WoodsWagon

If you're going to tow much weight at all, which is in comparison to the towing vehicle, get electric trailer brakes with a good controller. Not only will the whole package stop better, but you can apply the trailer brakes manually with a lever on the controller to put drag on only the trailer. This is really handy in tail-wagging-the-dog situations where an instability in the trailer can start pushing the car around. I've had a fullsized diesel pickup sideways on a 3 lane highway with 10k lbs worth of trailer and 56 GMC pickup pushing the truck wherever it wanted. Due to sub-optimal weight distribution of the truck on the trailer, mis-matched trailer tires, and a POS trailer with non-working brakes, it would start to sway at 45mph. I crested a hill at 55mph because I hadn't been paying close enough attention and had just been holding it floored up the hills. The trailer started swaying, I knew I couldn't hit the brakes because it would instanly jacknife. Ended up using all 3 lanes countersteering to keep the front wheels of the truck in the middle lane as the trailer switched from left lane to right lane to left again. Pouring rain, borrowed truck, borrowed trailer, and freshly purchased truck on the trailer. I played the full-lock countersteer game until the road went uphill again, then everything straightened out as the trailer came back under tow. If I had working trailer brakes, I could have applied them and had everything straighten out instanly. Instead I got to practice my "look where you want to go and steer for it, not the concrete barriers on each side that your going to plow into at 55mph 2 states away in borrowed equipment." Never again. On a better note, the cummins used less diesel on the way back at 35mph loaded than it did on the way down at 70mph empty.

Yeah, if it pops out of second as soon as you load it you screwed that tranny. Find one with the matching ratio for your rear diff and swap out.

Yup, an unfortunate number of bonded shoe linings are coming loose these days. I've had parking brakes from explorers, titans, subarus, and others falling apart. Autopart international sells them for a lot of makes too, not sure about subaru.

Automatic or manual transmission? If it's an auto, the transmission and the front differential have separte dipsticks, the tranny is a red handled dipstick by the firewall on the drivers side and the front diff is a yellow handled dipstick right on the passenger side of the tranny above the axle on that side. If a shop drained and filled fluid on the tranny or front diff they can often mix up which fluid goes where, or leave the front diff dry. Check the fluids in each, following the owners manual. Rear diffs rarely fail, and if you put the FWD fuse in the the whine should go away. If the whine stays with the FWD fuse in, then it's a front diff or transmission issue. If it's a manual transmisson, the input shaft bearings tend to whine on some of them. Those are a crapshoot, sometimes they'll go forever that way, sometimes the whining is because the nut is threading off the end of the mainshaft.

Did you have to keep pushing on the shifter for some reason? Why was your hand on the shifter long enough for it to become numb? You should complete a shift, then remove your hand from the shifter, otherwise the pressure on the shift forks from your hand resting on the shifter wears them out and can cause problems like this. If you were forcibly holding the shifter into first the whole way home, you may have smoked the first gear syncro, jammed the blocking ring, or bent the shift fork inside the tranny. You can shift into the other gears while the engine is running? If the other gears including reverse are easy to grab, then the clutch and pilot bearing in the flywheel are working alright, and it's a specific first gear problem. If the other gears are hard to select, or if reverse grinds when you go for it, then the clutch may not be disengageing all the way or the pilot bearing may be seized and dragging, causing the input shaft of the tranny to keep spinning. Does first gear grind? Does the shifter still move to the first gear position? Or does it just seem like it won't go in? If you smoked the syncro and jammed the blocking ring, you may be able to get it to pop back loose by parking on a hill, shutting the engine off, take your foot off the clutch pedal, and attempting to jam the shifter into first while rolling backwards slowly (2mph or less). This will load the blocking ring in the opposite direction of how it was loaded when it jammed and may pop it loose. There's no fixing a bent or broken shift fork if you did that, and in that case the shifter will move into the first gear postion but nothing will happen.

If it's clunking, that's the AWD system starting to turn into a 4wd system. When it gets worse it will bind like an old 4x4 truck when you try to turn hard. If the viscous coupler that limits the slip of the center differential fails unlocked, you won't get any binding, but you will get stuck with just one wheel spinning, be it front or rear. Yours is failing to the locked direction, so you will get an even front/rear power split if you get stuck, but it will bind taking corners.

So did you weld the driveshafts to each end to the halfshaft hanging off of the inner CV's coming off the welded front diff(in the tranny)? I've thought of doing the same thing, but for running 90 degree boxes to run dual props on a boat.

You can wheel them hard with no doors, the doors don't add much to the structure as far as suspension is concerned. If you slide it sideways into a tree, rock or stump, they are very important in protecting your sorry rump roast. My loyale when I started out, you could open and close all doors with it flexed out and a rear wheel up in the air. After 3 years of hard wheeling, rust, welding, and suspension mounts torn out and reattached to the body, it got a fair bit looser. The rear hatch would move 1 1/2" sideways if you opened it while it was flexed out. Doors would still open and shut, but you had to slam the heck out of them. On the flat it was fine. I think all the spot welds in the body had been worked, so nothing was really clamped tight anymore. This will happen with or without doors.

I'd weld the notches you cut into the framerails back in, and weld captured nuts in. I assume you notched the frame so that you could access the nut with a wrench? I had a lot of stock captured nuts tear out of the body of my lifted EA82, so I would weld a nut to a big fender washer, and put that up in the torn hole, and weld the washer to the body. I had really good sucess with that and the washers never tore out because they spread the load across a larger area.

You'll have to check if you have space in the hinge area for the electrial connector. Depending on how many options you want to keep, there's a fair bit of wiring there. Power locks, mirrors, windows, all add a fair bit of wiring. If you take the kickpanels off the interior, it might be easier to plug and unplug the factory connector. Pack it with grease to keep it from corroding while it's unplugged. Roll the windows all the way down before you take the doors off, the guides aren't strong enough to put up with manhandling the doors around when they're off the car.

Yup, 2.5l flywheels are quite a bit heavier I've found. There's less of a hollow cast into the back between the ring gear and the crank surfaces on the 2.5's. I've used them on 2.2l's because I lug the engines down all the time offroad. Functionally, their the same and interchangeable, the average driver won't notice. But if you have 2 side by side and you want to pick which best suits your application, there you are.

Get a torch. Heat, and really hot heat like oxy acetalyne, is needed to get rusted to ************ bolts out. Heat it till it glows, shut the torch off, and pound a size smaller 6 point socket up on it. Should come out. The hanger unbolts from the tranny, so you can take that off, get it over to a vice, and drill a hole through the sheared bolt. Then put a bolt and nut on instead of the captured nut on the hanger.

Temp light flashing means there is a code stored. The code may be retrievable with a certain input dance, there was some sequence of shifting the tranny and pushing the accelerator pedal that puts the TCU in read codes mode. Not sure if that was still available in 96 with OBDII or not, but worth a shot. Do a search for it. No AWD and a code usually means a front or rear speed sensor has gone. If you had locked 4wd and a code, then the Duty C soleniod would be the likely culprit. Does the spedometer still work?

Have him hook up his select monitor scan tool to the ECU and make sure the temp reading matches the actual temp of the engine. If the CTS reads low, or there's corrosion in the wire making it read low, then the ECU will never go into closed loop operation. Closed loop is where the ECU adjusts the fueling based on 02 sensor readings. So, if the CTS or the wire connecting the CTS to the ECU is bad, the ECU won't even bother looking at the O2 sensor. As said earlier, there's 2 temp sensors and 1 temp switch for the fan on the engine. Make sure you're dealing with the right one. O2 sensor mabe, but it's unlikely that it's used at idle. Same thing with the Cat, it's not really used at idle. Idle fueling is controled by the coolant temp reading and the MAF reading. It's an open loop base map pretty much, ECU adjusts fueling based on MAF (air coming in), CTS (engine up to operating temp or not) and controling the RPM's with the IAC(idle air bypass). So, it's probably not the cat, or the 02, so try cleaning the MAF sensor with MAF sensor cleaner, and check/replace the ECU's CTS (not the gauge one!) and wire, which is known to get corroded. Or go ahead and thow a cat at it, hope that it converts enough HC's and CO's to CO2 and hope you'll pass. Then do the same thing when it fails next year.

On that car the front cat is the only cat, the second thing that looks like a cat is really nothing more than a resonator. However the cat is part of the y-pipe manifold so it's harder to replace. High idle HC's and CO means your running rich. There's really not enough heat coming out of the engine at idle to keep the cat lit off, so a cat won't have much effect on idle readings. Leaky injector, restricted intake, dirty MAF sensor, or most likely a bad coolant temp sensor or corroded wire leading to the sensor could cause that. If the ECU doesn't think the engine has come up to operating temp, it will run rich, much like the choke staying on a carb until the engine's warmed up.

The fuel pressure regulator can fail too, and dump gas into the intake. Don't run it long with that much gas in the oil, the lifters can collapse and I've had the rockers fall out.

Well, knowing the year and engine setup in your car would help. Carb/fuel injected for one. Usually the front cat is the the one that does most of the work. Why do you think it needs a cat? What were the readings that failed you?

The viscous coupler on the center differential, the one inside the transfer housing of the transmission, fails just like what you are experiencing. It will work fine when cold, then as the tranny heats up, the coupler starts binding. If the car was ever towed with 2 wheels down, or if it was stuck and you sat there spinning wheels for a long time, the center diff can get baked. It's not a hard job to swap out the center diff.

With no EGR system, no Catalytic converter, no oxygen sensor, and a weber carb, there's really nothing the ECU is doing any more other than turning on the fuel pump. The shift up light was operated by the boost sensor reading (really just a MAP sensor on a non-turbo), and engine rpms. High rpms, but high vacuum, meant low load on the engine that was being revved higher than needed, so it would tell you to shift up. Take the cluster surround off (there's 2 screws under the top and bottom HVAC buttons) and pull the bulb out. The ECU was meant to run the air bleed solenoids and mixture control solenoid on the feedback hitachi carb, based on readings from the MAP coolant temp, and O2 sensor. Since you have a webber, there's nothing for the ECU to control except the pump, and that's easy enoght to run with either a non-feedback equipped cars pump controller or a relay.

The injectors out of a late 90's DOHC 2.5 should fit right in, you may be able to swap the 2 rails and not have to mess with the injector seals. There may be a difference in the indexing tab on the connector, you just shave the tab off the injector side plug so that the motor harness plug clips down on to them. I could poke around my shed and see what's what.

90-94 legacy 2.2l turbos are much better built, and much more forgiving. Yes, you still have extra hoses and extra heat in the engine compartment that are inherent to turbo cars, but the ej22 is way sturdier, so if a hose does pop and the coolant starts spraying out, it won't blow gaskets or crack heads. I find the EJ's easier to work on than the EA82's. Heck, you don't even need to pull the valvecover off to take a head off.

Rear crossmembers are the same, I've used outback crossmembers to replace rusted through legacy ones. The spacer blocks and bolts are different.

What I'm trying to get at is if there is no electrical connection to the transmission, all connectors unplugged from it, so it's stuck in 3rd gear, and driven, and it still disengages, then it's 100% a hydraulic problem. If it holds 3rd fine with everything unplugged and you can drive it around that way, then the hydraulics are fine. By key cycle, are you just quickly clicking the key off and back on while moving, or are you letting the engine come to a full stop, then starting it again? Letting it stop would also stop the transmission front pump.

Key cycle shouldn't affect it if you unplugged the harness from the tranny. Did you just unplug the TCU?

Which PCM are you using? Are you using 2.2l injectors or 2.5l injectors? That might be part of the idle hunt, idle is usually open loop, and the base maps for idle fueling may be off enought to cause the hunt. Using 2.5 injectors may change that, I think they're a higher flow rate.