heartless

my personal choice would be the triangular cut - had that style on the old Ford truck w/SS center caps and chrome acorn nuts. That said, it is your car, get what you like. as for the trailer wheels - a "good" tire shop would know just by looking at those wheels what they were - even without the sticker on them. poked around a little at the diamond site - prices arent all that bad considering - they seem pretty close to buying any standard aftermarket steel wheel. If I remember correctly it cost me in the neighborhood of $80 plus to buy one 16x8 wheel for the Ford - theirs is $96 for a racing wheel. wouldnt cost you anything to give them a call (800 #) and ask.

this car is a known entitiy to you - you know what it needs - keep it and fix it. buying another car you could be getting into things much more expensive than what you already have - when funds are tight, this is not a good idea - I am in the same boat with funds. as far as the brakes go - I have seen worse - it is fixable but is going to take a little time and effort. you have already received some very good advice on what to do parts are not that expensive - the slider pin/bolt can be replaced for about $17* if needed, the rubber boot kit is only about $6*, and the SS clips can be purchased new for around $20*. Add a set of pads for $15-20*, clean up the rotor with a wire wheel, put it all back together and you are good to go. total cost estimate: around $60 The only variable here that could drive the price up is the caliper itself. if you can not get the piston to move back in, then it either needs work or replacing. Caliper rebuild kits can be had for as little as $7* (basically consists of new seals) A new caliper isnt that bad @ $48* for the cheap one - the front ones are much more expensive. *prices are Northern Wisconsin prices - yours may be slightly higher or lower depending on location. First step is getting it apart and assessing just how bad things really are, and what you absolutely need to replace. if at all possible, try to save as much as you can by cleaning things up and using the brake grease as already mentioned

i am carrying a spare & tools with me just in case. Took it for a short drive this evening, so far so good, but didnt really go long enough to know for sure. will know more tomorrow night after driving to town

the CV joint is part of the axle - not something seperate. the CV (constant velocity) joint is what allows the wheels to turn while the axle is still supplying power to the wheels. (ie: the part of the axle that bends) if the clicking noise (similar to the old "playing card in the bicycle spokes" noise) is heard all the time - cold or warm - then chances are it is the CV joint of the axle gone bad

try harder to do that - I actually broke a window by pushing the door shut that way once (not on a subaru - was a Caddy Eldorado) broke me of that habit right away! that little habit cost me more than $200 to replace that window.

hmmm...looking under the hood, on my car, there is a harness that goes thru the firewall on the passenger side of the tranny..."diagrams" (line drawings) do show this, and also show that wiring as spreading out under the dash to various components other "diagrams" in the FSM do indicate that the SJ is on the drivers side, more than likely up behind the guage cluster, but i dont see where any wiring goes into the passenger compartment on that side of the engine bay as the diagram "suggests"? Would this be the large loom that goes into the fender area, and disappears from sight? and would it be possible to access by pulling the guage cluster out? Yup - all clean there, the main feed wire is also clean. doing the check as described by Cougar showed a very tiny reading of only 0.03 volts - I am assuming that this is very good, and that the alt is, in fact, fine. (meter set at 20 VDC) Also, when checking ground points at various locations with the car running, i see 0.02 volts, or less, difference between reading at the actual battery terminals and reading at the ground points I know the car is a 22 yr old rust bucket, but it is all I have and I cant afford to have to replace the darn thing. being jobless for more than 2 yrs really sucks the big one.

Well, went saturday to get the alt tested once more - still getting the light show periodically. Again I was told that the alt tests fine. The person that did the testing this time claims to be a former "master tech" - and we had a rather interesting conversation. He asked if the car was a slavage, had ever been under water/gotten wet - answer: no, clean title and to my knowledge it had not. he asked a few other questions - and then I remembered - the first winter I had this car it got completely packed full of snow under the hood (see my avatar?), and some had even managed to get inside, past the door seals...oops... :-\ ok, so sunday I dig into the dash area that had gotten snow in it - behind the lower dash panel where the little "tray" is - which happens to be very close to where the fuse box is located. I was very careful about drying everything out back when this happened, but ya never really know, it is possible that i missed something, so I went with that assumption. I went so far as to completely pull the fuse panel out to make sure there wasnt corrosion anywhere - did not find any corrosion under the dash, but I did find that the greater majority of the connectors had a lot of very fine dust/dirt in them. So everything got cleaned up, blown out, and reassembled - only some driving time will tell if this has done any good, or if the problem continues to persist... Now - anyone know where the big "super junction" referred to in the FSM is located??? Or is that something that would require pulling the entire dash out to get to? (not sure I want to go there)

Yeah, that is what I thought too, but (big But here) I have no money to buy a new one, and in order to get it replaced under warranty, it has to "test" bad with the parts store's equipment....so basically, I am screwed. I do have an old stock unit I can swap in to test the theory, but I dont know as I trust it to last for very long.

same light show on the way home - on and off, on and off... does not appear to be any rhyme or reason to when they come on, or go off (don't have the light hooked up on the gauge, so cant see that after dark). sometimes just a brief flicker, other times on for a minute or more. does not seem to be tied to bumps in the road (of which there are plenty) grounds that have been cleaned: *Main negative battery cable ground to trans bell housing bracket (both bolts) *smaller cable off main to front chassis *there is also a smaller gauge wire (12 ga?) running from the neg battery cable clamp to the chassis below the battery box - possibly an add on by a PO? *ground between dog-bone bracket & firewall anyone have any other ground locations? I feel like I am missing something, somewhere, but danged if I know where.

the max voltage that the alternator will put out (for this unit anyway) is around 15.5 volts - so, that particular day, at that particular point in time, it was pushing out the maximum. anyway - back to the issue at hand... cleaned all the ground connections that i could find. Other half used the car to take the dog to the vet and reported no problems for the trip (about 15 miles each way) driving to school this evening, the dash light dance started up again - all the warning lights came on, voltmeter dropped to just under 12, then just as suddenly, everything went out & meter returned to 13+ this little light show happened several times in my 18 mile drive. about ready to pull my hair out! what am I missing? (and just for the record - heartless = female )

Well, guess i learned something new, too. Thanks for the info Cougar. Hoping that the issue is resolved at this point, i guess only time will tell for sure - driving time. just to clarify a little further - the alt output is the connection that goes to the battery, correct? the single wire with the nut? and one would do this with the meter on the voltage settings? (sorry, i can be a little slow with this stuff, but i am trying to learn)

+10 - if you are concerned about doing more damage - put a fuse in the FWD fuse holder and just go with it until finances allow you more room to work on it.

yupper - pm being sent with info - please let me know if you dont get... (still never recieved that last pm from you)

Adventure - if you want the ECU out of that car, I can pull it easy enough, throw it in a box and send it your way if you will cover shipping costs.

voltmeter is indeed run thru the fuse box so that it turned off with the key. the main ground bracket was off last year when the motor was pulled for resealing, should be good on that side, but i will pull it again just to be double sure - the ground cable side does look a bit on the rusty side however, and that was my main concern for that area. plan is today to get all of them that I have found thus far pulled, cleaned up, a smear of dielectric grease to slow the reformation of rust/corrosion and everything put back together nice & tight. Hoping that will cure the resistance issue. The one person at the parts store that I do actually trust (most there are idiots) showed me how to check for resistance on the ground cable using the DVM on the ohms setting. He says it should be 0.5 or less - mine was well over 8.5 - pushing 9!! cleaning just the small ground from the battery to the body dropped it to about 6.4 - yup, i have work to do. for those that want to know how: DVM (Digital Volt Meter) set to 20K Ohms (touching probes together should show a 0.0 reading) disconnect the battery negative cable and move it away from the terminal. place one probe on the neg battery terminal, and the other on the neg battery cable clamp. Any reading over 0.5 means you have ground problems

actually - the battery terminals are quite clean (i do stay on top of that), but the chassis grounds are looking kind of rough - the small one right by the battery had some rust build up, as does the big main one. also found the one at the dogbone - that one looks really nasty on the chassis side. Any others I should be aware of?? so I have my work cut out for me tomorrow (no classes at least) The other half did help me get the main one broken free just a little bit ago, using a pair of vicegrips on the bracket to keep it from twisting.

ok, so went to see about getting alternator exchanged today - just one small problem - apparently there is nothing wrong with the alternator - it was pushing out 15.5 volts at 2000 rpm, with hi-beam headlights on, and heater blower going full force. (guage only showed 13.5) I was then informed that I had a ground problem. no, aside from the obvious ones - neg cable to trans bell housing & the smaller wire from battery neg terminal to front - where else are there grounds on a first gen legacy? also, what is the best way to unbolt the main neg cable from that stupid bracket off the bell housing?? it just wants to twist.

The motor he got from me - same year as the car he put it into (1991) so wiring should not have been an issue - unless of course a critter did a little gnawing somewhere.... the motor came out of a known good runner (when we bought it - pre-cannibalization) car was purchased in northern Illinois and driven home to north central Wisconsin - only major problem that car had was really bad struts and body rot! he did have to swap over his fuel injectors (both were/are autos, so shouldn't be issues there either) and the front accessories as those parts were cannibalized for our daily drivers.

driving to class yesterday evening confirmed that the alt is indeed losing charging ability as things heat up. cold start (car sat for day and 3/4) registered just a hair below 14 volts on the meter. drove to campus - about a 15 min drive, give or take. meter was showing 13.5 volts when i arrived there. no accessories running... Car sat for about an hour while I was in class - exam day, got out early... started car, meter is registering slightly lower than 13.5 volts now... by the time I arrived home again - another 15 min or so drive - it was down to 13 volts even...did have the headlights on coming home as it was heading towards dark thirty. Time to call Advance and see if my replacemnt has arrived yet... (edit to add: I am carrying around an original stock alt from one of the parts cars, and my socket set - just in case)

dont feel stupid, we all had to learn somehow at some point, some of us just learned it sooner than others is all.

ah, ok... thanks for clarifying. the brake booster is the big round thing on the firewall, the master cylinder is attached to it, and yes, it does use vacuum to operate.There is a fairly large vacuum hose that runs between the booster, and the engine.

um, yeah, another one we dont have around here. this is all farm country and just about everyone drives either a pickup truck, or a minivan/suv kid hauler. Very few "imports" of any kind around here The closest Subaru dealer to me is about an hour away, and they are so small that they only have maybe a dozen cars on the lot at any given time.

in all honesty, 19 yr old vacuum hoses should probably be replaced anyway - dry, brittle hoses dont seal very well. That said, I would be trying very hard to determine exactly where that "smoke" was coming from - are you 100% sure it wasnt smoke from perhaps an oil leak dripping onto the cat and burning off? Not saying you are wrong about where it is coming from, but there really isnt anything under the intake that could produce smoke...

Thanks guys, for the validation on this one. glkiller - Since I live 30 minutes from the parts store the car, and the alt will be good & warm when i get there, so it shouldnt be a problem proving it at fault I did call them today cause I couldnt find my paperwork, they have it on record that I bought the thing april of last year. they have to order in another one, should be there tuesday morning, so that is when I am going in for it - no point wasting the gas for nothing. edrach - if you could come up with the cable to go with that alt - i may just take you up on it! older subarus and thier parts are kind of hard to come by up here - dont have any pick-n-pulls in the area, and the yards we do have just dont keep anything from them when they do come in - not enough call for them. (which is why we "stockpile" cheap parts cars) have been having idle issues when warmed up for several months - changed all the usual suspects - CTS, IAC, PCV, vacuum hoses, etc, etc and it still has issues - wouldnt it be funny if swapping in a new alternator cured that little problem as well... oh, and GD - I went and looked them up, my stock alt is 70 amp, the 96 alt i looked up is 85 amp - a nice 15 amp increase would be sweet! i could put the fog lights on the car and not worry so much about burning up the alt like I used to do on the GL! LOL