heartless

Stock height on left - 95 with Forester struts on right with stock size tires... the extra clearance of the forester struts allows for a little larger tire as well, so you can add a little more ground clearance there.

Good Job!

I am running just the forester strut assemblies on my 95 Legacy L wagon - no spacers. They are not really needed, and require more work to put in. If you like doing the extra work, go for it, but not a necessity.

Congrats on the new Subaru, and the new friend! Well done all around!

there is a lot of controversy over the dino - vs - synthetic thing. doing a search will get you lots of reading material. personally, I would stay with what has been run in the car for the majority of its life - in your case the dino oil. initial start-up is where viscosity plays the biggest role. depending on where you live, and the average temperatures, the 15w40 may be too thick - the colder the temps are, the thicker the oil will be, the less able to flow easily at cold startup when it is most critical. If you still have the owners manual for the car, it will give you recommended oil viscosities for various temperature ranges. Use a good quality oil of the recommended viscosity. I switched my 95 Legacy with a little over 200K to a "high mileage" version.

it could be done, but it wouldnt be an easy swap as the upper wiring harness is different, the 90 is OBD I, not OBD II compatible, and a few other issues. you would be better off finding a more compatible version of the 2.2 for your swap.

you are quite welcome. ideally you should solder that splice before putting the heat shrink over it, but even without the solder, this will give you a much better connection than those crimp connectors will.

get rid of the crimp joints. go to radio shack, or your local home improvement store in the electrical section and get some heat shrink tubing - the 3/16 inch size should be perfect for your needs. you want the rubbery looking kind, not the plastic looking type. Strip about 3/4 inch of the insulation from the ends of the wires, slip a piece of heatshrink over one wire - it needs to be about double the length of the stripped ends. Twist the bare wires together so they look like this... Slide the heatshrink over the twisted wire so that the heatshrink overlaps the insulation on both ends of the splice, then heat the heatshrink with a cigarette lighter, a small butane torch, a heat gun - whatever you have handy. keep the heat moving so you dont burn it. When done it should look like this... I have used this method of splicing vehicle wiring for many, many years on all types of vehicles, including under semi trailers, with no problems. when the heatshrink overlaps enough and is heated properly it makes a good enough seal to keep weather out indefinitely.

congrats on the home purchase - hope everything goes well with that. I can see how it would be difficult to get regular spring compressors in there - the crazy angle and other parts in the way...yeah... Whatever you do, just use extreme caution. I hear ya on the cold weather & age being a deterrent to working on the car - have the same problem here - and I have you beat by almost a couple of decades! LOL

Apology accepted. and just to clarify things a little... when the struts came off the 98 Forester, they both "looked" fine, aside from a little bit of oil leaking on the one. As madkow007 said, they were a temp fix for the broken springs & bad struts that were on the Legacy when we got it. The Forester struts were then installed on the 95 Legacy, and I have been driving the car for several months with them on. During that time the ride got progressively worse, to the point that it was almost unsafe it was bouncing around so much. And temperature seemed to have a lot to do with it - the colder it was, the worse it rode. And it has been unusually cold this year - week after week of sub-zero temps. When we pulled them out from under the Legacy, the first pics I posted of them is what they looked like - temp was barely in the 20s that day. A couple days later it warmed up to nearly 40 for 2 days in a row. it was after that brief warm spell that I noticed the one had extended itself - whatever had been frozen up inside had thawed out. In summary - yes, the internals of the one strut are completely shot, the spring was taking the entire weight of the car on that corner, and the all bumps, potholes, etc., and is pretty worn out as well, as evidenced by the rusted coils at the bottom where they were rubbing against each other. Again, I am VERY glad I decided to go all new. Additionally, if you look up the numbers posted by madkow, taken from the struts, you will find that they are both for Monroe OE Specturm struts, fitting 1998-2002 Subaru Forester - one left rear, one right rear. My spacers for the fronts arrived Saturday - hoping to get those asembled and installed soon.

if you are going to attempt this yourself, I would advise using several straps on that spring - one to the opposite side of the car, one towards the front somewhere and another towards the rear - limit its potential escape paths as much as possible. And please be super careful around this thing. No one wants you to get hurt! Around here, some areas use a lot of salt, some dont use any (when they should be) it is either clear, salted pavement, or ice covered - take your pick... This is a paved county road that I use going to work 2 days after the freezing rain/snow storm we got recently. Has a nice thick layer of ice...no salt, no sand...

HOLY CARP, MAN! How in the heck did you manage to do that??? no suggestions for you other than in the interest of your safety - take it to the pros!

So how about you two stop beating around the bush and just flippin say what you are thinking? You think I am a liar. Well, I'm not - but I learned long ago that there are going to be those that will believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of what others say or do. At this point it wouldnt matter if you were standing right next to me watching me take the stupid things apart to "prove" to you they are the same, you would still think I am a liar - so... Good Day, Sir - I am now finished with this conversation.

LOL - no, I didnt try leaning on it - it is pretty dirty and nasty, and I had halfway good clothes on at the time. I am sure it would compress pretty easily tho. I just thought it was interesting that it "grew" with no weight on it - betting the couple of warm days we had recently had something to do with it - I had noticed that the ride was much worse with colder weather - the warmer it was outside, the better it rode.

ok, so I went out to the garage yesterday to plug in our skidsteer and noticed something kind of interesting about the old struts... the day we took them off the car it was in the 20s F temp wise - had been in the single digits and low teens for the week previous... we then had a couple of nice warm days - upper 30s to maybe 40...it has since gotten cold again, but that is beside the point... anyway - the strut that was so much shorter has become longer over the last week with no weight on it, just lying on the floor of the garage... The shorter one is on the left - still not 100 percent the same, but much closer than it was when it was taken off the car - and yes, those are the exact same struts pictured earlier. no trickery, no BS.

I will be happy to take them apart this weekend. Both strut assemblies are from the 98 Forester that is sitting on blocks in my driveway. When they were taken off of the Forester they were the same length - I took them off.

my KYB rears are definitely solid as well. The dont need to rotate like the fronts do. The ones I took off the car are solid, too - no bushings - and those were OE as far as I can tell. I probably could have reused the old rear tophats, but i didnt feel like having to take things apart and then put them back together again with the car sitting on jack stands - much easier, and faster, to do the entire assembly in one shot - old out, new in, done. We had both rear strut assemblies installed, and the car back on the ground, in a couple of hours with typical home garage tools & taking frequent breaks to thaw the cold fingers. Hardest part was getting the bottom end of the strut & the knuckle lined up to get the bolts started thru. Was a little off on the orientation of the one, had to clamp the tophat in the vise and try to twist the strut a little to get it into better alignment...it did not want to turn easily with the new rubbers, either...a piece of 1/2 inch solid steel bar thru the lower mounting holes gave enough leverage to get it to twist just enough, tho. now, if those darn spacers/washers would hurry up and get here, I can get the fronts done as well...hoping that they will resolve the unpredictablity of the front end...it likes to wander a bit if one tire has more resistance (snow on the road) than the other, and has a little bit of a catch when turning...was told the ball joints and tie rod ends were in good condition when the alignment was done, but the front tophats were pretty worn...

Never heard of Mevotech so I probably wouldnt order them - I will stick with names I know Rear tophats are new KYB, along with the KYB struts. Front tophats are Monroe, with KYB struts. Springs are OE all around.

while I cant say with any certainty that they are or arent the same strut spring combo - if you look at the shorter one closely you can see the lower coil is much more compressed than the other one is. the first complete turn and a half are almost flat it has compressed so much. and to add to that - it was NOT that much different when they were first put on the car. I would have noticed that much of a difference between the two.