jonathan909

Yup, sure was - nine days for the round trip, not driving stupidly (i.e. maintained my normal wake/sleep cycle, more or less) and sleeping every night (but the two spent at an old pal's place in Madison WI) in the back of the '99 OBW whose EJ25D I rebuilt last winter. Ran flawlessly. Couldn't be happier... unless the Supercat 19 I came back with wasn't covered in snow for the next five months. So now I'm back and catching up. Just did the HG job on my girls' '01 Forester that's been in the queue since spring, so I'm getting closer to tackling the H6. For the "live data", I'm assuming this is a job for one of those newfangled OBDII/Bluetooth dongles and the appropriate tracking device app. I see the dongles start at just a few bucks; can anyone offer some pointers as to what to look for, what to avoid, and which apps to run under either IOS or Android? I can probably dig up an old iphone here but would need to acquire an Android.

Actually, I'm still marveling at the "genuine Subaru" part. I have block heaters in every one of ours, and I've never see anything but a Zerostart/Temro in any of them - or in any car in any junkyard. Where in Canadia you at?

Good questions all. I just don't have the answers yet. Have to embark on a road trip (Calgary -> NY -> Calgary) tomorrow to fetch a boat (unless anyone here is about to head west from Long Island with a vacant trailer hitch...), and as soon as I'm back I'll start fiddling in earnest.

Stands to reason, though it gets better really quickly - as in "within 30 seconds" - and before the engine has had a chance to warm up significantly. But I'll take a look when I get back from a cross-country drive to NY and report results. Thanks.

This is the one I picked up a few months ago on the cheap. Ran well at the time, I've been getting some body stuff replaced and dealing with the fershlugginer (Simbolz) lock nuts on two of the wheels (they came without a key and are a terrible system). Thinking now of pressing it into use. Started yesterday with a little fuss, but it'd been sitting for months and the battery was flat, so no big surprise. Once it came up it behaved fine. Today (ambient temperature about 0C) I could barely get it to catch, even with a little shot of ether (something I've never had to do with an EJ22 or EJ25). I think it's running too lean (i.e. failing to choke) because it was a little backfirey. Once it caught it idled way too low, like barely alive. After 30 seconds or so the revs popped up to normal-ish and it seems okay. Since I'm new to the H6 and have never seen this sort of behaviour on any of the fours, can anyone suggest a cause beyond the usual look-for-vacuum-leaks? Btw, no CEL.

Excellent - thanks very much.

I'll try to remember, but if I fail to, I'm sure someone will find this post and ask.

On one hand, that makes perfect, reliable, practical sense. On the other, if nobody tries the Mahle future generations will search here in vain for the answer to this question. So I'm going to try them. For the children.

Thank you, but you did not answer the question. It could be a better answer than the one I'm looking for, though, so let's break it down. 70.88 USD + 16.52 USD (shipping to Canada) = 87.40 USD = 115.41 CAD Mahle: 78.68 CAD + 5.30 CAD (shipping as part of a larger order) = 83.98 CAD For comparison, my local dealer is quoting 179.12 CAD for pair (of #633). So I can get OEM gaskets from ebay for a 37% higher price than these Mahle MLMs. Back to the original question: Does anyone have any experience with the Mahle gasket that would indicate the cost saving is or isn't worth it?

Looking for a set for the '01 Forester. Rock has Mahle MLM at a significantly better price than I can get OEM from the dealer. Comments?

Am I interpreting this correctly? It looks like nothing connects to them. If they're simply breathers (i.e. vents to ambient), I guess that could be the right answer.

The good pal I sling Subarus with up here recently bought an '06 OBW (AT, turbo). The PO had dismantled the engine for reasons that don't appear to have been sound, and unable to put it back together again, unloaded it on my friend for a song. He's gotten it pretty much sorted out, the biggest hangup (predictably) being all the manifold hoses. Now that the engine is in, the major outstanding mystery is a pair of lines (1/4"-ish rubber) coming from the top of the transmission housing and held in a little white plastic clip next to the tranny-firewall brace (upper right corner of photo). There are no obvious corresponding connections in the engine neighborhood. Can anyone shed light on where these go?

Actually, my '95 has always been quiet, as has the '98. It's the '99 that has the persistent rattle. I'll get to that latch, but it's a little low on the priority list. But the point is that those little spring-loaded bumpers don't take up enough slack to kill the rattle.

Not much it doesn't.

We need to cull the herd a little, and the '99 OBW is the best candidate, all-round, for getting a decent price. The only real problem is those rust holes. A local shop just quoted me ~$1500 to fix each of them, which is obviously a non-starter. I've never done any body work and am eager to learn. What is the typical DIY approach to these things? I'm not too concerned about the finish - I think I'd be happy to leave the repair in primer - but would be happy with a reasonable minimum level of success in patching them.

"Love to see"? That's a little perverse, but here youse go... Btw, we're seriously thinking of selling our '99 OBW in Montana, where you're crazee for these things.

Finally got ahold of the Chemsearch guy out in Ontario. FYI, they've renamed the product "FREE". Now I just want to get my hands on a single can so I can try it before laying in a whole case, so I may give the ebay guy(s) a try. [Later...] Here I thought that all the impossible-to-deal-with companies were semiconductor manufacturers. nVidia's arrogance isn't to be believed, Broadcom's anus is a black hole that has consumed all reason, and an ATI applications engineer was once ordered by his manager to apologize to me for being a d!ck. But Chemsearch is giving them a run for their money. If I decide I like this stuff after buying a can from the ebay guy (for what will probably turn into $50 plus the hassle of getting it here from Montana, because there's no way for me to try it out otherwise), Chemsearch will sell me a case...at a price to be discussed later, because they won't quote it to me now. And American manufacturers wonder why everyone just wants to buy from China now.

Cool, thanks. Now to see if they'll ship to Canadia (many won't)...

If you could, I'd really appreciate it - PM me. Naturally, but that's the whole idea behind "stocking distributor", right? Manufacturer sells MOQs to disty and disty sells smaller quantities those customer who want/need them. Of course, if they only have reps and not distys, they may get a little huffy over people who want to buy onesies, but they've brought it on themselves. The least they can do is just explain their sales policy rather than giving a brother the runaround. All they have to do is say so. If the stuff's that great maybe I should spring for a case.

After a (failed - no wind) sailing trip to BC a couple of weeks ago, I renewed my search for an H6 Outback because with the four of us, the (pretty light) boat, and all our gear, my '99's freshly-rebuilt-and-running-great EJ25 was really struggling to maintain 90km/hr through the mountain steeps. Scored an '01 for $500 CAD (about $400 USD): Only 233K km, engine and drivetrain seem really solid, tires less than a year old, body a little nasty. A minor front end incident deprived it of bumper and grille and damaged the headlights and hood - but nothing that a couple of hundred bucks at the wrecker shouldn't set right. Severe wheel well rust. There's other little $h!t to deal with - missing exhaust donut, leaky AC, nonworking CD, and ugly-feeling brakes - but I feel pretty good about it. Except for the stupid locks on two of the wheels - creepy little Simbolz items that I hope a shop with the right extractor can relieve me of. Subaru-specifics aside, nobody told me that having a family meant signing up as a fleet mechanic...

The question you were answering was "Yield"? I'd love to give this stuff a try simply 'cause you say it rocks so hard. But I can't remember the last time a company made it so difficult to buy their product. There's no information online and a series of phone calls has just brought dead ends. They claim they're going to get someone to call me re: Canadian distribution, but my hopes aren't high. Do you buy it direct from them, or do they actually have distributors? I'm going to be sailing in Montana next week, so if someone down there carries it I could pick some up.

It's a good point. The illumination from a handful of point sources isn't going to be as uniform as that from a single filament. Again, though, I think the only way to find out how much and what kind of difference it means is to try them.

Your argument would hold water if we were talking about glass, but if these headlights were made of glass, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because the headlights wouldn't suffer UV degradation. Okay, they might, but over the span of hundreds of years, not a few. You know perfectly well that plastics don't behave as do glasses, and that not everything just sits on the surface. Plastics absorb. Which, unfortunately, doesn't really answer the question I asked. Apparently the only way to get a nuanced answer is to get a set and try them out. And btw, we have elk here too - but they don't behave at all like the deer. They travel in pretty big herds, when they cross the road they take their time, and there's no missing them - unless you've got terrible lights (or, yes, you're going way too fast). Deer are so stupid, fast, and unpredictable that one of our writeoffs was a product of the deer broadsiding us. It launched out of a deep ditch (where we couldn't see it from the road) as we passed, slamming into the front fender and rolling along the length of the car, wiping off the mirror and pushing in every body panel along the way.

Dude, look at my avatar and you'll get that I understand wet sanding - not just for cosmetics, but for performance (though actually less on the TriFoiler than on the catamarans). And from what I've seen the UV coating really makes a difference on these things - without it (that is, when I used the Mothers kit) the lens fogged again within months; with it the degradation of the lens has been slowed. I actually have the laboratory equipment here for a spectral transmissibility analysis, but at the moment I'm just going by subjective observation. You need to understand what I'm talking about here. I live in the country and wrote off two cars last year to deer strikes. Prior to that I wrote off a third in addition to a number of incidental non-writeoff collisions since we moved out here. Earlier this year a moose ran my girls off the road (moose are no joke - they kill people in cars). According to both the police and the body shops, half of the accidents reported in this area are from collisions with these stupid vermin. Overall, they present a much greater hazard than you suggest from oncoming traffic, and I couldn't give a bright orange sh!t what you or anyone else find "obnoxious" about a headlight's colour temperature. I'm not going to intentionally create a hazard for other drivers (nor do I want to attract tickets), but beyond that I'll do what's necessary to make these awful, substandard headlights minimally safe.

The Meguire kit - drill-driven pad, a couple of wet+dry papers to 2000 (iIrc), polish, and UV protectant which seems to help. I posted previously on this kit vs. Mothers. "LEDs are obnoxious" doesn't begin to approach "informative". The question was about effective brightness. Qualitative opinions require explanation.