DaveT

Run away. The timing marks are on the flywheel. There should be a little black rubber cap on the bellhousing center top of the engine. Remove it, look in the opening, slowly turn the cranckshaft with a 22mm socket wrench.

The oil is also for insulation. It has higher breakdown resistance than air.

Oops, I cut & pasted the wrong thing. Fixed.

Most likley. They are very detailed, thus the recomendations to get one. Someone may have one here. I have an 86 and a 90 FSM.

The pump isn't turning fast enough at idle to move enough oil to keep the pressure high. Normal. No load on the engine at idle, so it doesn't need high oil pressure. Don't "lug" the engine, it's made for high RPM. I have also seen this when the battery is near end of life. A lead acid starting battery, (car battery) under ideal conditions, is near end of life after five years. Somewhere around 140K miles, one of the brushes in the alternator wears down to the point where it doesn't touch the slip ring. This was amazingly consistent on my 3 EA82 wagons. The charge light doesn't necessarily indicate the failure as it is very gradually reducing the charge current.

4WD - if all 4 tires are same model & miles: I use 4WD in rain or worse. If the tires are mixed pairs: I use 4WD on starts in rain, always on in snow or off road. Switch on the fly is one of the things that made Subaru famous. Things to check so you don't break down - Coolant hoses, all 7 of them. Anything over 5 years old, replace all of them. Thermostat, wouldn't hurt if it's over 10. Subarus do not like to run low on coolant. Check the radiator - especially in the corners of the electric fan shroud. If the little fins are gone or loose / falling out, get a new radiator. Timing belts. Mine have always failed between 50K & 60K miles. So now I change them near 50K. Check the idlers while working on the belts. If a T-belt breaks, it won't hurt the engine, just leave you stranded. Listen to the engine idle with the hood open - if you hear the typical dry bearing rolling sound, find out which bearing is bad before it takes out the T-belt. Best manual is a factory service manual. Some stuff is online here. Best bet is probably ebay. All of my 3ATs have been no problem, except the ocasional vacuum modulator. Those fail eventually on any car, and are cheap & easy to replace. I have run synthetic ATF in all of them, have one at 206,000 miles, another 2 or 3 over 150,000. I can't say for sure if it made a difference in reliability, but they do shift better in the cold with it. I have been driving & maintaining EA82s w/3ATs since about 1988. Welcome to the board.

They are notorious for leaking. So are the cam cover seals. Also the oil passage that supplies the HLA passes through the headgasket and the seam between the head and the cam carrier. The o-rings get hard and don't seal, thus leaks.

Mine all have 2 bolts. Most I have never moved. The first few times I changed a timing belt, I checked with a timing light, but never had any reason to adjust. If you move the disty back to the original marks, it should run as it did before changing the belts. Unless they are off a tooth. And assuming you didn't remove the disty. A degree or 2 shouldn't make it go from running fantastic to running crappy. At least good enough for a rough reset / start point. If you want to fine tune for performance or MPG, then get out the timing light.

The best way to avoid these problems is to replace ALL 6 [edit - make that 7!] of the coolant system hoses every 5 years or so, don't wait for them to fail. Use coolant system hose for the small ones, not fuel or oil line. Something about the composition of the rubber doesn't stand up well to the hot coolant. Same with timing belts, change at 40K miles, and inspect the idler bearings. Check the oil and coolant level at least 1/week. Coolant check includes squeezing the top radiator hose while listening for the jiggle pin, and looking at the level in the overflow tank.

For low power add ons, I usually make adapters from connectors and wire & terminals from my big box of spare wiring harnesses. I can match the gauge and color of the existing circuit I'm tapping into. I made a tool for removing the terminals from the plastic housings out of one of the stainless steel strips from a windshield wiper refill. For amature radio transievers, they have to go to the battery - they need minimal voltage drops. The wiring has the fuses right at the battery.

All the wiring to the switches on the column have connectors. They are tucked up around the ECU box.

There are alternatives, but they are more expensive, impractical, or require fairly high level electronic design work. Most are 2 of the 3. The details are all buried in the previously mentioned thread.

Excellent. Reminds me of my first engine rebuild. 1976 wagon. 1400cc engine. Rebuilt it in my kitchen, on the heavy duty table I had made. This was, of course, before marriage. Now I have a big insulated garage, soon to be heated.

It is a combination of a switch AND power resistors that makes the speed changes. The power resistors have to disipate a lot of power, so they are mounted in the blower housing for cooling. If your resistors are good, you need a single pole 4 position switch that can handle 20 Amps. For more information than anyone should want to know about EA82 blower motors & speed controllers, including voltages, current, power ratings: http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/showthread.php?t=64761&highlight=speed About the 3rd page in starts the more detailed stuff.

That should work. I have a vacuume pump, so I do that too. That way I know there are no leaks. You need to pull a hard vacuume. A simple way to test this is to see if your pump can cause water to boil at room temperature. A rotary compressor from an old window air conditioner can be set up to use as a vacuume pump.

@ Gd, +1

There's NO mistaking that smell! I'd rather smell skunk.

I recently had the pully off a power steering pump. There was what looked like a standard 62xx ball bearing with a seal on the outside. The standard 62xx bearings can be bought with shields, seals, contact seals, or nothing. I can't be 100% sure, because I wasn't specifically looking to replace the bearing.

It could be mice in the heater system. They make a horrible mess, and it stinks. My soon to be retired (due to rust) 90 got invaded a year or so ago. I just pulled what I could out, and left it open all summer. The amount of air moved is severely reduced by the crud in the evaporrator, however. I discovered their mess in my "new" 87 (no rust) while getting ready to install the wiring for the 4WD transmission. I decided to take everything apart & clean it out with TSP and bleach. I HATE MICE! Since I plan on using the 87 car for years, I decided it was worth it. The A/C evaporator was plugged almost solid with their mess. I am going to put 1/4" hardware cloth over all of the intakes for the HVAC. At the base of the windshield under hood, and the blower box behind the glove box. In one overnight, those vile critters will tear up insulation from under the rugs, naw insulation off wires, make a nest, pee & poo in it. I once disturbed a nest of 2 or 3 one cold morning. When I came back, maybe 15 minutes later, one mouse had died walking away in the snow, and another had partly eaten it's body! I don't feel bad about setting traps or poision for them anymore.

Not really. If it gets so bad you see smoke (lots, not wisps) rising from under the hood when you stop, it's probably a good idea to get after the leaks. You don't need a flash fire. Take a close look at the exhaust pipefrom under the engine to just past the transmission. If oil is getting on it, there will be stains / black marks. If there are any, odds are that's where the smell is coming from. The valve cover seals shouldn't be a difficult thing to replace.

+1 to GD from me, too. 1, 10 or even 1000 old subarus w/o cats won't make a measurable difference in global anything. *Maybe* if every car didn't have a cat, smog would be worse. Buying cheap goods from countries that have little to no environmental regulation causes more pollution than a few old Subarus.

Most likely - a drop of engine oil lands on the exhaust manifold & vaporises. Depends on how hot & how much - sometime you won't get smoke. The cabin air vent intake is in the slot where the wipers sit. It doesn't take much leakage to get a little inside. Very common on these old cars.

Keep a close watch on that. I did that once. It failed much sooner than expected. Fuel line doesn't like hot coolant about as much as coolant hoses don't like fuel.

I have used the green stuff almost 30 years. Don't change it much. Usually add in new if I have to open the coolant system as part of a repair. I never have seen any corrosion in any of the cooling system parts - cast iron pump impeller, aluminum block, brass radiator. My 1990 EA82 has been with me 15 years.

The turbo are 2 row, thicker core. Same overall height & width. I put 2 rows in all my EA82s. I think it was the XT that used a wider radiator. The 2 row will make installing the clutch fan a little tighter. I have had to shorten the studs that hold the fan on the water pump on some. Recently got an all metal, 2 row, NOT made in china radiator here: http://www.usaradiator.com/index.php