edrach

No I haven't.

King5 is doing it's annual food drive collection for the Christmas season. I thought we had a great time last year meeting at Redmond Town Center Mall and having an extended lunch at Claimjumper; do we want to do it again this year?

Welcome back. Sorry about the car, but your best bet is to take it to my favorite emissions guru next to the 6th Ave. South emissions testing place in South Seattle (just south of Spokane St.). $40 plus tax if he can adjust it to pass; no charge if it doesn't pass. Plus if it needs a part he can tell you what it needs and then bring it back to him for "tweaking." You can't go wrong! PM me with a 'phone number if you need more information.

I spoke too soon. The foaming that I saw in the coolent wasn't due to excessive oil but likely residue in the heater box and existing hoses from the original failed engine. The brat is running okay now! I put the radiator cap on it and started it up and let it warm up. As soon as the temp guage was about a 1/4 I took it over to my neighbor's place. He does auto repair in his front yard and we talked a bit. I was watching the brat and the smoke out the exhaust pipe went away after a bit and the fan came on and 20 seconds later switched off; the temp guage was at 1/2 and stayed there. My friend went to his tool case and got a laser temp guage and we measured the temp of the heads at all four cylinders. All of them were at 200 degrees plus or minus about 5 degrees. The back side of the radiator was at 208 degrees. I brought the brat home and loosened up the throttle cable and got the idle back to normal at 800 rpm. The wicked lifter clatter was also gone; actually sounds like a normal engine. A wicked clean up job is all that I have left to do.

Good news, bad news. Junkyard engine is finally in and started right up. Bad news is that it has a blown headgasket so there is more work to be done. Keeps me out of trouble I guess.

Donny's having a heck of a time lately. Let us know where he will be. Thanks for keeping in touch.

Actually, with the traffic jam for the windstorm, it took me 6 hours just to get to Portland. Return trip in four more!

This will pull up realtime data; I haven't been able to pull up codes with it.

It works quite well for displaying realtime info, but I couldn't get it to display CEL codes. http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/showthread.php?t=46407&page=1&pp=10

Tighten the adjustment cable until you can slip a dime through the spring coil as if the dime were a feeler guage. With the thickness of a dime as a start you generally need to just test it for proper operation and maybe just adjust it a little more one way or the other.

So Bill, how did you do? Actually, I'd be up for it, but I really can't justify 10 hours of round trip driving for the fun of it. ---ed---

Unfortunately, the sparkplug trick does not work for determining which engine you have. Your '92 2.2L is definitely a non-interference and the interference engine did not start until the '97 model year. I have a '97 Impreza with the 2.2L engine and it is most likely interference even though it has a manufacture date of Oct. '96. Do a search on non-interference; this was discussed ad nauseum about 3 months ago here. Here's one link; there are others. http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/showthread.php?t=40824&page=1&pp=10&highlight=non-interference

You might try www.cvaxles.com and see if they can make custom axles for you. Pricey, but just a thought.

Don't be embarrassed; my first one took me four hours. Thanks for the thank you.

Any white smoke coming out of the exhaust even after it's warmed up? If so, you might have a head gasket problem. Other than that, check the water hoses for small pinhole leaks especially that nasty one in the center just below the manifold (tiny little bugger). Look for tell-tale coolent residue to help locate the leak; turbos run hot enough so that a pinhole leak often dries up faster than you can spot the leak.

Sorry, I was trying to be sarcastic; next time I'll tag it with the proper emoticon.

Can you describe the course and layout and such? I'm curious how other regions do their rallycross events.

You don't have to ask Austin to take lots of pictures....it comes naturally for him.

I'm with Russ on DON'T DISCONNECT THE BATTERY WITH THE ENGINE RUNNING. Very bad for the car in general; aside from taking out your ECU (if your car has one) this is a good way to fry the alternator also. Hopefully, everything is still working. The likely cause of the lamps dimming is poor grounds or corroded connections along the way. Not an uncommon problem on a 23 year old car. Hard to find, but they can cause a multitude of problems. Snowman's testing writeup is right on the money. One of the deceiving factors in testing battery voltage is that you were testing it without a current load on it. Even a dead battery can test with good voltage readings under no-load conditions; put a load on it and the voltage will drop like a stone. Almost any auto parts store will test your battery and alternator for free. Of course they'll want you to buy one of their replacements which leads one to suspect the testing. Try taking it to two or three places and if all of them come up with the same faulty component, it might be time to replace that part. All that being said, I still think you have a bad ground or bad connection somwhere.

A bigger alternator. Batteries are only used to start the car and as backup when the alternator can't keep up.

All of the above work; as a last resort, take out the four bolts holding the hub and remove it; knock the cone washer out of the hub from the inside.

If you'll be there I'll bring the bumper from Flow. Otherwise, come make a trip up to Bothell to pick it up sooner. --ed--

It was optional on the '88 to '90 GL turbos; it was standard on the RXs; in both cases it was a 3.700 which needs to be converted to 3.900. Check with qman or Dr. RX for that if you find one.

Good information here: http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/USRM2/mick-usrm/transmission/lsdswap.html

James has "comitment" problems. With his motorcycle racing schedule, he couldn't make most of the events. He got one other event in at Brooklyn and won his class there also. He does seem to be a natural (trust me, he didn't get it from me). Also, having a stock '96 2.2L Impreza to drive didn't hurt him any; the car is quite competitive.