fishy

You offroading guys have inspired me to put Forester struts and springs under my Impreza. I hope to be doing that in the next couple of weeks. I also hope I can fit the 215/70/15 tires under there that I already bought. #hammertime?

I was going to chime in and ask about road crown too... I've owned 5 Subarus and driven many more from an early Impreza to a new STi and I've owned and driven other brands and type of car as well. I have never seen a 'family' of cars follow the crown of a road like Subarus seem to want to do. They don't always do it an alarming amount but Something about their suspension geometry or factory alignment spec seems to make them love drifting with the crown a bit more than other cars. My current car (05 outback) had worn out tires and slightly off alignment and it wanted to follow the road crown straight into the ditch until I put another set of tires and an alignment on it. It is now very well behaved. I wonder if maybe you've got a 'bad batch' of factory tires that just aren't true enough to drive straight or something.

^THIS I've driven a 2003 base impreza wagon with over 200,000kms on it that the owner put a wrx rear sway bar into. Total night and day difference in cornering attitude. The exact same car with all the same worn out everything now feels eager to turn-in and stays much flatter in the corners. It's a real sweetheart now. Make sure you take care of completely worn out struts and bushings too though. Also I've heard good things about doing the steering rack bushings on these cars with harder poly ones but haven't tried it myself yet.

I just wanted to add this: I've driven an 06 STi a few times and it's at LEAST as fun as you think it is. Probably even moreso.

+1

Leaving the AC off in genuinely hot weather is something I'd consider if I were hypermiling or started hearing awful noises from the AC compressor... those are about the only reasons I can think of. That said... I _do_ occasionally turn it off for a minute when I'm booting the car up to highway speed to merge in. I want that extra 2hp

Definitely check out Faritax4me's knock sensor education thread... and/or my knock sensor changing video for some enlightenment on the act of replacing the little devil:

Is the engine cutting out entirely for a second or is it just the power delivery dropping way off and on quickly? If the latter: When was the last time your knock sensor was changed? Mine flaked out on me without setting a check engine light and was causing all kinds of bucking and hesitation under load.

I actually made a video when I did the plugs on my 05 outback recently. Have a look and see if you want to dive into the job or not. It's not really a nasty job, just a bit silly. Don't be in a hurry.

There's a quick clip of this car leaving the starting line here:

It's pretty important for those to move freely. They are what allow the caliper to push from one side and make even braking force on both sides of the rotor. Without even braking force you're giving up some of your braking performance as well as unevenly wearing components. This is something that definitely needs to get sorted out.

I see that you're in New England somewhere and that means you're in the Rust Belt. Did you check and relube the caliper slide pins when you were doing brakework? Often in older cars and/or salted-road cars these sliders will stick and not allow the caliper to properly centre itself over the rotor where it should be. Were the old pads evenly worn when you took them out or was one much thicker than the other? This often indicates some stuck sliders. Sometimes these things take a fair bit of working to get them freed up... Good luck whatever it turns out to be.

That's what I recognized from the pictures too. In my 99 Lego the headlight sockets were doing this but it was exactly the same looking result.​

As far as I understand the rear wipers quit on so many of the old subarus because they operate on with a metal-on-metal bushing which oxidizes and seizes up when they don't get used for a while. According to safety inspection around here anyway if the wiper is there it has to work... so that's why so many of them are missing in my area anyway.

I don't know which seats are available in your market or anything but I recently retired a 99 legacy wagon from daily driving and had my son's carseat in that for a while. Initially in the 'bucket' seat he had as an infant we had it in the centre position but when we changed seats to the next size up I found that the plastic seatbelt pocket things at the base of the seatback interfered with the base of the carseat and made it hard to get the seat installed correctly. I moved his seat to the passenger's side and had much better luck with installations*. The other carseat thought I wanted to add was: if you haven't already turned him around to front-facing please consider extended rear facing. Here in my part of Canadistan the law says I could have turned my little guy around at 1 year but the longer they rear-face the better basically. He outgrew rear-facing in the seat I have in my 05 Outback (the Latch system for car seats was almost worth buying the car for alone!) so he is forward facing in my car now but the seat we have in the Wifemobile is rated differently and he is still rear-facing in that car. He's over 3 years old now. * I don't think you can correctly install a child seat in a smallish car unless you get at least one pulled muscle during the process. A hernia means you've done a really good job! (sorry for being long winded and not particularly helpful)

I've recently just gotten a 2005 Outback and have been doing some reading about the suspension on that generation. The 05 seems to be notorious for having rear suspension made out of marshmallows. This leads to plenty of rear end bounce and shimmy. Perhaps your 06 is tuned the same way from the factory so that once the struts get some good wear or them they don't really dampen anymore. In the same research I've read that rear struts for an 04 outback wagon will bolt directly in and they're valve more stiffly because the previous generation Outback was heavier than ours. Also the alignment was out of whack when I got the car so it acted really wandery on the road. And pretty worn tires too. Combined with the sloppy rear end(nobody wants a sloppy rear end) it wasn't much fun to drive. I've got some newer tires on it and had a 4-wheel alignment. Still haven't tackled the rear struts yet but the car is 70% better to drive already.

My friend has a 2012 Sti sedan and it's not as low to the ground as you might think. It's certainly lower than a Outback or Forester but it's not as low as other small sedans are and the limited slip diffs and snow tires make it basically unstoppable in any reasonable amounts of snow. While the Sti and WRX are small cars with super-powers they ARE still smaller cars and if you're dealing with a foot or more of snow on a regular basis you're probably wise to stick with an Outback or Forester for the extra height. The Forester has better approach, departure, and breakover angles if you get ambitious off road sometimes.

I gotta try to get my 05 Outback in for this one I guess... In the last three years I've blown out the rear brakeline on two different (and perfectly legally safety inspected) cars due to rust. Talk about good pucker moments!

You might get away with the front seats. The rears, I believe, will NOT fit. I swapped some front buckets from a Forester into my Impreza last year and all I had to do was swap the mounting rails from my old Impreza seats onto the bottom of the Forester seats. The mounting rails from the Foz were much higher than the Pretzel units. Just like everything else I do... I discussed this swap in a youtube video:

Now that I think about it that motor had the oil pan and some oil too...

Would it be about the same as a 25? I weighed an ej25 longblock with nothing bolted on but the flywheel and it was about 140lbs. The heads (not on for the longblock weight) were about 25lbs each.

Good point. I should remind my friend to pull the carpet up on that side and do some more drying out.

I'm pretty sure I heard the fan slapping water around in there for a minute afterwards... As for longevity, you're probably right. Thankfully it wasn't my car

There's really not much point to this post but I wanted to share the fun with some like-minded folk. My buddy and I were breaking in his new-to-him 03 Impreza TS wagon today. We were doing some soft-roading with it and wandered into a water hole that was a wee bit deeper than we thought and the bow wave came back up over the hood and several inches up the windshield... In fact as proof that water got that high some of it actually trickled down through the HVAC system onto my feet in the passenger footwell. The car appeared to suffer no ill effects and did a couple hours of highway duty right after we wet/dry vacuumed the footwell out. . That's just one of those things that makes a Subaru a Subaru I guess