azdave

Welcome back to USMB! I doubt I can help much with questions about your Outback but you never know. I DD a 87 DL wagon and also enjoy my 2003 WRX wagon so that is what I know best. No shame in your new car not being "new". I'll be 66 soon and have never owned a new car in my life and have no plans to ever make that mistake decision. The most I've ever spent on a vehicle was $9500 and only once have I ever bought a car from a dealer. Every other vehicle has come from a private party. The amount of money I have saved by avoiding depreciation and not being in debt constantly, has allowed me to enjoy owning multiple classic cars while on an average salary and being comfortably set up to retire at the end of this year.

My 87 DL wagon with a stock EA82 just popped on the CEL light upon first start today but went out about 100' down the road. I'm at roughly 254K miles. I haven't checked yet to see what code(s) are stored. I hope the light was one of those "service reminders" that really mean nothing. I have not tried to get the DL to pass Arizona emissions since I got it three years ago. I insure it as a classic vehicle instead and get an exemption. Once I put the full new exhaust and converters in place, I may try to run it though the DMV the test just to see if it will pass. It is $17 to have them sniff it and find out.

I have a 4-channel temp reader with a handful of 6' long thermocouples. I put the thermocouple touching the fitting and hold it in place with a One-Wrap style Velcro tie. If doing a driving test, I can temporarily route the wire into the interior past the door weatherstrip and monitor the temps while driving. I also have a set of those wireless A/C pressure gauges so I can watch the high and low side pressures while driving. Too much data probably, huh?

That is only true in a narrow range of ambient temperatures. For you to have read 65 PSI (assuming there was at least enough gas in the system to reach the saturation point) I'm guessing it was about 66F outside at the time you measured the inactive system pressure. You can find online gas/temp charts that show the relationship and values. Adding gas the way you did is a great way to sneak up on the proper fill if you don't know how much was in the system to begin with but don't be temped to "add just a little more". The compressor will cycle on and off for three reasons. Low gas charge, evaporator coil too cold or system overcharge. A compressor cycling because the evap coil temp is too low is the only time it is acceptable to routinely cycle. Cycling due to a low charge is not good because the refrigerant also carries the lubrication oil that the pump needs and an overcharge will wear out your pump and blow hoses. I fill my systems by monitoring the evap coil return line temperature too. When I know I am close to the proper fill, I watch the temp of the fat line leaving the evap coil. You put in a little gas and watch to see if the outlet line drops a few degrees accordingly. You do that a few times as long as the temps keep dropping a little each time. Once you add a little gas and the temp stops dropping, you know you have reached the point that the evap coil cannot boil off any further addition of refrigerant. It's a more nerdy way to do it but I'm in the SW desert and I need my cooling when it is 110 outside. I daily drive my 87 to work each day and driving home in the afternoon on the freeway really loads the system. Your low 30, high 150 readings sound about right for a properly charged system on a day that was in the 70's but you don't mention the ambient temps on the day you did the work. Sounds like you have it dialed in pretty well. Speaking of R134a, a local farm store had 16oz cans of R134 for $5 a can this weekend. I stocked up for sure.

Welcome! USMB has been a great resource to me as well and glad it is still around. I'm grateful to all the contributors throughout the years.

Great! Thanks for the follow up. I hate it when repair threads have no resolution, good or bad.

Yup. Corrosion creates high resistance connections that will heat up and ruin the compression/slip fit of the terminals and then it melts everything around it, all without ever blowing a fuse. I'm okay with the non-electric fan on my DL but it was tough finding a good thermostatic clutch when mine seized up last fall. I ended up finding one at PicknPull from a GL-10. It looked brand new and has been working great.

Here's a new thing to check for if you've come here searching for "fuel pump whine" issues. This relates to a whine that is barely noticed at first but gets worse the longer you drive and yet is quiet starting out the next day. SPOILER ALERT! I thought it was the pump getting too hot the longer it ran but it was actually being starved for fuel. I went to test a new pump on my DL but when I pulled the inlet line to the the pump, fuel barely dribbled out. It should have given me a bath because the tank was at least 3/4 full. I decided to take a look at the inline fuel filter I added a few years ago, just ahead of the pump. Sure enough, the filter was barely passing fuel. I cut it open and found the pleats completely packed with a light gray powdery paste. After the fuel evaporated, the stuff was very loose, fluffy and powdery, almost like talcum powder. I don't recognize it as any type of fuel tank oxidation or corrosion I have seen before and I play with classic cars constantly. I'm used to seeing rust flakes or gelled gasoline gunk but not this weird powder. It was not magnetic. It sank to the bottom quickly when I added gasoline to the powder and stirred it. When I pulled off the filter, I found once again that hardly any fuel was coming out of the line so guessed the filter sock on the end of the pickup tube was clogged too. As a test, I removed the gas cap, to try to relieve any possible vacuum, but that changed nothing. Next, I blasted a bit of compressed air backwards into the line from the tank and after that, I was greeted with my expected gasoline shower and the full flow was restored. I now need to drop the fuel tank and do a flush and inspection to see where this powder is coming from. I might be better off to remove the filter sock from the pickup tube before I install the tank and then be sure to change the external fuel filter every 5000 miles or so. At least that way, I would not have to drop the tank again if the powder continues to be an issue.

If you had air conditioning and turned it on, the A/C fan would then be fed 12 volts but the fan would not run unless that same coolant snap switch was closed. At that point, both fans would turn on and off together as needed. I'm confident the extra Y/W wire would have been used to provide the switched ground connection for the A/C fan you don't have. My 87DL is different. It has a fan belt driving the radiator fan (with old style thermostatic fan clutch) and it is always on of course. The electric fan for my A/C has a coolant snap switch to provide a ground connection when needed. My wagon is pretty much my daily driver here in Phoenix and used all summer long. I see about 3/4 scale on the factory temp gauge (not known for accuracy) and I have never had an issue with running hot once I installed an aftermarket single row to replace the heavily clogged OEM metal radiator.

I've had several pumps in my 87 DL wagon in the last two years and they all begin to whine and moan after a few months but only when they get warm. The whine pulses up and down when the turn signals are on or when any change is made to the loading on the battery. The pumps all work great at first and are pretty quiet but eventually I begin to hear them after a long drive home from work. I just figure it is cheap pumps that quickly lose the gearing tolerance after a few thousand miles.

The only thing critical is that the blue/red wire on the fan sees positive voltage and that the yellow/white gets a ground that comes from the thermo snap switch. The wires on the thermo snap switch could get swapped but is doesn't matter since all it is doing is supplying the ground connection for the fan whenever the coolant is hot enough. When the key is on and the engine either hot or cold, you should always read +12 volts on one wire going to the snap switch connector. The other wire will be grounded to the chassis. When the coolant is hot enough, the snap switch closes and the fan is connected to ground and turns on. You could have the wires on the snap switch reversed and it would not matter. To test the fan, temporarily jumper across the connector at the snap switch with a paper clip (ignition key in the run position) and the fan should turn on. That tells you if the fan is okay. To test the snap switch, you will need to get it hot enough to trigger it. If you can take it out easily, connect it to a VOM and heat it in a pan of boiling water to see if the contacts go from open to closed.

If you did everything correctly, as you and the shop both agree, then it pretty much comes down to the struts being the issue. Not all brand new parts are without fault. Did you compare the old struts to the new side-by-side? If the extended height seemed to match, did you also compared the number of turns on the spring coils and also compare the coil diameters? Do you still have the old struts? There are far to many sellers these days that offer parts that fit where the old parts were but don't meet the application specs properly. I had the same issue with front struts for my 87 DL. I found out they weren't really the exact part for my car but they would bolt up the same so some manufacturer decided to group them all together as being compatible when they were not. I bought them because the cross reference charts claimed they were correct for my wagon but they were not. It sat too high after the install. I eventually found a proper set but it took a long time to find a right and left pair.

Thanks again. Time to build a parts pile. I see Rock Auto has some of the bits so I can start my list there for a few of the pieces.

Thank you. I'll maybe reach out to David Melcher over in Cali as he seems to have quite a bit of L-series stuff on FB. I don't think he is on USMB though. I also replied to a FS thread here for Dave S. in New Mexico to see what he might have.

Thanks. That image gives me a little more idea what I would be in for on the lower end. Really wish I had a donor car to do the swap but they don't come up for sale very often around here and are very rare to be found in a junk yard. I don't even know of another like mine around here. I go to the weekend Subie meets once in awhile but haven't seen one there either.