Fairtax4me

Sounds like an alignment problem. Did they give you a sheet with the before and after specs on it? Not returning to center can indicate a problem with the caster angle, not so much the toe. Could also be the U joints in the steering shaft are binding.

Broken tooth on the ring gear maybe. Every half rotation would make it two teeth though. One on either side of the ring gear. It happens.

My store participated in a huge multi-dealership sale this week. 4 different dealers with just about every manufacturer you could think of. There was the American trio, Honda, Nissan, Subaru, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Kia, Chrysler, Cadillac, Lincoln, Mercury, Mercedes Benz, Lots more but I can't think worth a flock right now. Each dealer only got to bring a limited amount of cars from their inventory because of the size of the lot where the sale was held. Subaru (one of our sister stores) brought their whole inventory, about 35 cars at the beginning of the week. They left with 8. Just completely annihilated every other brand there in sales volume. I got a chance to drive a few of the Soobs that were there. They are: 2010 Outback 2010 Forester 2010 Impreza OBS 2007 (used obviously) Forester XT The 2010 Outback. I liked this one, comfortable ride, a fair amount of room in the front seats as well as the back, plenty of head room, and a ton of cargo space to boot. The CVT is strange, definitely takes some getting used to when driving. You put your foot down and it goes Vroooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmm, and you're going about 45 mph. The "manual" shift option, is just as weird. The split second it takes to change "gears" the car feels like it actually accelerates better/faster than when it's just in "gear". Decent power in the 2.5. I didn't get to drive the 3.6 but I bet that would have been a monster. The CVT makes a funny whistling or whirring noise when you;re driving though kinda like a turbo on a big diesel truck. You hear it wind up and down depending on engine speed. I thought it was kinda cool. But for those who don't care to hear the rumble of the engine or the whine of the "gears" you turn the radio on and it all goes away. 2010 Forester. This one was probably my least favorite of the bunch. It just felt... cheap. The doors are clangy, the seats are hard, the engine is almost obnoxiously loud, and SLOOOOOW!!! Did not care for the acceleration at all in this one, nor the exterior styling for that matter. The interior was kinda plasticky feeling, and the center console was creaking. Might have just been that one I dunno, but I was overall un-impressed with the "Oh 10" Forester. ("Oh 10 is kinda of an inside joke at work) 2010 OBS. This one was expectedly simple. Yet it all fit together pretty well. It felt cheap and plasticky but you know what it's a $19k car. Albeit the price tag is a bit higher than I would want to pay, it does have that Subaru feel to it under all that new jazz. Leather heated seats, nice sound system, 170 horses galloping under the hood, and with the 5 speed manual it was quite a fun drive. Actually felt extremely similar to my 96 Legacy space wise inside. Also has built in roof rails, and the slightly raised stance makes it lean just a hair in the corners. It feels like a good dirt road car, so getting out to the country for a day of biking or hiking is easily done with this car. The 2007 Forester XT. If you can get beyond the fugly headlights, it's a really good looking car. And just an absolute blast to drive. Tuuurrrrbooooooo... :drool: Plenty of power in this one. 5 gears of hard acceleration as long as you're over 2000 rpm. If the turbo ain't spooled you ain't goin NOwhere. :-\ (typical turbo lag) Car drove smooth, the seats were comfortable, nice sound again, and lots of cargo room in the back. Hangs corners like it's on rails, and just enough lean to let you know you're pushing it too far before it slides out from under you. If I were in the market for a new(er) Subaru, this would be the one. If they had had a bit smaller price tag on it, I would have said screw the payment and jumped in. $400 a month for 5 years? WORTH IT! (not really) But honestly I think if I could find one in good shape, maybe a year or two older for the older body style, and about 7 grand cheaper (this one was tagged at $21k) I'd probably go for it.

That really doesn't make any sense. I just don't see any reason it would do that. My best guess would be something with the idle control motor. Maybe it's sticking there's some sensor that is preventing it from responding right away to the change in RPMs when the pedal is depressed.

The 6 bangers have them. And you still have to service them every 100k miles IIRC.

We used to have a tech at work who had the largest assortment of hammers of any tech in the company. His mentality was... It won't come off, get a bigger hammer.

Where are the pics? LoL, just kiddin. That's a heck of a project. I decided when I had my manual apart that if any of the bearings on the pinion shaft ever go bad I would just ditch the trans. One of them cost more than a used trans, the rest were much cheaper but the labor involved to get to them is just simply not worth it. I suppose if a new (used) trans were $1200 it might be a different story.

Oh ok. I must have missed the "minuscule" part in the first post. Been working 12 and 13 hours days this week. Not used to it at ALL. When I get off work I feel like... You should be good to go. But if you feel like it remove the oil pump and make sure there isn't any sealer plugged up in the feed galleries for the cylinder heads.

You need to drive that poor thing more often. I hope you change the oil every three months. You'll have bigger problems than a low battery if you don't let the car stretch it's legs once a week at least.

Then we need to start chasing a no idle problem rather than a no start. The first thing I always tell people, check for vacuum leaks. What maintenance have you done in the last 6 months?

Do a compression check and leak down test.

The brown sludgy stuff is just that. Brown sludgy stuff. It's dropout. There's really no way to prevent it, it just happens with age. It's caused by a reaction with air. Only the coolant in the reservoir is exposed to air. A small amount is purged as the engine warms and gets sucked back into the engine as it cools. So eventually it will build up in the engine and radiator, but it will generally be only a small amount.

What do you mean by "wont start"? Does it crank but not fire? Or does it just click when the key is turned?

It depends on how much. It should be hardly noticeable except in direct bright light or sunlight. If it looks like metallic paint then you got a problem.

Don't flush it with anything. Remove the rod caps and visually check the bearings for damage. If you want to go the extra mile tear down the entire block and check the mains for damage, but if the rods check out OK it's probably not necessary. Silver in the oil is not a good sign, but it may not be indicative of an imminent failure. It's probably from the bearing that was working on grenading itself. Again, DO NOT FLUSH the engine. Thinning out the oil with solvents will do more harm than good. Put fresh oil in it, and a fresh good quality filter. Run the engine for about 15 - 30 minutes at varying RPMs, with no prolonged idling, then change the oil and filter again. The cam may have seized for any number of reasons, but probably oil starvation due to some form of blockage in the oil gallery. There are a lot of threads here on the boards dealing with seized camshafts.

You'll have to cut a hole to get access to the nut. That's about all there is to it. Whether you go in from the side or from the top is up to you, but either way will be fine.

It could be. Could also be a tire balance issue. Can you tell if there is any grease left inside the boot? If there is grease and it doesn't look like it's full of sand then the axle may be fine. A thorough cleaning and a new boot and grease will suffice. If there is no grease, replace the axle. Lots of people have trouble with after market cv axles. There are a few brands though that people have had good luck with. I believe one of them was something like MWE. Do some searching here and you should get some good info on that.

If you can't feel it on the mating surface I wouldn't worry about it. What I mean by "feel" is, slide a straight edge over it, and if it snags then get a file and knock it down. Be sure to carve towards the chamber if it needs smoothing out.

No reason it can't be done but the car will be a complete slug without the turbo. Turbo engines are generally lower compression than their naturally aspirated counter parts. Power would suffer quite a bit compared to an N/A engine, and I suspect fuel economy would as well. The turbo actually increases the efficiency of the engine. When driven correctly turbo engines are entirely capable of higher mpg with slightly more power than a comparably sized non-turbo engine. But that hardly ever happens because its so much more fun to drive it like you stole it.

I did something dumb Friday night. Out at a friends place about 20 minutes out of town, and I'm driving back in around 12:30 am to go home. I get stuck behind this SUV doing like 40, and decided to take a short cut. It's a road that cuts off of the main road we're on, it runs over about 200 yards to another main road which intersects with the first road so it makes a little triangle in the woods there. And people quite often use this little offshoot road to pass slow pokes. So I get to this road, drop into 4th gear and hang hard right to make the turn, except I misjudge where the edge of the road is. See where this is going? Right wheels drop off into the ditch, and I mean literally DROP. It's about a 2 foot straight drop into a drain that runs under the road at this corner. It's only about 45° corner, which is normally easily doable at 40 mph. Unless you miss the road. So anyway, the right side of the car just plain drops. BAM! It hits the road, tire bounces back up out of the ditch (more of a hole), car heads on two wheels for the ditch on the opposite side of the road. Wheels drop back onto the road, pull hard right on the steering wheel to keep out of the other ditch, car straightens out and the excitements over. I coast for about 50 feet and don't feel anything significantly wrong, so I gun it and keep going. So I get past slowpoke at a price. Car feels OK and I don't see any plumes of smoke billowing out behind me from some possible massive oil leaks so I just drive on into town like nothing happened. Put it up on the lift at work the next morning and I find... scrape marks on the tow hook (given, they scrape on everything) Scrapes on the control arm in several places, scrapes on the sway bar, a nice huge flat spot on the passenger side exhaust Y pipe heat shield, and about 2 oz of asphalt jammed into the sway bar end link bracket. The only thing noticeably out of whack is the rear control arm bushing got shoved back about 1/8th inch, apparent from the nice shiny rings around the bolt heads. Loosen the bolts and the bushing pops right back into place all on its own. As far as I can tell it still drives just exactly the same as it did before. So great job to Subaru. For as flimsy as the body of this car feels, they sure built the chassis right. It held up great to a good lick, that for sure would have taken the control arm clean off any other "cheap" car.

For an old car that's kinda to be expected. Maybe it could use a valve job and a re-ring, but honestly it's probably not worth the effort. Is that causing your trouble with the loss of power? Probably not unless the compression is significantly low on all 4.

There are a couple O rings on the older 2.2 heads. The rear of the drivers head has a big rubber plug seal. All can be seen here as numbers 3 and 6 http://opposedforces.com/parts/legacy/us_b11/type_5/engine/camshaft_and_timing_belt/illustration_1/ The 2.5 as far as I understand you just use sealer like Qman said. The gurus here like Anaerobic sealer. Really weird stuff, it won't dry if left to open air. Any that gets squeezed out into the engine won't dry up and become a potential blockage. But what is on the mating surface of the cam plug will dry to bond in about an hour.

Oughtta say on the bulb somewhere. GE has a bulb application guide on their website somewhere you can look the car up and see what it says.

Don't have to drive it anywhere to check codes, its OBD1. Just connect the little plugs and read away. Which also makes sense why there might not be a code yet, OBD1 was so slow you practically had to set it on fire before it would realize something was wrong.

How far have you driven since the fluid was changed?