Snowman

People have put d/r 5 speeds in EJ cars before. I have not seen one personally, but I've looked into the swap. The biggest hurdle I can see is the CV axles. If the GL is turbocharged, it will have the correct 25 spline stub shafts to match up with the Legacy axles. If it's non-turbo, it will have 23-spline stubs, in which case you would have to get custom axles...way cheaper to find the correct tranny out of a turbo car. The rear driveshaft may need shortened or lengthened. You will have to weld up some custom tranny mounts. Shouldn't be hard. I've put a Legacy tranny in a GL, and it was an easy fab job to attach the legacy mounts to the GL crossmembers. You should be able to do the same thing in reverse. You will also need to swap the rear differential for one with the proper ratio. The one from the GL may fit. Again, when putting the legacy drivetrain in my GL, the Legacy diff bolted right up and you may be able to do it the other way around. (The legacy probably has a 4.11 ratio, and the GL will have a 3.9 ratio if it's non-turbo and a 3.7 if it's turbo.) The gearshift linkage should be easy enough...may have to weld the GL stuff to the Legacy stuff. Not sure about mounting the 4wd shift lever, but it's been done.

That is cool! Probably incredibly unstable at high speed, but still cool!

One more vote for cam timing off a tooth. Doing the belts in the car, it's kinda hard to see the driver's side alignment marks. I've screwed it up before, and the car exhibited similar symptoms...idled okay but NO power. Mine even backfired pretty good.

Thanks for the info, that's encouraging. Picked up a new one from NAPA today, and it looks just like the OEM axles, which is encouraging. The EMPI units had different inner joints and outer boots. Maybe NAPA is duplicating the exact specs of the factory axles in their manufacturing, which should bode well for longevity, as I've only seen OEM axles fail because of torn boots. It's going in this week, and if I like it, I'm replacing the other side as well. MAYBE my epic axle adventure is soon to be over!

DUDE! It's been less than 500 miles and I'm hearing a couple of tiny little clicks here and there from one of the new EMPI axles. This is starting to get old. That makes 7 failed axles in 23,000 miles (really 8 since I expect the other one is not far behind). One last chance before buying two new axles from Subaru for $600 is the new axles from NAPA that a friend told me he has had good luck with. They're still only like $75 per, so I'm willing to try one and see if it works.

I would also go for putting a d/r in your loyale. Not a hard swap at all, and you can put in a new clutch while you're at it and be set for a long time. SPFI is better than the stock carb (lots of people like the aftermarket weber carbs).

Legacy777's webpage has a GREAT writeup on the swap. He actually went from FWD 4EAT to AWD 5MT, so did a lot more work. The page details exactly what you need to get from the JY/parts car and how to modify the wiring to make everything work like it came from the factory with a manual tranny. I did the swap in my 92 legacy recently, and I know I COULD have figured it all out EVENTUALLY, but looking at that site made it quick and painless. Complete drivetrain swap from engine to rear diff was done in two days.

Yeah, you can go from SPFI to carbed or vice versa no problem. I would recommend getting the stuff from a junkyard or parts car to convert to SPFI. It's a long day's worth of electrical work, but not that hard. General Disorder and myself have compiled manuals on converting from carb to SPFI that explain everything you need to do to make it run. SPFI > carb

Anybody with a 360 in that area? You could spank those guys!

I've done a bunch of the horizontal tensioners in a vice with no trouble. Like you said, just really really slowly. What I've been told is that keeping the tensioner oriented as it is in the car while compressing is the critical part. Keep the horizontal ones horizontal, keep the vertical ones vertical, otherwise they will be damaged. That seal prying tool looks quite handy. I need to try that. Currently, I have a heavy pick that is bent at the end so I can get it in and pull the seal out from the back side by grabbing onto the pick with some channellocks and prying the channellocks against the end of the cam shaft. Looks like the tool does the same thing, but easier and with less risk.

Wow, I came in late on this one...tried to read over most of it to get an idea of what's going on, and in the back of my mind I kept thinking it might be a cam or crank sensor. Never had one fail on me, but I've talked to a subaru shop in town that has had consistent problems with crank sensors being covered in oil, from a leaking crank seal, causing the engine to run fine but throw random misfire codes. Yours doesn't leak oil, but a faulty sensor could do the same thing. What about getting them from a junk yard, at least for troubleshooting purposes, rather than throwing new ones at it?

http://www.empius.com/2008_driveaxles/drive_axles.html There's a link to their website. I looked in the online catalog and it showed axles for the loyale series. Where to get them in fairbanks might be the challenge. I got mine from FATS in anchorage. I'd check around for other brands of new axles too. I had good luck with a new axle I bought in Washington from a schucks or autozone type place. Can't remember the brand name. Anybody else have experience with other brands of new axles?

No plans to head north in the immediate future, but the car's running well, so maybe a little jaunt would be in order sometime. I've been thinking about driving up the haul road this fall, but I don't have time with classes and such. Got two NEW EMPI axles, for basically the same price as reman ones (actually cheaper than I can get them back home). They're going in this afternoon. Edit: New axles are in. Noises and vibrations are gone for now. Fingers are crossed and wood has been knocked on.

I was able to use the EJ carrier bearing with no modification. It definitely is supposed to mount a little differently, but it bolted up and ran 10,000 miles with no trouble. This was on a lifted car though, it might not fit so easily on a stock one.

Ditto. Valve seal caused oil burning = very uncommon Piston ring caused oil burning = very uncommon PCV valve caused oil burning = ridiculously common Get a new PCV valve from a subaru dealer (aftermarket ones don't work) for $12 and try it. If that's not the problem, you're only out twelve bucks and ten minutes of install time. If it fixes it, .

I appologize if this has already been discussed. I've been gone from the board for a year or so. So I finally got around to putting a 5 speed in my EJ22 Legacy, and I made an interesting observation that might apply to installing the EJ AWD tranny in the EA-series cars. When I put an EJ AWD tranny in my old EA82, I got the whole EJ driveline setup and rear diff with it. The front section of the driveline (tranny to carrier bearing) was almost exactly one inch too long and had to be shortened by a driveline shop. In my case, the nearest place that could do it was 250 miles away in Canada, so it was kind of a pain. When doing the tranny swap in my Legacy, I discovered that the automatic transmission driveline is almost exactly 1" shorter than the manual transmission driveline. This leads me to believe that you could just grab a driveline from an automatic Legacy when installing the EJ AWD tranny in an EA82 car, avoiding the cost and trouble of modifying a driveline. This would also mean that if you broke it in the future, you could use a ready-made replacement, rather than having to customize another one. Again, sorry if this is old news. Seemed like kind of a big deal to me when I found it, so I thought I'd bring it up just to make sure.

Helped my friend put an EJ22 in his 86 Westy last spring...entertaining project for sure. The conversion went well overall, taking about a week of us dakking with it for several hourse each day, running into a few minor glitches here and there but no big problems. Of course, the engine we got turned out to be a dud and had a rod bearing failure about 1500 miles later, but he got another motor and it now runs fine (just did a round trip from oregon to so-cal and back). Anyway, my questions concern the transmission. Unfortunately, the rig is equipped with a 3 speed automatic. Seems like a pretty good tranny, but I'm inherently prejudiced against automatics, primarily from a reliability standpoint, but also because of fuel economy. With that in mind, I have two questions. 1. For those of you who have owned VW autos, how good are they? This one seems like a "solid" tranny, but are they reliable? 2. Has anybody here done an auto-to-manual conversion? If so, how big of a deal is it? Any input would be great. Thanks.

Thanks guys, good to be back somewhere with a decent internet connection. Sadly I didn't get pictures of my roadtrip (camera broke), but I'll post about it soon. Okay, so sounds like reman axle quality is not to be trusted. I have noticed that a lot of the reman ones I've dealt with recently develop a lot of rotational play in the inner joint after very little use...the same type of play that was present in the binding joint I had trouble with. What about new aftermarket axles? Good luck? Bad luck?

I'm trying to figure out if installing the outback struts on a gen 1 legacy, raising the car and therefore increasing the CV axle angles, might cause the axles to fail faster, or if I just have INSANELY bad luck. I installed OB struts on my 92 legacy at thanksgiving 2006, and have had a lot of axle problems. Everything else on the car is fine...it's been aligned on a laser machine, all the suspension bushings are tight, the wheel bearings are fine, etc. The story goes as follows: -Installed OB struts and drove for 5000 miles with no problems. -Tore a boot on one front axle and since both axles were getting old (probably original at 185k), I replaced both with reman ones from the local parts store. -Drove 4000 miles before the LF axle's inner joint started binding up something fierce, causing the car to shake violently between 20mph and 45mph. The boot did not fail. Replaced the LF axle with another reman one. -Drove 3000 miles before the LF outer joint started clicking. Again, the boot did not fail. Tired of dealing with axle problems, I replaced both front axles with SOA reman ones, hopeing that would make a difference. -Drove 500 miles before the LF outer joint started clicking again, also with no boot failure. Having lost faith that SOA reman axles are any different from NAPA ones, I replaced the LF axle with another NAPA reman unit, which made it 10,000 miles trouble free. -I'm now just starting to hear some clicking noise...not bad enough that I can tell which axle (could very well be rear) it's coming from. Again, no boot failure. Nearly all of those miles were relatively easy highway miles, as I was driving around the country primarily on interstates. There was one brief stretch of rough road and a couple times where it was pretty cold, but other than that, there were no outside factors that should have had any impact on axle life. On the plus side, I'm now really good at swapping axles on the side of the road with hand tools. For those of you who have done the swap, what has your experience been?

OMG, that's practically the size of an EA81 radiator!

Those lamps look very cool! What are they?

Do you know if you can get the fronts and rears separately? I need some overload springs in the back of my 92 legacy (running 97 OBW struts). The front sits fine with the OBW springs, but the rear is always sagging when I'm carrying a load, which is most of the time.

Taken care of, it should last a while. Compared to other automatics, the 4EAT is very reliable, often going 200k-300k, but it's always a gamble with autos (always been a manual transmission fan myself). Mine is about 10 miles short of turning 181k, and it seems to work fine. Some of the shifts are delayed a little, which appears to be a common thing on the older ones, but it never slips or anything. I also think my AWD clutch pack is starting to get a little old. I figure I'll run it until something happens, or if I make it to the 240k maintenance interval without it going out, I'll throw in a factory reman unit at that point for reliability's sake. I've also never seen one fail suddenly and/or catastrophically. They tend to give plenty of warning before becoming completely inoperative, which I find very comforting.

Look in the vendor sales forum on here. There are a couple of guys that do EJ swap harness prep for like $200...having done the swap myself, I would call it money well spent. By the time you buy the FSM you need to figure out which wires are which, you're nearly halfway to $200 anyway.