bicycle_ben

theres your problem! im fairly sure that the arm is straight, it just looks like where the nut is supposed to be on the bottom is a little chewed up mmm grease ill have it going again in a few days

operation cannot possibly fail i took the lugs off so the tire wouldnt rip all the running gear out i looked in the frozen mud/slush for the bolt that i think belongs there but didnt find it doesnt look so bad! aww sad little car operation cannot possibly fail a second time ok so one truck came, took one look and drove away. then AAA came and they brought out a flat bed. they used a second truck to pull the sube down to the flat and then loaded it onto the flat bed. we went up the hill to turn around and on our way down slid into the ditch. that took 2 hours and then once we offloaded the sube into the garage the two tow trucks got stuck again leaving my house!!! ahhh good times. i was with those two drivers for 5 hours! anyway long story short the car is in the garage and it didnt cost me a dime, now i can start work on it. im going to jack it up so i can figure out what exactly broke first and what was consequently damaged. then i set to work buying new and used parts to get it out on the road again!

the problem is that the nearest parts store is a two and a half hour round trip walk and then its another half hour walk back out to the car where i get to use only the tools i carry on my back. having never done this before i think i had better do it in the comfort of my own garage where i have access to tools, the internet and beer

haha oh im going to keep this beast, i just need to get parts off other less fortunate subarus and yeah working on a car in the snow is kinda rough never mind that i dont have parts. id be working on it right now except that because of the snow no companies around here are towing. ive called 6 so far...

boy is it good to have guys like you around! well with the snow and everything i cant really see what all is broken. i dont have easy access to parts so im going to have it towed to my house and pushed into the garage till i can deal with it. the sucky part is that all the tow companies in the area are swamped because of tards who ran off the road in the snow. ive called 6 companies so far.... ill need a flat bed because i cant get parts today and i dont know how you would tow a 3 wheeled car otherwise its too bad i cant just leave it there till i get parts to roll it out on its own power. its blocking one side of some rich peoples road .... nothing liked inconvenienced rich people to get my car impounded - the fee would be more than the car is worth ! ok so its an 81 wagon, what years and models will have running gear i can salvage ?

its going to be a lot of work to fix. once i find a tow truck to come get it in the snow, i have to figure out how to get it off the truck and into my garage to work on it. then i have to find junk yards with parts ... wouldnt be a big deal except that its snowy and i cant really ride my 160mph street bike in the snow ...

yeah the old school 3 light ones rock - the grill was mashed up a bit and the motor that is supposed to lift the light cover didnt work so i took that off... looks like i got me a new project now

PICTURES!!!

pictures are coming as soon as i can walk back to the car with a camera. long story short there was this steep rutted pothole filled, snow covered gravel road that i tried to drive up. i went up, got stuck. then rocked it and did a little digging till i got it out on my own. being me i thought ill have one more go at this and i went up and avoided where i got stuck the first time only to get stuck somewhere else. i rocked it and i was almost out and then kinda felt the car catch on something. i got out to see what i was stuck on only to find that my front right wheel isnt attached to the suspension!!! thats right, the wheel is not attached to the car! - not just a broken tie rod or anything, actually ripped right off the car. not having owned this sube more than 2 weeks i really have no idea exactly what i broke but ill call a tow truck and then start calling junk yards for parts... its an 81 wagon just in case anyone was wondering

mechanically everything seemed to be in order so i just ran my own wires too and from the battery with an inline 15A fuse. i have OFF LOW and HIGH but dont quite understand exactly how the HOME and INT positions are to be wired. i assume that when you set it to OFF its supposed to run juce to one of the contacts on the gear inside the motor so that it spins till it gets to the HOME position and then shuts off. what i dont know is exactly how to wire that up because i wasnt able to get it to go HOME while playing with it out of the car. since i cant get HOME to work i cant really make INT work because im fairly sure that INT uses HOME and some little timer thing burred under my dash in a rats nest of wires.... oh well ive gotten good at just turning them off at the right time

so i took the wiper motor off to play with it. i ran 12v to the fast and slow speed connections from the battery and grounded the motor case. i was able to get the motor to spin at both speeds. when i plugged the motor back into the wiring harness it didnt spin and still killed the heater fan then i thought hey maybe i can go from the fuse box to the motor with my own wires! ... motor didnt spin still killed the heater ... this to me means that something in the motor is bad even though it can still spin i could run my own wiring through a switch to the battery but the fact that its not making the factory wiring happy means to me that this could be a bad idea ... you know, setting my car on fire and what not

i tested the juice at the connection from the wiring harness to the wiper motor so i guess it really should be 12V. i un plugged the wiper motor and poked my multi meter into the plug. i guess i get to go hunting for shorted out wires today ...

i peeked through the "manual" and didnt find anything that seemed to fit my problem. i am hoping someone here can help or point me in the right direction ive got an 81 gl wagon where a prior owner did some hack wiring in the poor thing. none of my fuses match what they were supposed to operate ... the starter motor was wired into the stereo ... i dont think the wiring to the back hatch is hot ... more importantly the windshild wipers dont work! when i picked the car up a week or so ago i checked to see that they worked and i didnt use them again till a day ago. when i turned them on they didnt move at all and a breaker or something tripped in the accessories wiring causing the heater blower to stop. when i turn the key off and then back on something re sets and the blower works again. i disconnected the wiper motor and then turned the wiper switches on and off to see if it would still kill the power to the blower. with the wiper motor un plugged the blower didnt get killed so i blamed the wiper motor. just for fun i used my multi meter to see how much juice the wiper motor was beeing supplyed. i got 3.6 something volts to one wire with the wipers on LOW and 3.6 to a different wire with the wipers on HIGH. i tried all sorts of wire/wiper settings/ground combinations to see if i would get more juice but i didnt. is my wiper motor supposed to run off of 3.6 volts or do i need to go looking for something gone wrong in my rats nest of wires? also i took the wiper motor apart and it looked good inside. it wasnt frozen up or anything but i dont know if its blown something i cant see so who knows... anyway , all the help i can get would be awesome!

we got enough snow at my place i was able to go out to a parking lot and mess around with it a bit! it still has enough under steer in 4WD that i had trouble getting it to turn sharp in a slide. i could get it to "drift" well till i picked up speed and it would just straighten out. in fact i didnt loop the car once because it does so well at going straight. ill need a little more work till i get the hang of it with the subaru - i learned how to do it in a 4WD toyota where you could kick the rear end out in 2WD then shift into 4 to pull your self around nicely

thanks! its going to be a bit more work than i had hoped but it just might be worth it.

i have an 81 wagon and i got a key stuck in the ignition so i just pulled it all out and poped in a home cooked toggle switch ignition

so i have an 81 GL wagon and i want to change the E brake so it pulls the rear brakes instead of the front brakes. i mean really how are you supposed to slide around in the snow or on gravel roads if the front tires lock?! i havnt looked at it just yet so i dont even know if it can or cant be done. anyone know if it can be done and or have a thread/tut for it ?

mmmm welded rear dif - thats going to happen right after i weld my self up a set of bumpers and a roof rack - yeah im trying to get away from the little stock looking tires if i can

so im brand new to this whole owning a car thing! i just bought my dream car, an 81 GL wagon but up till a week ago ive only owned a motorcycle and the choice for tires was easy. now that i have 4 awsome little 13" wheels with 4 different little mis matched tires i want to find something as off roadie as possible to put on them. right now im looking at a set of these guys: 175/70R13 Firestone Winterforce if anyone has suggestions for tires id be happy to listen!