pontoontodd

Good point on finding an H6 for that price. Haven't really started looking very seriously but that does seem to be a cheap one. Any advantages/disadvantages to second vs third gen Outbacks?

Looks like a decent car. At this point I'm thinking something with lower miles and a 2005+ for the bolt on front wheel bearings. Although I guess I know I can just put them on an older car, especially since I probably won't care about ABS.

Still trying to decide what to do about the radiator. At the moment I'm leaning towards the Mishimoto for 91-94 Legacy Turbo. The tanks, inlet, outlet, and mounts look the same. Expensive but probably worth it. I definitely have to replace the condenser. Waiting a bit on both of those, no sense getting them beat up and dirty before the V2R. Didn't see a good place to put the heater core in the front. I suppose it could be mounted to the hood itself but we'd have to do some testing to see how we could get air to flow through it. It would certainly make the plumbing a lot simpler and safer. One of the main thoughts behind the heater core in the hatch is that it should stay pretty clean. Still working on the vent in the hood. I'll post some pictures eventually.

I'd suggest a small Lincoln MIG welder. I've had a weld pack 100 for about twenty years now and it still works great. It runs on 120V AC like most inexpensive welders in the US, so I'm not sure what an equivalent model would be for you. You will definitely want to use inert gas and solid wire. You can get a gas kit if it doesn't come set up for it. The cheapest way in the long run here is to buy a bottle (75/25) and then have it refilled. I bought the largest one they have and probably get it refilled about once a year, sometimes less often. You can still get a small bottle if you need to move it around a lot. I made up a filler out of fittings from McMaster (not sure where you'd get them) to hook one tank to the other to refill the small one with the big one since it's fairly expensive and a hassle to get the small one recharged all the time. If you're going to do that get solid fittings that are rated for the pressure you're dealing with. It's cheaper to buy the larger spools of wire (I think they're 11#) but if you don't use it often and it gets wet/moist the wire can rust and cause all sorts of problems. So if you don't use it a lot get a small spool of wire. For the weld pack 100 I normally use .023" wire. That welder can weld very thin and/or rusty/painted metal surprisingly well. It's of course ideal to have clean metal to weld together but some things can be rushed or can't be cleaned. That welder can weld up to about 1/16" steel very well. You can weld thicker steel with it but you should do multiple passes at the least. I also have a power mig 180C. That's what I normally use now. It is the cheapest 220V welder Lincoln sells here and is MUCH smaller than their other 220V welders. I use .030" wire in that one and you can still turn it low enough to weld .030" thick steel. It's definitely good for 1/8" thick steel and does fine on thicker stuff.

How/where would you suggest doing that? I was originally going to run them in the driveshaft tunnel but I was afraid they'd get snagged or smashed, plus running alongside the hot exhaust would sort of defeat the point. Why would I put heat shielding insulation around the metal lines? The whole point is to reject heat. We even discussed running some of those finned aluminum lines, but they'd probably have to go on the roof or something. If nothing else this way I can find out how much it drops temps to have that heater core and fan in the back.

Installed a big heater core in the hatch door plumbed into the heater circuit. Started with this heater core for a 78-97 Dodge full size van and 8" Spal fan. Found the heater core on a chart online of heater core sizes, the flange is very convenient for mounting. Cut a hole in the hatch to fit the fan. Heater flow goes first through the stock heater in case we actually want heat, then over the gas pedal and under the radio. Then through the console and under the carpet over the driveshaft tunnel. Then under the rear seat and up along the rear seat belt. Then over the spare tire to the hatch. Then in the hatch door to the rear heater core. Cut a hole in the interior panel to allow airflow. This is how it looks from the back, moved the license plate over to the side. The fan moves a lot of air, but the only time I've driven it since and gotten it up to temp it wasn't fully bled yet so it wasn't very hot. There is definitely a noticeable difference in temperature between the hose going out of the engine and the one going back in under the hood.

Another thing I did after we got back is to weld some bushings on the subframe for the driver's side control arm. The holes were wallered (slotted) out at least 1/8" each way. Turned up a couple of bushings to use a longer bolt so the shoulder would be engaged on both sides. Tack welded them on with the control arm bolted up. Then swung the arms down (as pictured), finished welding and threw a little paint on. I'll eventually do this to the other side to be safe. After the race the steering shook over 60mph on the highway. Between replacing the one control arm bushing, tightening a castle nut on one of the tie rods, and this fix it's now back to smooth steering on the highway. I've been thinking about how to get more travel and keep thinking that we really would want more up travel. I don't know how much more a couple inches of droop travel would help. I don't want to raise the car much. At full bump the bottom of the wheel is about even with the bottom of the body, so we could use at least a couple more inches of up travel. At the moment I don't know how to practically do that. For one thing the front tires are very close to the wheelwells already. I think the rear axles get pretty close to the rear crossmember at full bump, that might take some effort to fix. Mainly though the springs are already at coil bind at full bump without any room between them and the strut mounts or the tires, so I don't know a good way around that. Maybe shorter but stiffer springs that would be a couple of inches short at full droop would be the answer.

Did you check the valve cover bolts and oil pan bolts? Try to get it as clean as you can, use brake or carb cleaner, put it up on jackstands, fire it up, crawl under and see if you can tell where the leak starts. Yes, you can pull the stamped heat shields off the exhaust manifolds and run it without them. They're pretty easy to get off with a big screwdriver, just pry them apart at the spot welds.

I ordered a head gasket leak tester and that came in, but the fluid was on back order so I figured I'd get it locally. The guys at the O'Reilly's I stopped in yesterday couldn't find the test fluid. I stopped in an Autozone and got a bottle. After a lot of bubbling the test fluid was still blue. To make sure it worked I put it behind the exhaust while the engine was running and after a half dozen squeezes of the bulb the fluid changed yellow or almost clear. So I don't think I have a head gasket leak. It does seem to take a lot less throttle to cruise at 80mph now that the exhaust isn't crushed on one side, I wonder how much of our problem that was. I also replaced the rear O2 sensor since the wires were pulled out but I doubt that would make much difference. The car did seem to run cool at the start of the race and got hotter as we went, but so did the ambient temps.

Up travel on both ends is limited also by tire/wheel well clearance. You are right though, in droop on both ends the CVs are close to bottoming out. In the rear they slide inwards at full droop. Various other things are binding up too though. Maybe if we went to heim jointed links instead of rubber bushings that wouldn't be a problem. In the front the CVs slide outwards at full droop. The outer tie rod ends also run out of travel, which wouldn't be the hardest thing to fix. If we moved the control arm pivots much I think we'd get some bump steer. The nature of the shocks/struts limit the travel too. For instance, say the compressed height of the shock/strut is 14" from the top mount to the spindle, you can only have 11" of travel. I've seen some rally cars get around this by offsetting the front strut to go down alongside the axle, like the stock rear struts. Looked at doing that and didn't seem like it would work for us. I have seen some offroad cars mount the top of the shocks sticking through the hood but didn't want to go that route if we could avoid it. More practical to do that in the rear, but the rear struts are already pretty long so probably not necessary. I had the springs off many times and cycled the suspension while we were building the long travel. The springs themselves are an issue too. The rule of thumb with aftermarket "racing" springs is that you only get about half their height in travel without yielding (permanently deforming) or hitting coil bind. That is why at first we had the springs running almost the full length of the struts alongside the tire sidewalls. To get the springs pointed at the wheel and the strut body farther out to reduce binding, we went to a traditional spring perch over the tire layout. So again, the best we can find are say 5" compressed at full bump, 16" long at full droop, so only 11" of travel. You could probably just run another inch or two of droop and have the springs float. The springs we're using now are the best MOOG springs I could find using their chart. I would like something 30-50% stiffer to get a little more ride height, right now it sits in the middle of the travel. So without getting custom wound springs that is a limitation also. Unless someone knows of another spring chart out there.

I was suggesting you do it. Without a low range, we could really use more low end torque than anything. One of the reasons we have to go "too fast" over obstacles. I've thought about a six cylinder swap but I think it would be better to eventually replace my Impreza with a rust free six cylinder car and start on that. Still planning on making a low range at some point. There are very few classes or series of desert racing that allow turbos. A six cylinder would not bump us up a class and would have much more torque. Not that I plan on caging one of these again. The engine is still stock. The previous owner supposedly replaced the head gaskets, and I've replaced the timing belt and spark plugs and wires, but that's all that's been done to it as far as I know with 210,000 miles of abuse on it. I've thought about some of the frankenmotor builds but I'd really like to see some dyno charts starting at 500RPM instead of 2 or 3k. At this point, especially for desert racing, we're still almost totally limited by the suspension. We could get up to speed faster out of the corners with more power but it we'd still have to go slow in the rough. I'd rather have a 25% improvement in suspension than double the power. Even though the suspension now is far better than stock. More power would probably make it a lot more fun to drive but like you say then we'd probably just start breaking CVs, etc.

Finally got the video from our last race edited and posted on youtube. It's not the greatest since we were focusing on finishing on time and couldn't really get video out on the course. I'm still really happy we were able to drive the car that hard for over nine hours that day. answered this question in your thread

I would think you'd bend a flat skidplate like that more easily than tubing. A big skidplate like that will protect the exhaust and control arm mounts better than what I built though. It really depends what you're doing with the car. If you want to slide up dirt berms, the flat skidplate is probably the way to go. If you're worried about a giant rock in the middle of the trail taking out your oil pan, a piece of tubing will provide more protection.

You should ask those guys if they have overheating problems. I know it's an issue with rally cars when they lose the front plastic bumper. The stock plastic will sort of limit your approach angle, but not really. It's very flexible. This comes back to the question of what you're really going to do with the car. If it's occasional mild off roading you can probably just leave it alone. With your lift it might scrape and flex sometimes but stay on the car for years. I wouldn't bother with rear diff protection, I can't imagine how you could break one of those. I would build something under the gas tank if you're going to do a lot of rocky trails. This is what I was talking about for the front. You probably don't have to go this far, but the front end will really take a beating if you start pushing the car. The lower radiator support will start bending up and the oil pan will certainly be destroyed. Run a tube the full width of the lower radiator support. On our other cars we've welded plates onto the ends of this tube and bolted it to the tow hooks. That gives you something solid to anchor your oil pan guard to. On this car we've run tubes up to the fabricated bumper, but that's a lot more work.

I was mostly joking, like why not get the WRX engine/turbo/etc and swap it all in?

It depends how hard you're going to push the car. If you really start doing difficult trails, you will want to do something about the bumper covers. On both of my Subarus I've made the bumper covers bolt on and off easily. That way you can have clearance for the trail and they don't get torn up, but for driving on normal roads you can put them on so it looks stock. The other two things I would recommend are some kind of radiator/oil pan guard and gas tank guard. You can buy or make skidplates. We've made them out of steel tubing, otherwise the radiator support, oil pan, and gas tank will get badly dented. I would also not worry about bushings or swaybars. The lift doesn't seem to hurt them.

You're probably right, and maybe I misunderstood, but it sounded like she was telling me it costs $30 to rent it. It'd probably be handy to have one so I'll probably just buy one. I'm surprised the exhaust is still attached to the car. It hangs below everything else but seems to require very little maintenance. We did crush the driver's side in the same spot as this about a year ago in Kentucky, I think I posted about that a few pages ago on this thread. Why not just run a turbo and pipe the outlet straight up out of the hood?

Henry Ford 100 year old Model T showing how it's done on a RTI ramp!!!

OReilly has one but it's $30 to rent it, and I think you have to pay for the fluid, so I'm just going to buy one. I did pour in a bottle of coolant system cleaner and drove it for a few days, just flushed it out this morning. No obvious flood of junk came out. While it's drained I'm going to drill some holes in the thermostat. Another thing we noticed after we got back is that the passenger side exhaust was crushed. First I pried off the heat shields. I cut a scrap of 1.75 x .120 4130 leftover from the cage to fit. Should flow a little better. Yes, I ground the flash out of the inside of the tube. Tack welded it in while the exhaust was still on the car, took the exhaust off, finished welding it, and put it back on the car.

Stopped at the local Advance yesterday and they had no idea what I was talking about with the head gasket tester. I'll look around a little more. I looked them up online so at least I know what you're talking about now. We got the HVAC fan out of the Outback since it was making noise occasionally after the race, especially when turned all the way up. There were some sticks and rocks in it: Couldn't get any pictures but the plastic box the fan blows into that holds the evaporator had an inch or two of dirt and debris in the bottom. The evaporator was partially covered with about 1/4" of mud too, so we cleaned it out as best we could. Should improve AC performance.

This is the strut with the bad hose that was bottoming out. The other rear strut is slightly bent but not as bad. In this picture you can see the weld was starting to crack too: I am going to shorten up the mounting tabs like I did on the front struts. There is room between the strut and the sidewall now that the spring is above the tire. It also helps that these need a little more positive camber which will give us a little tire/strut clearance. I'll also gusset the bottom of the tabs. Trying to find different springs so I can move the spring perch up while I've got it all cut up. Anyone know of a company that makes inexpensive custom coil springs?

Here are a couple of pictures from the race: The race was a lot of fun and I'm still amazed how well we did against the competition. We finished third in our class of nine trucks because there were only three of us that finished both races. There were only three trucks in the class that were faster than us though, the rest were running similar or slower lap times. Perhaps more amazing, only nine of the 29 total entries finished both races. So just finishing was an accomplishment. We have definitely driven over much rougher terrain and we've driven that fast and jumped the car before, but never all day long like this. We definitely had to push the car harder than we would trail riding in order to finish in the time limit. It was probably a few feet off the ground thirty times that day. We might have to go back down there sometime.

Planning on water w/ water wetter or a little anti freeze. Going to drill some small holes in the thermostat. As posted we've built as much of an air dam to force air into the radiator as we can. It's possible that's scooping crap into the radiator but the front of it looks fairly clean.

Thanks for the Oreilly tip, they do have dimensions on all the radiators and heater cores. I'm trying to avoid a lot of work fitting some kind of non stock radiator and fans but maybe I'll have to do that. I just went through all the radiators on Summit with drivers side lower outlet and passenger side upper inlet and they're all too tall. I will see if I can get one of those head gasket leak testers. Replaced the t-stat with one from the Subaru dealer not long ago. I agree with you guys that something is probably wrong, clogged radiator, stuck thermostat, etc since turning on the heat cools it right down. 2005 STI radiator looks about the same as the 2002 H6, about the right size but top and bottom tanks so that might be some work getting one of those to fit too. Other than the overheating I'm really happy with how the car held up. There was barely any dust in the air filter, brake pads still look new, only one bushing in the suspension seems sloppy, wheel bearings seem good, etc.

Do you know of one specifically for 99 Legacy? I've seen them for first gen and third gen legacy but not second gen. I've seen a few others that might fit too, but it would be nice if it dropped in.