jonathan909

Whoa - that's a steep grade alright! What kind of tires do you use with that?

Just got back from another little boat-hauling road trip, this time over the Rockies and into the British Columbia interior, where it's pretty damn hot. Two years ago the town of Lytton burned down after the temperature exceeded the highest ever recorded in Las Vegas. My problem is that in 30+ heat I was barely able to hold the temp gauge's 9-o'clock norm. Any extra load - climbing a hill or turning on the AC - would cause the temp to climb, forcing me to slow down, turn off the AC, even turn on the heater in an effort to keep it from going past the 10-o'clock mark. That I can tweak it on the fly like this suggests that it's a marginal problem, and in the past (e.g. with my old 318 Dakota) the answer was a new rad. 1. Is there any reason not to take the same approach this time? 2. Of the rads available from Rock (in ascending order of price): CSF, Ultra-Power, TYC, FVP, UAC, Koyorad, Agility, GPD, Denso are there any particularly good or particularly bad?

Absotively - I always pull the ground (first) rather than +12. There are some other delightful failure modes as well, such as your big college ring or metal watchband coming between that wrench and ground.

The headlight relays are. The high-beam relay isn't.

Belay that, looks like they're behind the kick panel.

What about the aforementioned kid?

Both the docs and the clicks I'm hearing confirm that it's somewhere over on the passenger side. Before I start pulling stuff apart, can anyone be a little more specific e.g. behind the glove box, or the kick panel, or what? thx.mch.

I've never had an Impreza, just Legacy and Outback wagons and Foresters, but I'd be surprised if there were any difference, because they're all the same engines. Other than pulling the air box and pushing some hoses and wires around, it's a nut and a bolt that holds it to the bell housing. The nut under the starter can be a bit of a PITA to get at, but you can still do it from above.

To close the loop on this: Figured it was time to stop thinking about it and actually do it, since I just completed a 12-day road trip carrying a lot of stuff and pulling a boat, during which the RR wheel well was within a cm of the tire - turns out that in addition to being old and soft, a little less than a turn had broken off of the bottom of the spring (it was intact when I replaced the shocks last summer). When I called the dealer to place an order, the parts guy asked for the last eight, and I don't have a Baja, so I called my buddy who does and he supplied his... and the parts guy said that it listed the 20380AE39A spring, which only confused things. So I ordered two of the 50A, and the idiots in the (Portland?) warehouse shipped one, and I put it in yesterday and it fits fine and looks great, though I won't really know until I load it up. But if it's stiffer, I should be made in the shade.

That's a bit of a head-scratcher, alright. I'm tempted to dig out the drawing and see if anything stands out. My only comment is over your "Something seems to be causing huge resistance somewhere", because the symptoms you describe - particularly the fan slowing down when you try to actuate the window - suggests too high a current draw rather than increased resistance (which would reduce the current). But that doesn't make a lot of sense either, since you've verified the motor and mechanism. [edit] Hmmm... actually... increased resistance somewhere upstream is a possibility too, as that could cause an unusually high voltage drop when the window motor draws serious current. You said you checked the fuses, but did that include the fusible link? They're usually a little less obvious. [end edit] About all I can suggest at the moment is the old tried-and-true "check the grounds". Seriously, a missing ground (or even a broken +12) can cause astonishingly weird symptoms as the current finds an obscure, unanticipated path. And since the wiring harnesses have to pass through the door hinges, that's primo opportunity for a wire to get flexed and broken, or for a little nick in the insulation to allow moisture in to invisibly corrode through the wire inside (that happened to my Grand Cherokee years ago where a +12 passed through the firewall - drove me nuts). p.s. Your punctuation does not go unnoticed; I thought I was the only guy using semicolons these days. But you need to follow a colon with a capital letter...

Great news on the '02 - I love mine, that engine has power to burn. And total agreement on your '96 - our stable includes a '95 2.2 MT that I thought I was buying for parts about ten years ago; on the drive home I realized there was nothing wrong with it that a CV axle, a tailpipe, and a window crank wouldn't fix. And of all our cars, that's the one that's goddamn unstoppable - it isn't a daily driver these days, but a backup that we know we can walk out to in the middle of winter, -30, not plugged in, hasn't been started in months - and it'll just start and run.

Hmm. Good point, worth checking.

The gasket in question is a rather intricate coated metal one a la our head gaskets, so I don't think that's happening. So my next thought is whether the existing gasket (once the coating has been cleaned off) might be reused with the addition of an anaerobic sealant. This appears to be a single bolt retaining splines, but once the bolt is out it's... um... reluctant to separate. Well, that's kind of a circular argument, isn't it? If they're not available, nobody can buy them and do the repair. If they were, they would. By that logic, there shouldn't be any H6 head gaskets available because you prefer to replace the engine over the gasket (which I'm not arguing with, btw - your reasoning is sound). As far as availability of a replacement goes, Rock (just a point of reference, not definitive) doesn't have one available for the H6.

I'm catching up on getting the AC running in an assortment of cars, starting with the two '01 3.0 H6s. On the car of present interest, I've chased down and replaced the various bad O-rings, think now that what I thought was a leaky condenser isn't, and just discovered a leak in the compressor, where the back plate mates with the body. Seems to me that this should be a SMORAG (Small Matter of Replacing a Gasket), but there don't seem to be any gaskets or kits readily available. What gives? I mean, I'm not talking about a black-goo-and-broken-metal failure, just a leaky seal. The context is that yes, I'd normally just go get a junkyard replacement and drop it in, but the H6 uses a serpentine belt, which means a 6-groove pulley rather than the usual 4-groove non-serpentine 4-cylinders - and there aren't any H6s in the yard at the moment. Suggestions? [edit] Actually, I guess a clutch transplant from this one onto a compressor from a 4 would work... but what's the trick to removing the clutch?

Been away for a while (that's a good sign - the cars have been pretty much behaving), but I've got a few things to do this summer and might as well wade in. I think I'm the lone dissenting voice here. I have a couple of '01 H6s, both bought cheap, one came (in pieces) with HG leaks and the other developed them later thanks to a series of overheatings. Last summer I pulled them both and did the gaskets, and it's fundamentally not a different job than doing it on the EJ25s. The difference is in the timing cover and All Those Damn Screws - about 65 just to pull the front off, and those are the ones among which will almost certainly be a stripped head or two (they're Allens). Once the heads are back on, cleaning up the cover halves and reassembling them adds a day to the job. I actually found rethreading the chains to be kind of fun (didn't replace any of the timing components), and I wouldn't hesitate to do it again. I just took one of them (the one with the terrible body but bitchen McIntosh stereo) out for a road trip - Calgary to Toronto to fetch a(nother) boat, then back via Pittsburgh, Madison, and Minneapolis - and with a big load of old computer hardware in the back both ways. Nothing like an H6 to give you the juice to do that.

Ain't my first rodeo - when I do HGs I go with known quality. Not sure exactly, but over the past couple of years I've generally been using Mahle MLMs (most of which have actually been Subaru OEM), and they hold as they should. The one exception was the (2019?) rebuild on my '99 DOHC in which I used the gaskets supplied with the EngineTech kit - that was purely an experiment, and they failed after about a year (during which I made a nine-day road trip to NY and back). This car hasn't seen nearly that many miles since the rebuild. So I have confidence in both the gaskets and my work.

Yeah, but it's winter here too, so obviously there's no towing involved, and since we live in the foothills, a day trip to ski in the mountains isn't any kind of serious load - I'm not talking about the middle of summer with a full load of passengers and camping gear and towing a boat.

Daughter is reporting the cabin heater (normally very efficient) is blowing cooler than usual as well, which just adds to the weirdness. BBQ thermometer an interesting approach, though.

Like most of us, I've had my share of bad HGs, so I rather doubt that's the case, but I'll double-check.

This one's odd. I did a rebuild on it a year or two ago (spun a rod bearing), it wasn't running well after I put it back together, it sat for a bit, and it finally settled down after I stuffed in a pair of fresh O2 sensors. After that, it ran great through the spring, summer, and fall. Then it started acting up in a strange way: The engine temperature isn't as stable as usual, and though it was running a little on the cool side, it overheated on my girls on a day ski trip to the mountains. The first and easiest thing that sprang to mind that might be causing this was a thermostat, maybe not staying closed tightly when it should (hence running cool), but maybe being generally sticky (which might cause both the under- and over-temp conditions. So it got a fresh OEM 'stat, but has still been running cooler than normal. What next? The pump? There's no evidence of leaks, and when it overheated the coolant loss was through the overflow jug. I'm a little puzzled.

Ouch! Around here it warmed up as predicted and has been hovering around 0C - and predicted to stay there for a while. But I've lived here too long to be fooled into thinking that it feels like an early spring...

...except if corrosion has actually removed portions of the threads. That's what had happened to the first of the H6s I did this summer, and I very reluctantly reused them because I was in a rush and under a lot of pressure. I knew they'd hold okay despite the voids - just a few mm of missing thread here and there - but didn't anticipate how much it would affect my ability to accurately torque them. The creak was unbelievable. So I'm just grateful it's holding together and I won't do that again.

How is it for you up there, brother? We woke up to -40 this morning, and a few miles up the road (Sundre) it was -42 (not counting wind chill, of course). But we're due for a Chinook, so we'll be back up around 0C for a few days around xmas.

About the head bolts: Even though people in the business of selling them say that they have to be replaced, they don't. Re-use them unless they're obviously damaged (e.g. corroded threads).

I bought the Enginetech full-rebuild kit for my '99 EJ25 (DOHC) a few years back, and just for yuks, used the head gaskets supplied in the kit - I wanted to see how they'd stand up compared to the MLM gaskets we all know are the Right Thing. I got one year out of them before they leaked out, causing me to pull the heads and put in an MLM set. So the HGs in their kits are clearly crap, and I don't think I can recommend their head bolts either - some I got were, um, "less than straight". So the Enginetech kit is a perfectly reasonable - and very economical - kit, as long as you just toss the HGs and get HQ MLMs (incidentally, of late I've been buying Mahles from Rock - and they carry the Fuji Heavy Industries (Subaru) logo). Do it that way and you can get the quality where it matters (the HGs) and save a lot of money over a premium kit.