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EJ22T Brat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgs4eY0J4uQ

make sure the pickle fork isn't bottoming out and not actually "wedging". is it the right size and i didn't know they could bend over time - but make sure it's working as it should. 1. Use a HEAVY hammer or larger solid metal mallet with lots of weight behind it. 2. SWING HARD. light hammers and construction style hammering isn't the ticket here. This is more like "stand back, wear goggles, cover your ears, and scare the neighbors"

Take the nut off the ball joint flip it over and screw back on a little. Take a floor jack and place it under that nut. Jack it up a little until you see the control arm move up. Go to Lowes and get a 3 foot pipe used for natural gas applications. Direct the pipe on the control arm and just keep hitting it downwards with a hand held sledge hammer. This may go on for 30 minutes until you see it drop off the ball joint.

You can make a tool to pull the ball joint from the knuckle , cheap cheap. few pipe fittings some threaded rod a lug nut a tack of welding and your good to go! Look on YouTube for subaru ball joint tool. It Works . They do sell this tool thru amazon but its like $80 +

Seems like you need to run a certain cam grind from delta cams to get the best from this build. Do some reading, drop thread links in here and hopefully it can be worked out for your setup. I reckon the EJ253 (going by an EJ251 with a sports exhaust that's in the family) would be a good engine and upgrade over the stock VW donk in there atm. A fella I know over here has an EJ22 in his '80s kombi (T3??) and he loves it, so the 2.5 should be even better I reckon. Cheers Bennie

Well I have occasion to cut open filters almost daily so I see their construction and effectiveness or lack thereof quite often. The guys joke that filter cutting is my favorite task. Really I just enjoy failure analysis.... and who doesn't enjoy some really awful carnage to take pics of. It's like watching a train wreck. Horrible, sure - but you can't look away. I have all the gear to check differential pressure across the filter and data log it also. At some point I will tabulate all the data on different filters and when/how long/how often the bypass valve opens. GD