kjmclark

This is a 2006 Forester, currently with no transmission in it (it was a manual!) My son's friend got a bit of a steal when this Subie died on his Mom when she tried to take off from a light. Something went very wrong with the transmission, and the car quickly became semi-scrap. Semi, because the friend's parents said he could have the car if he got it working again. What teen boy would pass on an almost-free car? Anyway, they towed the car back to their house, and as the three boys were pushing the car into the garage, it suddenly stopped dead in its tracks and wouldn't budge. They were pushing it backward into the garage, and everything was going fine (the car was rolling, no problem). The new owner decided the point wasn't right, so they stopped, and tried to push it forward to change the angle a bit. And that's when it stopped moving. Rolling fine at first, try going the other way, brakes locked. Tried pushing it backward again, nothing, brakes locked. I brought my floor jack over so we could jack it off the wheels and roll it the few inches it needed to get in the garage. I assumed it was the rear that was locked, since the parking brake and hill holder both work on the rear. Fortunately, that wasn't it, because they turned out to have a drain hole *right* under the differential! When I jacked the front end, the car rolled back into the garage no problem. But what would make the front brakes lock like that? They didn't start the car, so the hydraulics weren't involved. We'll probably find out more when we take the wheels off to put it on blocks, but in the meantime, it would be nice to know what happened.

No problem. When "lmdew" wrote that his strut towers looked fine, I thought, "Geez, what we need here are some pictures. Well, duh, I could probably take some, and then maybe other people could catch this problem before their back-ends start rusting out." My little Christmas present to my fellow Subaru owners!

One more note. These pictures are of the driver-side wheel well. The passenger side has the same problem, along with lots of issues on and around the gas filler neck tube. The template is reversed compared to the last picture of the hole. The biggest part of the hole is toward the front of the car, and the hole tapers toward the back of the car. The holes on both sides are symmetrical, so once you've got your template for one side, the other side is just the same thing, but flipped (again, bigger part of the hole toward the front of the car.) Actually, I made a pdf of the template on graph paper. I'll have to find a way to post a link to it.

He's right, but people miss it because it's not actually part of the strut tower. It's actually a separate panel that's next to the strut tower. Here's what you see with the tire off, looking up: Notice that there's a little discoloration, but no apparent problem. The strut tower looks fine. Keep looking: I had to put the camera right above the brake drum to get this picture. Still looks OK, kind of, but there's something going on at the left of the picture, up at the top of the strut tower. Here's what's going on: I had to put the camera between the strut springs to get this picture. See the gray primer? You're not supposed to see that. It's on the inside of the quarter panel. There's supposed to be a metal panel here that's painted with the same undercoat as the other pictures. You don't see it because it's rusted out. How big is that rusted out hole? After I finished breaking out all the loose rust, I get a hole that's just over 8" wide at the widest, and about 4" high at the highest point. Here's the template I made of the hole: (All pictures hosted at http://www.flickr.com) Until you patch this hole, you're wasting your time going after rust on the back of the wheel well or down in the running boards. This hole is causing the others.

The problem with the rear wheel wells is the rusted out spot you can't see, not the rust you can see. If you have those bottom/back of the wheel well rust spots, jack up the rear end and take off the rear wheels. With your back against the rear brakes, leaning back, look up and toward the outside of the car. Better yet, put your hand up there and feel for a hole. You'll find it soon enough. Now push on the metal around it and feel it cave. There's your problem. That will let water/salt/grit into the inner panel. The salt water will drain down past your rust spot, and into your running board. You'll soon find rust down there too. If you don't fix that upper wheel well problem, there's not a lot of point to fixing the lower quarter panel / wheel well rust spot. The water coming into that spot up above will just keep rusting things out. Here's a video of another guy working on those rust spots.

Thought of those. Removing the cross-member is recommended somewhere else, but they also recommend putting a jack under the transmission in that case to support it. I also don't have any air tools, so I'd have to go spend a couple hundred bucks The pin wasn't *that* hard to deal with. If my bad bushings had been the non-replaceable ones, the next thing to try would have been torching the connection. But all I have at home is a propane torch, and since I don't know what's on the other end of that transmission rod, I was a little concerned about how much that rod would heat up (and cook what was on the other side), since with propane I'd have to leave it on there a while to heat it. I'm not good enough at heating rusted connections yet - it only seems to work about 1/3 of the time for me.

I think you'll just need to unbolt things a bit. It would have been nice to have the transmission down - the frozen up part would be easy to work on then. That's probably what the shop will end up doing if I eventually need that linkage replaced - drop the transmission and cut through the rusted on part. I suspect our problem is because of the transmission. Our transmission always sounded a little more noisy than we thought it should (bought the car used). Then two years ago it was doing some funny shift things. The shop told us the transmission was shot - the shifting was funny because the trans itself was slopping around. They found us a used transmission and put it in. We noticed this loose shifter problem right away after the replacement transmission, and it got worse over time. I think the linkage was fused to the shift rod from the used trans shop. Neither them or my shop did anything with it; they just decided to put the trans in there without touching the rusted-up part. I wish they had told me it need a new $50 linkage and done that while they put the transmission in, but they didn't.

Alright, I just did this and I have some warnings. 98 Brighton, 220k miles. We had enough slop that it was getting hard to hit fourth gear, and in fifth, the shifter had a nasty rattle. We started putting a pop bottle against it to shut it up, but that led to swearing every time we got off the expressway and tried to downshift! Changing to 5th right away - awesome. Getting the pin out - like everyone said, the small pin moves easily, the big one is a bear, mostly because you don't have much room to swing the hammer. You *must* have a 5/16" punch, but you almost certainly won't find one long enough to be able to hit it. What you want is another punch, I used a 3/8", to hit your first punch. I used the long 3/8" (why's it so freakin hard to find a long 5/16" any more?) to get the pin flush with the linkage, then another long centering punch to get it in some, then the 5/16. I got the pins out, then discovered that my linkage and transmission rod are corroded together. I had hit the linkage with PB Blaster five days ago, but it was still locked tight. I hit it with the punch a bit to break things loose, and still nothing. It was going to take some cutting to get the darned thing off. I took a good look at my bushings, and discovered my permanent bushings were in good shape, but my replaceable bushings were shot. I decided to take the bushings off my new part and save cutting the linkage off for the shop another day. So I put the pins back in (using the tape trick, tape your pin to the end of your punch). The bolt for the rear (vertical bolt) bushings came out just fine. The top bushing was gone. The bottom was just the plastic cap. I was laying under the car with my legs sticking out the driver's side. I found I had a *lot* better access to the nut on top of that bolt if I turned the other way. (Though I couldn't see what I was doing at all like that.) So I put my wrench on the nut, turned back around, and only needed to turn the socket wrench (yes, you *must* have the universal socket.) I pushed the new bushings in (had to turn myself around again to get the top.) Then I tried to get the bolt back in - - it wouldn't *begin* to go in. I tried all sorts of stuff, but it wouldn't go anywhere. There was so much crud in the linkage, that I could get the bushings in, but there was so little clearance left that I couldn't get the bolt back in. I ended up cleaning (sanding) off the bolt, using a battery terminal brush to clean out the gunk in the linkage, hitting the linkage with silicone multiple times, and putting some superlube on the bushings and the bolt. I *still* had to force it. As I was turning the bolt with my socket driver, I pushed hard as I could into the bolt at the same time. After about 15 minutes of grunting and swearing, it was finally in. Works great now. I strongly advise people to figure out which bushings need replacing early on. Save yourself some grief if all you need is the replaceable bushings. And if your linkage looks corroded to the transmission rod, do yourself a favor and give it to the shop! I started wacking and twisting things, and realized I was wacking and twisting a fairly delicate part of my transmission! Bad idea! Render unto the shop the really hard jobs...