Susysubie

Update: Fred the Red lives on! I meant to do this update a month ago, but have been crazy busy. My husband repaced the O2 sensor and replaced a broken ground wire. That's it--Now it runs like a dream! The only fly in the ointment is the rear axle, which is still making a horrible noise. It gets louder as the car goes faster. We are currently not driving it much because of concerns over what might be causing this. Hubby's out of a job, and we can't afford to even have it looked at, presently. Anyway, thanks so much for all the help and suggestions! It was definitely *not* dying--at least, not any more than anything else is.

​Got it! We'll try those things and get back to you. Thanks!

​Thanks so much, Grossgary! The car runs fine--with one, possibly revealing exception: after driving for a few miles/getting warmed up, it occasionally "lurches" (misfires?). I'll be going along at 55-60 mph and the engine will quickly lose and gain power again. There is, rarely, a backfire. Minus the backfire it feels almost like when I was first learning to drive stick and messed up the timing; speaking of which, this is a manual transmission, if that is helpful to know. It's been doing the lurch for a loooong time, which was why my husband replaced the plugs last summer (NGK's). Thad didn't make the lurching stop, though. The timing belt was replaced, as were the head gaskets, before we got the car, but we don't know if the pulleys were replaced with the timing belt. This all came to a head about a month ago, when I started out one morning and, suddenly, the lurching and backfiring were happening non-stop. At that point, my husband cleaned the MAP sensor. Then, it was drivable again, with much less frequent lurching and no backfiring. After this, I noticed a reduction in power when there's a load on the engine, going uphill for example. Right now, I'm not driving the car much for fear of getting stranded in the middle of nowhere--I'm a free-lance musician and drive a lot of long distances. Other hints of something amiss: the temperature gauge sometimes plummets when it's cold outside--doesn't have to be unusually cold, and, when it plummets, the heat coming out of the vents becomes lukewarm. Coolant level is fine. You asked about electrical: No issues, except that the fog lights both stopped working. We replaced one bulb, which didn't fix it, and used at multimeter to discover that no power is getting to the fogs....Maybe simply a wire somewhere, but thought I'd mention it, just in case. We have never replaced the spark plug tube gaskets. In light of the fact that the lurching is intermittent, is the coil swapping idea worth trying? Our point in taking "Fred" to the dealer (which is the only place that works on Subies up here in the armpit of western PA--about an hour north of Pgh.) was to diagnose so we knew what needed to be fixed. My husband has been a service writer for Nissan and is very familiar with motorcycle engines, and has done a lot of the repairs on our cars, himself. We don't know where to begin with "Fred", however, and the dealer apparently doesn't need our business. I hope I've given you more info to go on, and I really appreciate all your advice. Thanks, again!

Thanks, Matt167! We will try all that. Hubby says he replaced plugs/wires last summer but will check them again. Compression test is something we haven't done, but will.

Thanks very much, Mike104! We are in the western PA area. Apart from a Google search, is there a way to search for a Suby specialist in our general area?

Thank you! Quick question: What will happen if we unplug it? In other words, how will this rule out the plugs/wires?

My husband and I took my 02 Legacy wagon to a local Suby dealer to see what it needed to pass PA inspection. (It had passed when we first bought it used a couple of years ago, but we knew it'd need some work this time.) I was really bummed when the service writer told us that, in light of the CEL codes my husband reported reading, the engine is on its way out and it wouldn't even be worth their looking it over! My previous Suby, an '01 RS 2.5 which we bought new and had for about 14 years, had over 300K on it and was still running when we sold it. My Legacy just passed the 200K mark. My question: is there any way to know how long the engine will keep running, and is there anything we can do? It doesn't bode well when the Subie dealer doesn't even want to work on it. Not only do I love my Legacy, but we can't afford a new or even new-used car, right now! Here are the codes: 0301, 0302, 0303, 0304, 0172, 1137, 0457. Any advice would be most appreciated!