WoodsWagon

My EJ swapped wagon gets 25mpg calculated doing commuting. Get's 29 on the highway. That's beating the bag out of it too. I go through transmissions every 6 mo's and axles twice as fast as that. EJ22 that has about a billion stop and go miles on it, it was a rural route mail delivery legacy.

Russ's probably would have worked fine if he hadn't gotten greedy with the boost...

Change the tranny fluid at least 3 times in a row. It's easy do-it-yourself job, there's a 17mm drain plug on the transmission pan, and you fill it through the dipstick on the drivers side of the car by the brake master cylinder. Change it, drive it a couple miles, change it again, repeat. Use Mercon/DextronIII ATF. Changing the fluid is the easiest way to try and cure this. If the Duty C solenoid fails, the AT light will flash on startup. If the fluid changes don't fix it, then you need to replace the clutchpack. As for continuing to drive it, you can remove the rear section of the driveshaft and use it as a FWD car. Driving with bad torque bind is the equivalent of driving an old pickup on the road locked into 4wd= not good.

You pulled the stub axles out of the front differential. They were supposed to stay in. The CV joint has a roll pin that holds it onto the splines on the stub axle. Take a look at the replacement tranny, it has a hole through the stub axle were the pin goes through. Drive this pin out of your CV's and pull the stub axles out, then they will slip right on the replacement transmission. EDIT: The transmission you have in the trunk has the stub shalfs ripped out of it. You need to pull the stub shafts out of your transmission. They will be a *************** to yank without the CV's on them, the CV's give you something to lever on with a prybar between the side of the tranny and the CV to pull the stub axle. There is a clip on the end of the axle that holds it into the diff, it takes a lot of pull to get the clip to compress and let the axle out.

I've got a neighbor who has a pile of these. 2 1984 13b cars that he drives and then 7-9 12a cars sitting down back. I used one of the 13b's in an autocross, and I have to say the steering sucks untill you break the back end loose. Then it gets nice and light and maneuverable.

85 and 86 EA82 cars had bolts on the spring perch on the strut that you could turn to move the spring perch up and give you lift, but I don't know if the brats had that or not.

If the cams are off, compression will often be low on one side of the motor....

EA81 has single cam in block with pushrods out to the heads EA82 has single cams in each head with two timing belts.

only the rear has torsion bars, the front is coil springs

I'm with BoostedBalls on it being a ball joint. In all the parts you listed as being replaced, you never mentioned the ball joints. When a ball joint dries out, they often groan when you turn the steering. going over big bumps may cause it to groan too. The noise starts out being irregular, but will soon turn to happening every time you move the steering wheel. The noise is amplified by the brake dust shield vibrating and the control arm resonating. Each ball joint is about $45 for a decent MOOG one, or $20 for an el cheapo.

I hope you havent bought a transmission yet, and it's a pity I didn't see this thread earlier, been working my rump roast of recently. Option 1: Broken axle. Dealt with this on Sunday. Friend comes by, say's he thinks the trannys screwed. Makes horibble grinding noises, you put it in park and it still rolls away, and there's a lag where the engine revs before the car moves. That's the AWD kicking the rear drive in to move the car. Turbo legacy's can light them up real good in RWD by the way. Had to have some fun before we swapped the axle. Option 2: Broken Flexplate. The engine in my car was a freebie because of this. Subaru flexplates have a habit of cracking right around the boltpattern on the crank. The crack makes a full circle around the crank flange and does one of two things. The first is a crack that has an irregular enough shape that the plate and torque converter stays indexed to the crank. This ends up sounding like really bad bearing knock. The engine is pulled to be replaced, cracked flexplate is found, engine is still fine but is replaced anyway, leaving good engine for me to take. The other way is a crack circular enough that the torque converter can shift in relation to the crank. When you put it in gear, the crank spins but the TC doesn't. The flip side of this failure is you will have starting issues. The starter motor turns the TC side of the flexplate, so if the engine cranks over really funny and makes bad noises, it could easily be the flexplate. Option 3: Transmission failure: stalling means that the torque converter lockup clutch is being applied for some reason. Torque bind is caused by deteriorated ATF and sticky solenoids and spool valves. Changing the ATF multiple times will often fix this. This crappy fluid could be related to the other problems, but at this time it may be too late. The TCU throwing codes is not a good sign, but it does help. Find out how to retrieve and decipher the codes, they give you a window into what the TCU is seeing. The bottom line is to figure out exacly what is wrong first. Subaru 4eat transmissions (other than the 1999my ones) are really reliable transmissions. It takes a lot of neglect and abuse to do one in. Throwing a tranny at a car to fix a problem you haven't figured out is just stupid. The squeeling from the bellhousing is a big hint, follow it.

I got taught how to do valve work by an older guy who'd worked in ford dealers back in the 70's when they switched from leaded to unleaded, and they'd do valve jobs regularly. Grinding the valves themselves is only to true the face up to the stem. New valve should be true, so no need to grind them. Grinding the seats is to get the contact patch in the right area of the valve and to get it concentric to the guide. You use a post that fits tightly into the guide and use that to center the stones. You will need a 30 degree stone and probably a 46 degree stone. you want your main stone to be a degree off of what the valve face is so that they wedge. keep the stones cut straight with the diamond stone cutter tool. You pretty much drop the stones down on the center post that jammed in the guide and go to town with a 1/2 drill style thing and cut the seat till it's fresh the whole way round without pits. Then you take the valve and put it in the guide and smack it against the seat with your finger. A thin line will apear on the valve. You want the line in the valve face to be in the outer 1/3 of the contact area. When you lap the valve in, the contact patch will spread down the valve from this line. To adjust where the line is, you use the 30 degree stone to cut the face of the seat down. It's crude, loud, and seems scary at first to take a grinder to the head, but it works. You need someone to take the time to show you how to do it.

While I have heard many good things about the GCK axles, I have found them to be worse than my used subaru ones. The binding you're feeling is not a "tight" joint breaking in. It's all supposed to be hardened steel in there, and there shouldn't be wear. I've blown at least 2 GCK outer CV's, as in have them explode without any warning on the street, and had one inner let go. It had vibrated from the start, and I knew it was junk when pieces of the tripod bearings began poking holes through the boot. Take them back, or put the good stock axles back in.

When I did my swap, I holesawed the fire wall right in the spare tire well. After I put it all together, used a bunch of sillicone caulking to seal around the wires. My swap turned out a bit hack... especially after the SuperMultipleJunction got caught behind my gas pedal and caught fire. It's a few years on now and runs good with no codes other than the neutral switch.

I have used ATF to great results in cleaning out engines. ATF has a lot of detergents in it, but it still has high pressure lubricants for the gearsets it normall oils. I helped revive an engine that had had 3 oil changes in 86,000 miles by flushing it repeatedly with ATF. The key to flushing any engine is changing the filter repeatedly. What happens when you stir up a lot of deposits all at once is that the pump sucks them up and pushes them all to the filter. This is the point of the detergents in the oil, is to keep contaminants suspended in the oil untill the filter cleans them out. When a filter cloggs, like when all the deposits you just loaded the oil with hit it, a bypass valve opens inside the filter. This lets unfiltered oil, which is now full of the crap you knocked loose with the detergents, right into your bearings, lifters, and turbo's. This is what wrecks engines after people flush them. Have a handfull of filters on hand, and change them often.

mercon/dextron III seems to work fine. I'd be real cautious putting any of the Mopar +4 in.

That's normal. It vibrates untill the PCM shuts down, then stops. I'd look for air leaks between the MAF and the throttle body. Any of the PCV hoses or the IAC hose can leak and let unmetered air in. The engine will run fine when it's throttled up, but it will idle funny.

The main thing to do with small engines and carborators is to run them out of gas, and store them empty. Shutting off the petcock on your bike and letting it run untill it stalled would be a better way of storing it than draining the bowl every time you need it to start. I've revived a lot of "junk" snowmobiles by taking the carbs apart and doing a thourough soak and cleaning. Metal tanks you want to leave full of gas, with a stabilizer in it. What the stabilizer does is create an oil film on top of the gas, preventing the VOC's from evaporating. It also helps keep water out. Most of our gas these days is 10% ethanol, wich helps keep the water in suspension in the gas. Leaving a tank half full or empty leaves a bigger area for condensation to form inside the tank. The condensation pools on the bottom of the tank, water being heavier than gas, and rusts the bottom of the tank out.

If it has a poorly constructed oil filter on it, this can cause dry starts. the only real check-valve in the oil system is the anti-drainback valve inside the filter which is meant to keep the oil galleries in the engine full after you shut it off. Swap out the filter for a higher quality one, and see if that helps. Piston slap takes more than 3-4 seconds to go away. More like minutes.

The transmission is borked. The fact that you can select other gears and move through neutral means that the external linkages are OK. The 5th gear synchro is either seized, or the shift fork for fith is broken/ bent. Selecting any other gear locks two different ratios to the same shafts, which jams the transmission. Put the shifter in neutral, wheels on the ground, redline the engine and do a clutch dump. If the 5th gear synchro is seized from lack of lubrication, this may pop it loose. And you have nothing to loose if it doesn't, as the tranny is done already. There isn't enough torque in 5th to break axles and whatnot, so the only thing you'll hurt is the transmission.

So, as a resolution, I towed it home. I drove out to wyoming in my Tacoma with a crossmember from my 86 3-door, really rusty but serviceable and not snapped in half like the one out of my 92 or 89 wagons, a pushbutton 5spd, flywheel and tranny crosmember, a strippped 5mph bumper off of my 89 and a fully dressed 302 sbf in the bed among a pile of other things. The truck rode 1/2" off the bumpstops the whole way out. I've never really felt a truck "shudder" going over a bump before, but you could feel the frame shake in the truck when you hit stuff. Probably had at least 1,000lbs in the bed, plus the two of us and our gear in the cab. I put the engine forward of the rear axle, so when you went over a hump in the road, the front would float and then get rammed down and held by the weight. Poor truck. Got 22mpg though. I five speed swapped the wagon while I was out there, put the rear crossmember in, put the pedals in and all that, went to start it and all it would do was spit and cough. Found the fuel pump was jammed, and no amount of compressed air and solvent would break it loose, so I put a ford F-150 pump in. Started up and ran OK. It's a little rough at idle and just moving off, but it runs as good as an EA82T can under boost. And yes I boosted it hard. Lots of times. Without changing fluids or filters. Digi Dash is sooo eightys and very entertaining. I will have to find a way to make that work with the EJ swap. The redline alarm was put to good use. I put the stripped down 5mph bumper on and tossed the bent up 86 flimso bumper. I welded heavy angle iron on the bumper for tabs and put a tow bar on. I tapped into the turn signal wiring, parking lights and brakes and set up a plug on the truck and car. Welded up a reciever hitch for the taco and hooked it all together. Using 3rd to get over hills at 60mph was not rare up at 6k feet, even with the 3.4l. I actually checked the rear diffs and transmissions on the subaru and the Taco becuase it felt like something was burning up based on the amount of drag. I had to stay on the gas going downhill to maintain speed. I set the cruise for 80 and let it hold the accelerator to the boards for hours for me. Other than the drivers in Chicago not getting the concept that you can't nose your way in between a truck and a towed car, the trip was pretty unaventful. Yes, there was some tail wagging dog action under decel, and I did come close to loosing it on some offramps, but it all worked out. Average mpg: 18.6 Total cost of trip: $1,200, Of which I paid $200. I put the 302 in the 71 bronco it was destined for out there and everthing worked out. I'll get some pictures up soon.

I know this is a bit out of date, but if you're still having the problem, you might want to replace the fuel filter. Being under boost means that the fuel system is flowing more, and a clogged filter can restrict that.

On the circuit board in the instrument cluster there is a spot for a screw labled tach signal. That would be the most straight forward spot. However, it is really easy, like a 15 minute job, to put a subaru tachometer in the dash. I've done it a couple times to de-brighton some legacys.

Pressure plates rarely make noise, and if they do it shows up in clutch judder rather than audible. The first thing to do is pull the rubber boot up the clutch fork, out of the transmission. Then dribble some penetrating oil down the backside of the clutch fork, this is the side facing the rear of the car. Work the clutch back and forth a few times and see if it quiets down. Don't just hose penetrating oil in there as you will contaminate the clutch disk and it will die a quick death. If the clutch isn't slipping, I wouldn't worry about it yet. The throwout bearing has been going in my dad's 95 legacy for years now. It rattles bad enough to be heard inside the car and felt through the clutch pedal, but as soon as you put some pressure on the pedal, it quiets down. Hasn't let go yet, and when it does, he can drive it home wihout it.

bring a 12mm wrench and a pair of vice grips with you. Undo the 4 bolts that hold the rear driveshaft to the differential flange, and you can tow it as far and fast as you want to on a dolly.