pontoontodd

Hopefully the last rust repair on the 99 for a while. Driver's side rear strut tower / wheel well wasn't as bad as passenger side. The strut tower is still mostly intact but has been patched several times. The worst area was the rear portion of the wheel well. While cleaning this all out, we dug/vacuumed a large amount of mud out of the pocket just behind the wheelwell and found a few treasures. Cut out a portion of the wheelwell and some other rusty sheet metal. Cut and bent a piece to fit and welded it in and painted it. It's hard to see in these pictures but we also fit a vertical piece that connects the top of the wheelwell to the strut tower mount. Wheelwell from the inside: Mainly cleaned and welded some other cracks, rust holes, and seams that were separating and painted everything. It's hard to tell from these pictures but many feet of seams were welded. This wheel arch was badly rotted out so I cut out all of that. Added a patch to create a uniform arch. While we're doing all this we're also adding tire clearance to be safe. Also patched the area behind the wheel that is normally covered by the plastic bumper. Paint didn't turn out very well (you can't see how bad it is in this picture), so I'll probably end up respraying that sometime, but it looks far better than a month ago. Overall probably not as strong as the other side but it was holding as is and should be stronger now. Also those tube braces should help a lot. So I think the car will now be structurally sound enough for the V2R this year.

I put a big centrifugal air filter out of a Chevy van on my 99. That's been in some door handle deep water. Just the stock airbox on my 2002. It's been through quite a bit of water but nothing super deep. What I've noticed is the EJs with the filter right by the throttle body swamp the most easily. I think by the time the water gets there the damage is done. The other EJs and the EZs with the filter out in front of the fender will stall out because they're soaked with water but (so far) we haven't hydrolocked an engine with that intake setup. Tell me about it. More to come soon. B thought we should beef up his rear trailing arm mount on the passenger side of his Forester. We did the usual anti crush tubes and plate on top. Welded some bolts on to replace the seat tube bracket and stud. The main concern was that it was splitting from the rocker. It really wasn't too bad and it's not rusty but we figured it would be good to beef it up over the winter. The weld nuts for the trailing arm all stayed in place but the one for the subframe had come loose and that part of the sheet metal was pulled out a little bit so we also welded a plate over it. Bolts have enough thread to screw them in from the top and then just put nuts on the bottom. They're way up out of the way so we don't have to worry about them getting smashed or bent.

My 99 has a full skidplate under the engine that keeps it fairly dry. It occasionally runs rough after driving in a lot of standing water. My 2002 just has a skid under the oil pan though and I haven't had a problem with it running rough in wet conditions. Yours is newer though. Back when my 99 had the EJ25 I sealed the ignition wires going to the sparkplugs with grease and that seemed to help when driving through a lot of water. I posted about it way back on this thread. Not sure if that would help the EZ30. One thing I did on my 99 that seemed to help was to zip tie the coil pack wires on. If you pre bend them into squares it's pretty easy to do with the engine in the car. I think I posted about that on this thread too.

Latest project was reinforcing the rear part of the 99 Outback. Made braces for each side that tied together the (rarely used) spare strut mounts, strut towers, trailing arm bracket, and bottom of cage/jack. We gusseted the strut top mounts to the tube (see below). They don't restrict access to the back seat area much and are removable. Something like this but going back and down to the rear bumper bolts would be a good reinforcement for a car that's getting rusty and/or doesn't have a cage. Could add a spare tire mount to one or both sides too. Welded and painted. At the same time B pulled out the interior in the left rear corner so we could take a closer look at that strut tower/wheel well. The rear portion is worse than the right side but the front portion is fairly intact. Definitely plan on refabbing the rear portion of the wheel well but still thinking about how far I want to go. It appears the floor near the LR wheel well is pushed up some, maybe 1/2", not sure if or how we can reverse that.

This is all we're up to now. Bracket we made that screws to the sides of the radio to mount a tablet and pushbuttons for the brakes. It's a compromise as always, I don't use the radio controls much. You can still get to the HVAC and radio controls as this sticks out a few inches. Didn't mount the tablet high like my 99 since the vents are higher. I also drive it on the street with the airbag fuse in so shouldn't put a tablet in front of that. The rigid tablet mount is much better than the RAM mounts. Those basically work but it moves around too much to use while driving sometimes and is more difficult to install and remove the tablet. The buttons are set up so if you push any combination of them and hit the brake pedal, only those brakes will be applied. We tested on snow recently and the left front and right front definitely just lock up those corners, the rears don't really. Not sure if that is related to the auto trans center diff deal or the rear brakes being smaller or something else.

In my 2002 LL Bean Outback we just unplugged that security module next to the radio. Starts and runs fine, power locks work, alarm never goes off. Maybe with other alarms some jumper wiring is required but not with this one.

In case anyone else out there has this question, my friends did get one of my key fobs to work with the car. More importantly, one of my other friends found the security black box on the right side of the radio when we were doing some other wiring. We unplugged the security box thing and I can now use the power lock switches on the inside of the doors and the alarm never goes off.

That's too bad. I found when my Outback was lifted and had no swaybars it would still corner well with mud tires. In fact I usually still drove it faster than 99% of the other cars on winding roads. If you're talking about bottoming out the floor of the car on the ground, don't worry about it. If you're talking about bottoming out the suspension, lifting it won't help that (unless you use lift springs instead of spacers). Removing the swaybars will make it even easier for one wheel to bottom out, so you could try putting them back on. If you are still willing to give it a try I would try AGX struts. They have more damping than stock so it should be more stable on winding paved roads and harder to bottom out on rough roads and they're not extremely expensive. Taller tires will give you more clearance and more sidewall to make the car bottom out on the ground and at the suspension less often.

No, we're not welding on Fox shocks. We use a lot of Fox parts but many of the parts are custom machined and fabricated. If you start here you can see how they're put together: https://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/topic/144953-long-travel-outbacks-or-making-subarus-faster-and-more-reliable-offroad/?page=25&tab=comments#comment-1355228 If you're using a-arm suspension just use threaded body coilover shocks - Fox, King, etc. Depending on what you're doing with it I would look into some of the position sensitive single shock options - internal bypass (IBP) or coilpass (bypass tubes above coil springs). Otherwise most offroad racers run two shocks per corner, one is basically just a coil carrier with a little damping and the other has external bypass tubes.

Yes, but he wasn't hitting any sweet jumps or whoops, had to go slower on the rough trails than we did, and he still bent a strut. Of course stock Subarus are fun, they're just more fun when you can hit jumps, go faster, and not have to worry about bending struts. He's put AGX struts on it since then so we're curious to see how those ride and hold up.

Video from our trip to the UP in August: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_GPBHOLdIE

Replaced the trans mount, both the used ones I'd had when I put it in were split like this: That long stud keeps it from moving too far but the less engine and trans movement the better.

Latest structural reinforcement to the 99 Outback was to tie all the trailing arm and subframe bolts together and run a longer subframe bolt through the floor. Welded this plate on the top, overlaps the plate for the trailing arm bolts. Tack welds are holding a crush sleeve on. Painted and reassembled. Paint turned out like crap because it was either too cold and/or the primer wasn't dry enough. Unimportant for this repair. Welded a plate underneath to the front edge of the trailing arm plate I'd welded on earlier and to as much of the body "frame rail" as I could. We cut out and ground flush the tubes we'd welded in in Vegas. I was originally going to weld in other tubing but I think the fabricated strut towers will be good enough. Might make some bolt in triangulation for desert racing. Will be a paint to get in and out of the back seat so I'd leave them out most of the time, just bolt them in for racing. Meanwhile M and B replaced the engine mounts on my 2002 Outback. Both pairs I had when I swapped the engine in were split, these were actually the best. You can see that you could pull them apart by hand if you really tried. B also replaced the front control arm bushings that have been worn out an noisy all year. Still need to replace the trans mount but that should be much easier.

Eventually we might try that but for now we're just using it for manual brake control. One problem with the units we've experimented with is that the pump pumps fluid from the calipers to the master. So in order to use it to pressurize some of the calipers, the brake pedal must be depressed slightly so the fluid can build up pressure and not just pump back into the reservoir. Slammo suggested that a twelve solenoid ABS unit as used in cars with brake based traction control (such as Subaru VDC) should be able to do this without pressing on the brake pedal. As scalman has pointed out, the Subaru VDC system already does this, so if you really want it you can just buy a Subaru with VDC.

We will find out on the rust free cars with long travel how well the bodies hold up. So far, fairly well. I tried different bushings but the stock bushings seem to last for a decent amount of time and have enough flex.

Finished filling in the wheel well. Checked and it had tire clearance at full bump. Tire actually rubs a bit on the plastic around the gas filler at full bump, but that's with the bumpstop removed. Inside the wheelwell fully welded. That took longer than I expected. Painted. Didn't turn out great but as long as it keeps it from rusting for a few years I'll be happy. View from inside the car fully welded.

B and I did a little reverse engineering of the Subaru ABS system last night. Under no circumstances should you modify or alter your ABS system or its function. Do not try this at home or at all. Here is what we found: The unit we disassembled was from a 2000+ car with the ABS control system as one unit with the solenoids. The one we've been experimenting with most successfully is in the lower left of the picture from a 1997 Subaru Legacy Outback. It has a big center wire to power the solenoids and eight separate ground wires. The top row of solenoids definitely closes off the wheel circuits. I assume the bottom row opens them to the pump or dumps them back to the master but we couldn't get the pump to pump anything anywhere. It would make a little turbulence or bubbling at that "passage to pump" in the middle of the diagram but couldn't ever get it to pump. Tried powering one or all of the bottom solenoids, tried powering pairs of top and bottom solenoids, no significant pumping anywhere. We tried bleeding it but maybe it still had air. Does anyone know the specifics of where the brake fluid is pumped to and from? Also, I remember reading about a procedure using the Subaru Select Monitor that would pressurize each individual wheel cylinder but can't find it anymore, if anyone could point me to that I'd appreciate it.

We plan on fixing the other rear strut tower over the winter too. More on that soon. The rear end of that Toyota kicks really bad over those little jumps. I've noticed that with a lot of Dakar cars though, especially the Peugot DKR, and they still beat everyone else. My guess is that it is a compromise for better cornering and/or traction. Jumps don't occur very often naturally so if you have to slow down for them a bit it's probably not as much of a time penalty as having worse traction the rest of the time. It would be a lot of fun to race the Dakar, it will be interesting to see what it looks like in KSA next year.

It would be very difficult to swap the cage into a different body, at least if you want to keep the windows and doors functional, which I do. Fuel cell wouldn't be too bad but all of that tubing under the car is so beat up now I'd end up just doing that again from scratch. It's months of work in total and then the car is not as practical for normal use, I don't think I'll cage another one of my Subarus again. Especially now that they moved the Dakar to your side of the Atlantic. The long travel suspension should be easier on the body than stock suspension, but then we drive the cars a lot harder so it's a lot of stress on the body. We will find out in the next couple years since we now have two rust free cars with long travel suspension. So far it's been pretty good, a little separation at the rear subframe/trailing arm mounts on B's Forester that we need to deal with, but haven't noticed any problems on my white Outback. Worst case the body only lasts a few years and then you get another one, still relatively cheap entertainment. B and M and Z were in town over the weekend so I decided it'd be a good time to tackle the worst rear strut tower. This is how it looked when we started: It's hard to tell from the pictures but the bottom of that one strap isn't really attached to anything. Really the tubing is the only reason it's staying together. Then I just started cutting. Not a lot of cutting was required, many of the seams were completely separated. One of those projects where you just have to stop and draw the line somewhere, so I stopped there. Basically got to sound sheet metal most of the way around and there was still enough left to provide structure and a template. We cleaned the undercoating, paint, and rust off all the way around. Started with a couple of flat pieces, one the shape of the wheel well, the other just in front of the gas filler. Then curved a piece of steel for the main strut tower. All 1/16" 4130. Added a couple more pieces to close it up. Tried to make the wheel well a little bigger than stock for plenty of tire clearance. Here is how that looked from the wheel's point of view. Still need to make the wheel arch and finish fitting at least one spot. Overall this went much faster than I thought it would. Saving the cardboard templates for the other side, we'll have to do the driver's side also before the Vegas to Reno. B patched up this hole behind the rear tire. That was a lot more work than it looks like. Z has the AGX struts on his FXT now. We didn't get time to try them out on the whoops but I'm curious to see how they work and hold up. He does have a little tire rub on all the spring perches. He hammered them up. The driver's side rear was the worst though, he took that off, slotted the holes, and welded plates on to shift the spindle away from the spring perch.

Do you know this guy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1LKD7s6k3I More on the body repair soon. Again, if it didn't have a cage, fuel cell, etc in it I would have replaced it by now.

That thing is cool but it's more VW than Subaru IMO.

I do have a crescent wrench on the list. Seriously though, I have that socket. That list doesn't include all the little things, I typed it up off memory. Yes, the Outback XT definitely looks cool. I tried to get T to post about it but he's 78 years old so it might be beyond his technological capabilities. He has done a lot of work to it to reduce weight, stripping out a lot of interior, gutting the doors, replacing a lot of things with carbon fiber. He has entered it in the Sonora rally a few times, it is a Dakar style race/navigation challenge in the dunes of northern Mexico. The organizers of that race made him put in a cage before he entered it the last time. I do not think I got any photos but it is a heavy duty rally style full cage. The engine is mildly modified but I couldn't tell you exactly how. It has a five speed manual. With the horsepower and the light weight it did well in the dunes. Unfortunately he'd recently had someone do suspension work to it and they made the rear suspension far too soft, even unloaded it bottomed out easily. He will probably have us build him better suspension and join us on some of our trips next year.

Definitely say hi at next year's V2R. As you know there's always plenty of waiting around at off road races. I've been thinking about typing this up for a while. Here is what I usually take in the Subaru. Tools that stay in the car: 3/8” and 1/2” ratchet, breaker bar, and extensions 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17 & 19mm sockets spindle nut socket (32mm?) 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17 & 19mm wrenches 5/16 and 10mm nut drivers screwdrivers crescent wrench vice grips screwdriver 3' long prybar shovel multimeter telescoping bottle jack RV scissor jack stick electrodes & welding glass tire pressure gauge inner CV rollpin punch hacksaw blades 3# hammer When trail riding I also pack an inner tie rod tool (long socket). Spare parts that stay in the car: belts CV axle – 1 front, 1 rear electrical wire fuel pump u joints zip ties tire plugs full size spare fasteners fuses hose clamps up to 8” dia thin and thick safety wire 1/4” wheel spacers Spare parts I pack for trail riding: tie rod – inner and outer lower ball joint control arms (depending on how many stock suspension cars are going) struts (depending on how many stock suspension cars are going) starter alternator rear lateral links and trailing arm front and rear bolt on wheel bearing and hubs I also keep in the car: lithium jump pack 2” snatch strap ratchet straps fluids (oil, brake, PS, shock) fix a flat recovery ramps water jugs wet wipes JB weld RTV For trips I add: maps car title (if car is fairly disposable like my Impreza) cordless recip saw with long wood blades spare keys 12V compressor vidcams handheld family band radios winch, extension cord, block & tackle food/drinks/utensils TP/PTs/hand cleaner tents/sleeping bags/air mattresses insect repellent clothes, towel, shoes toiletries, glasses, headlamp phone & charger camp stove, propane, pan, lighter For desert racing we also pack: rear lights door bars & window nets number plates rear bumper corner windows harnesses second spare tire suits helmets HANS shoes gloves hoods but we usually don't take the winch and a few other things when just desert racing. Unrelated, we do have some useable whoops now just outside of town. We can hit them at about 20-30mph and they're fairly harsh so it should be a good place to tune our shocks.

Made more clearance between skidplate and engine. Pulled down/straightened out radiator support by welding these big tubes to the skidplate again. This time I welded the "hooks" to the radiator support so they wouldn't slip off. I think I had it a little beyond straight under load but that was about the best I could do. It sprung back to slightly bent but was definitely pulled down from where I started. I was trying to figure out how to reinforce things and B suggested welding another piece of tubing to the bottom of the radiator support. Since it's at the back edge it doesn't really hurt approach angle or get in the way. Could have actually fit a 1" x 2" tube vertically but would have had to mostly cut out the gussets on the skidplate so I thought 1" square was a good compromise. Fully welded with new tabs for skidplate and longitudinal tubes to the swaybar mounts. Have already replaced three of the six skidplate side tabs with 2" wide (they all started 1" wide). Gusseted the remaining original tabs. Cut more clearance for the engine and rewelded a couple seams that opened up. Trying to make it Nevada proof. Repainted top and sides. Didn't bother with the bottom, that stays paint and rust free from use. Lateral tubes were pretty beat, this picture doesn't show how bad they were, but bent/smashed at the bolt holes. I welded in tubes on the new ones and ground the welds flush. Painted and reassembled. Got the side skidplates back on too, no big changes there, welded a couple washers on some wallered out holes and hit them with a little paint. They were a pain to install mainly due to the radiator support being pulled down. Will see if those settle in a little with use, fortunately they don't have to come off often. Will probably work on our shock tuning area this weekend before the ground freezes. Anxious to improve the shock tuning further. Also sounds like I'll be building a few new sets of struts over the winter.

Sounds great. If you start beating on it offroad, then it won't be pretty, and then you won't feel bad about beating on it offroad. The EZ30 and 4EAT does really pull once you get going. I'm disappointed by the low speed acceleration in my 2002 but my 2001 is pretty good. I would see if you can fit one of your 16" rims from your old car on the new car, but the front brakes might be too big. If they do fit, get some off road tires for those 16" rims so you have more sidewall height.