sparkyboy

@coolhandluke I just read the story about you and your boys rolling up in the sport sedan to swoop up drowzee! Very nice work indeed! I would hopped out with baseball bats with "what you what you what you want?" By beastie boys playing full blast and a huge cloud of smoke (mj!) Oh and a full grown german shepherd off the leash as usual. Not drunk unless someone else drives lol! I would insist someone else drive. The name is very fitting too, subarus seem to have the best nicknames. My 92 leggo was named rose after finding a fake purple rose with a paperclip attatched for scraping a pipe. It fit perfectly in my shifter boot! On her fateful day with title in hand stripped down completely i looked everywhere for that rose, i still haven't found it. When i said one final tearful goodbye to my first subaru there was a fake red rose in the parking lot that i still have on my coffee table on my k&n chrome filter meant for a 2bbl weber, but fits a 2bbl holley. My super cool 73 year old hippie neighbor found her down the street and drove her home for me, after he called the cops and let them know he was driving a car on the stolen list. What a nice guy eh? And free drugs? Cool! I'll be honest it would have been puff puff pass time with my bros. I dunno how people get hooked on party drugs, like that, to the point of stealing cars, that garbage only gives a good buzz for 15 min at a time. What color is your interior and what needs replacing?

Is there any noise or vibration at highway speeds? I once had similar symptoms, except for the turning noise. But a bit of a vibration So i tightened up the motor mounts and it went away for sone time. Then it came back so i had another look and the rubber was worn out and separating so i replaced that and no worries now. Does sound like struts or sway bar link or something like that in your case. Happy wrenching! Let us know the diagnosis and outcome

Excellent repair, looks like that will work just fine if not better than before! Let us know how buttery smooth the shifting is now! And pics of the rest of your wheels!

Oh yea hug a 70s chevy nobody is peeling that metal column! Now 53 bel air? Ignition is on the lower dash so its rather easy to hotwire. Cherry bombs on her tho, she'll let us know. Kill switch somewhere nice like on top of the gas tank but hardwire starter so crank no spark hopefully my german shepherd will hop over the fence lol!

It's easy to steal one once i got my sweetheart back i looked and ripping the ignition cylinder out is neon and civic easy. Dent puller with the screw is all it takes. Those are amatuer body work tools leaving massive holes. Copper weld on then grind the tip off. Kids obviously stole her and i think engine braked in first or did donuts with awd. She was difficult to put into first and the clutch was fine. I drove her for a bit just pushing her into first while rolling to a stop and not using n a whole lot sitting still but she got worse. I experimented with using second to take off and found out she had 4.11! So these dix screwed up a good trans. The syncro was funky cause it started becoming difficult to put her in second... So i did what i hope truly you sube guys get to do... i shoved her into second and rolled off, at 5 mph i stepped on the clutch and jammed her into first. It was raining. Matted that poor beast and sidestepped, kept her wide the fock open slideways. She got me home and i shut her off...she went into n and never went back into first, not even clutch in engine off! Went into second a tad easier tho lol! I used second as first (first is pretty damn low!) and we went camping one more time and back through black hawk for some gambling and drank (free!) Then i took her ej22 (i called the engine babe like the pig) out and put her in my 86 gl, vega. I named her a tad ironically cause I have always wanted a vega (bodies by fisher had a design team with opel pininfarina and italdesign to create the corvair, chevette, second gen camaro and vega/monza. The curviest of gms 70s lineup the corvair got those fools the job! The 77 camaro and vega have the same bumper but vegas a bit smaller sh!t yea Monte carlo and caprice?absolutely beautiful boxes like subarus! Vega is the street fighter character that is a little beotch especially at his venue in spain he climbs on that wall and he can get you with that slash, (kens jab uppercut for that cuntt,) and jumps fastest in the game AND off the damn wall! Chun li only does that but she sucks to play as. If you get good with vega though hes the best charge guy (like guile and blanka hold back or down 2 sec and forward + whatever) that german suplex is borderline cheating lol! Anyway he has that long braid and screams like a lion use jab and knock his claw off and his mask. So after the swap (first efi! knew NOTHING! All old scool carby) the baby lion was christened (literally, i forgot to tighten a hose clamp in my haste to drive her like i stolded her) and has had some good adventures, a couple epic...tripling the speed limit in a couple feet of snow and getting it hard on a dirt bike trail! Cheers boys good times

My 99 outback did just what you described. It was the rear sway bar link for me the plastic connector on the end. My dad borrowed her for a few days and told me later that he and his friend overloaded her with paving bricks several times. Freakin jerks, my pops friend has a sorry post 96 subaru, but is a super tight wad about his 05 turdbo outback "xt". That poor bloated car is so heavy she is slower than my n/a 86 gl (ej22) I'm a REAL xt owner, first year! If anyone wonders about the air quotes. dunno why he is like that about his rides, he is a complete pot smoking laid back hippie otherwise, long hair and all! He musta known the load capacity and said his car was being borrowed or broken lol!

Nah. Used to be manufacturers would have a factory team to race all their models in various ways to test em out. Take the 70s chevy for example, camaro in international race of champions (iroc) and trans am, corvette in le mans, whatever they had in nascar, of course nhra drag racing, and hold onto your hats - the chevette for rally racing that set several records until audi and subaru started dominating with 4wd cars in the early 80s. Each division of gm raced something, hurst olds anyone? Pontiac can am? No need to do so anymore since it seems like your average consumer treats a car that looks like an appliance well...like an appliance. Some big league race cars are appliances too in the name of fair competition. Win on sunday sell on monday ended in the 80s. Now its drive a car for a few years, then when the warranty expires and no more free maintainance, trade for a newer, prettier one that will work with the newer, prettier iphone. Or when nascar says the sbc2.2 will be phased out and fuel injection is mandatory so that the cars are sorta "stock" about 25 years too late lol! Nascar is pretty wack now with stage racing, that car of tomorrow was such a piece a crap lol! As far as im concerned, it takes at least 100,000 miles or 10 years for any real problems to surface if any on a given model. Then if a particular model or manufacturer stands the test of time it becomes more widely known to non enthusiasts. Thats why i like gm and Subaru. They keep an engine design for a long time compared to others (pushrods forever!) Ford modular engines anyone? What piles of garbage, what kind of engine just spits out spark plugs and can't be reinstalled? They are held in by 3 or 4 threads! And threads cut right into the aluminum rather than a steel insert. When people are risking destroying a cylinder head by pre-emptively heli-coiling all the (angled!) plug holes i think I'll steer clear thanks, hot rod magazine agrees. If ford woulda just put an f'n steel wire in the spark plug threads then the only complaint would be that the engine is gutless. Chevy and subaru are much better, but certainly not perfect. The head gasket issue that each company suffered from were the result of a poor choice of gasket material, not faulty engine design. It was the iron duke 4 cylinder in the 70s for gm that made them look bad, but lots of companies put aluminium heads on iron blocks. People ignorantly blamed the different heat expansion of iron and aluminum. Or gm being crappy, go buy a toyota (and be bored all the time. Fast forward to today and i cant find my favorite sub compact, a 2 door chevette, any year. Rwd is best, then dual range. That's it. People to this day ignorantly bash the 2.5 subaru as a "bad engine" when its just the factory copper gaskets from the early years of the 2.5 corroding and failing eventuallt. Probably corporate trying to save 7.5 cents per gasket times a million cars. It must have been so embarrasing to have to SELL that subaru coolant conditioner! I think it was only like $15 from subaru, but come on! I'll say this, the US auto manufacturers have made me extremely proud by surpassing the horsepower levels of the muscle car era, while keeping the man happy enough. That is, keeping up with safety and emissions standards. I find it hilarious that gm paid back all the money they didn't really want to borrow, dealt with being called "government motors" while ford was praised for "standing on their own two feet" (my asss!!!) Now land rover and jaguar are owned by Tata (india) instead of ford, mercury is gone. No halo car. Their best car is so unsafe it injures innocent bystanders. While gm, a real American company paid the man back right away with interest and still owns autovoz (russia), opel (germany), holden mw (australia- engines only now), daewoo (korea), saic and faw light equipment, among others (china), Renault /vauxhall (uk), torino italia srl (engine research, italy) and a sh!t load of other companies. Now the almost 800 horsepower, supercharged Lt1 (pushrods still! original Lt-1 dohc by lotus) is coming in the MID ENGINE corvette? But auto trans only? *SIGH* wtf? I shoulda never made fun of the porsche gt3 for being auto only lately. Who got deep pockets and want to invest in my new company? Mmcms? Mid mounted corvette manual swaps! Might need some money to design a pedal set prototype, a program to disable the tcu and of course bumping the power up!

A couple of notes here, a pressure test (or is it the leakdown test?) One is for the head gasket, the other is for the coolant circuit. Anywho the test will tell you definitively but does require special equipment. As does the carbohydrons in the coolant test you mentioned. Try this, but i am not sure if subarus do this, but most cars with a blown gasket on the water side, as subarus tend to do (i have heard of only one "oil milkshake" which is a failure on the oil side of the hg, allowing coolant into the oil rather than the combustion chamber) will spit a whole bunch of coolant right out the filler neck if you crank the engine with the radiator cap once. These engines are very sensitive to thermostats since its on the bottom of the engine . A long nose one is required and an improperly filled one will cause an airpocket which will cause overheating. You can see if that is the issue by driving and once she starts to get hot, stop somewhere and feel both radiator hoses to see if they are both the same temp as well as the heater hoses to feel for one that coolant is not flowing through. Lastly, how long does it take for her to overheat again after you fill the radiator? Right away or a few days? One of the two rubber lines for the iacv may be leaking and when the passenger side leaks slowly, it drips onto the exhaust, eliminating all evidence of an easy fix! Barring that, the hgs are easy, you can just remove the nuts from the motor mount and tilt the engine if you don't want to take the whole thing out. Oem and fel pro gaskets are fine for these engines, just take care to clean the block super good, i botched a bmw once cause of careless block cleaning. Might as well get a timing belt kit too unless that has recently been replaced. A top speed record was set at Bonneville and the driver felt more power inexplicably... The head gasket leaked just the right amount of distilled water im assuming possibly water wetter for a race engine to make more power similar to methanol injection for turbo cars. In fact the corvair turbo had an option for meth injection. It was just windshield washer fluid and called boost boost or something silly like that. Haha! I digress. Happy wrenching! By the way that shop that looked at your car is incredibly lame if they won't tell you how they came to the conclusion that your hgs need replacing. Fix them and go back stating the same problem and see what they say, they might be trying to fleece you.

Horray! Told ya.

Indeed it is not the norm. The napa in aurora, co is independent and has a machine shop across the street for cylinder heads and boring blocks and what not. The hydraulic presses are in the back of the store. They also have a neat paint mixing corner where they mix colors by vin. This shop sponsors the best cruise of the summer, 3 miles long. Now the napa in boulder sucks like all of em. I have a hilarious and cautionary anecdote about considering all angles... If you tend to enjoy the "work" it takes to properly maintain a vehicle and/or lack deep pockets please by all means avoid the e53 bmws. That is the first gen x5. They are simply not a joy to work on the axle goes through the oil pan for example. Anyway if you lock or unlock one of the doors manually and the doors get out of sync for the power locks and then you lock it in the unsyced condition manually... No big deal usually but if the battery dies...oh boy. You simply can't get in. The ignition is supposed to recharge the key fob but if that also fails as is often the case then you need to pop open the key fob and change the battery...common battery? Oh no you have to desoldier the connections first. Slim jim will not work. The master key without the fob is the only one that will open the only mechanical lock on the car. Then the ignition has be resynced with a video game style code. Bmw will sell you a new key for $300 tho! This happened to my dad it took me 2 days to figure out this nonsense, none of it is in the fsm either. All youtube. The whole time he is complaining and ready to smash a window. But i am the only one who examined all angles of the issue and fixed it free! I had a spare battery lol! The e53 can be had for beater prices and there is a reason. The damn things dont even ride very nice or go fast and the stupid air suspension over cambers the rear and wears out tires. Next time you are driving behind one have a look! Riding all goofy every time! Cheers boys!

Glad it worked out but what the hell homes? Nearby machine shop it's $50 while you wait to press in a stupid bearing! Done it twice on my subarus, this isnt some goofy one man operation in a corner, its Napa! Thats a reason to hug an old school chevy, you can hit those wheel bearings in with a big socket but never go bad cause you can simply take a fistful of grease and cram it in there without removing the wheel even. Cheers man, happy wrenching!

Do these later subarus have the individual blend doors for each vent a la bmw? On the bmws the blend looks like the knob that simply opens or closes the vent but will cause nonsense like that. You can blast the ac as cold as it gets but if on the hot blend will be warm... Just food for thought subaru is probably not like that, earlier ones are definitely not like that. good luck finding the issue!

Sorry to hear about your luck man. F'n dirtbags. I have personally felt your pain my beloved 92 legacy was stolen right in front of my bros house the night i happened to be visiting... The L bodies are stolen by kids for a joyride or someone too lazy to walk across town for a sack and spends all their money getting high so can't afford their own subaru. She won't get stripped, anyone who truly wrenches on these cars can probably find all the parts they need for change in the sofa and are too good of dudes to steal or take parts off of one of their own. And dudes that don't know about em can't drive them so in a few days she'll be sitting in a parking lot missing home. The hidden star of Pleiades is watching her now, you'll get her back. My 92 leggo found her way home after 3 days

Too cool bro Make america scrape again I slammed my camaro Gonna slam my 85 xt You need the ej swap in your life soon, once you drive her silly. Ive said it many times before... Like. You. STOLDED her!!! Keep the patina please. Nookie i love it. My 86 gl with ej22 is the baby lion. 85 xt is ghost 88 gl is skye And my 78 chevy g30 rv is noodle. Cheers man

Ummmm.... Ok i never thought i would hear an L body described as a money pit. Even if you break stuff a lot! Audi and porsche is what you need if you want a money pit damn vws. And fix sti? Why? Engine issues? If trans, body, or suspension work is needed then put the sti engine in that gorgeous wagon! Then put it back when the sti is ready! Or ea82 in sti body What's your wagons name? Drive her to CO i have a 95 ej22 with harness and plate but im putting it into my xt soon. If youre serious tho phase one ej22 is $200 and adapter plate is $200. Whole harness is like $15. I also have a 92 ej22 with trimmed harness, if i put that in my 88 all my subes will have ej22! But i really want to keep the ea82t I swapped my 86 gl almost three years and im sad to admit only 15,000 miles ago. She is beautiful, nothing beats that subaru light blue. Are you installing a brush guard style bumper to match the roof rack? You made the rack as well? The second gen is a rare sight here. The five lug swap is top notch. Is she sporting an ej already? I have a couple of turbos as well, depending on if the one in my xt is good. Cheers man, keep it up!

Welcome! I love those roof tents my friend had one for his bmw. His cost $2000 and not as nice as yours! Your Forester is pretty neat, camping in the Rockies is best done in a Subaru. And you have the mandatory dog very nice. I live in CO, I'll have to check out your group. I would love to see your pictures too, I have some "good" amateur photography of my old subarus around Colorado, my fave of my 86 gl at red feather lakes. Do you guys go group wheeling? I love guenella pass and apex trail in Idaho springs and I ALMOST squeezed my gl to the top of johnstown to that glacial lake, but it's dirt bike only unless someone cuts a bunch of trees down lol! I still have two scars from hitting a tree on a dirt bike on that trail! Haha! And get the cvt cooler and drive her like you stolded her even more! You can always take it off later and sell it if you don't get any more cvt cars! Cheers man

Nice rides dude! Gotta love a boosted subaru and I'm beginning to think brumby ownership is mandatory in Australia or something haha! Beautiful. I must admit I'm a tad confused here, does sleeper mean the same thing as it does here in the states? Over here it means a plain looking and sounding car that is outrageously fast. Same over there? The bumper mount intercooler and sti badge kinda gives your game away! The plate most certainly! I have seen the standard nitrous hidden in the air cleaner (borrring). The slickest one I have seen dude mounted two turbos under the car near the gas tank, to a water to water intercooler in the trunk, then through the center console through the firewall finally into a carb hat under the air cleaner. So then...you're hiding something huh? Is there more than meets the eye in that gorgeous rs? I love the usdm turn signals! Here those cars are the touring wagon and sport sedan (ss) they came with closed deck 2.2s and are very rare. Bored, stroked and girdled are absolute monsters 500+ hp I love the sleepr plate, it's so ballsy that I would be nervous racing you, but it's somehow appropriate on a old school turbo'd Subaru! It would be arrogant on say, a corvette and downright douche bag on a muscle car any era no matter how fast lol! On a new wrx or Nissan gtr? Foul. So please tell me she'll murder a Lamborghini! There is something odd looking about that intake, and at that angle I can't see the size of your turbo...i wanna see the block stamp under the p/s pump dude! And no look at the wheels? There's bolts to keep the bead from slipping bro you ain't slick! We used to have a 1985 Ford Ltd station wagon it's the same as the mustang a great sleeper platform. Cheers mate!

Super cool bro! What a beauty Please take her to a few shows with the patina before you go all in with the resto. Cheers man!

Your friend sounds like a nice guy! Subaru guys are nice guys in general. 95 was arguably subarus best year in regarding the ej22. Don't worry about the hgs, the 2.2 doesn't blow head gaskets very easily and I've overheated one severely. I think you'll love her, these cars are easy to work on. You just have to get used to driving a much less torquey engine! Just stomp on her all the time, the ej dosent make power until 3,000 rpm lol! Nothing like a good old Chevy, but better in a lot of ways. Simplicity at it's finest.

Welcome to the forum! I'm in the US we love brats! I'll say this, from what little i have learned about Aussie subaru geeks on this forum, (mostly Bennie) i would venture to say you guys are some of the nuttiest around! You keep your brumbys clean and drive the absolute piss out of em I'll certainly give you that much! But you guys never got the jump seats? That sucks! And I love Australian muscle cars, the 77 Holden torana is so gorgeous. Of course we get none of that! I understand that there are not a whole lot of camaros or firebirds in your country? Am I correct? Always nice to meet another old school sube gearhead, and I like your style, keeping her factory down to the emissions crap! The Hitachi can't be that bad, I have only rebuilt Rochesters and holleys nobody builds carbys like the americans! Webers are Italian so when someone inevitably tells you to get one, tell them a fiat driver needs that carbs more than you do haha! I have 3 Subarus 1986 gl wagon with ej22 swap 1988 gl wagon spfi ea82 1985 xt turbo. Cheers man, I look forward to the pics! Sounds like your grandpa was a cool dude, and drove that brumby silly. How long did he own her? He sure left you something nice.

Nothing like a quality swap write up! All the jdm notes too, nice

I dont know about later legacy, but i tried to put 16" from an outback onto a 95 legacy and it hit the strut. I was at factory ride height Good luck finding wheels that fit your needs and look nice!

Two more here! Both ea82 1985 xt turbo 103,000 miles 1988 gl wagon spfi a little over 200,000 miles. My 85 gl wagon has the ej22

What kind of wheels? Alloys? Hopefully these tail lights fit in a flat rate box, i have lots of goodies i would love to trade. Who knows someone with an 05+? If they dont have a momo steering wheel i have two that would make lovely gift. If not going on ebay $30 + shipping. Wood grain and non. I have matching shifters too.

@carfreak85 I have the tail lamps! I grabbed mostly trim, badges and what not, grille (nice!) Some cool relays. All the crapola in that last pic up there! And that dope "this car is equipped for installation of optional a/c" bezel. I was on my moped so i could only carry what i could fit in my backpack and carry in one hand or i would have got two of those wheels. They closed while i was starting on the mud flaps. Got anything cool you might want to trade? Any xt crap? Lol