WoodsWagon

I broke or bent a lot of parts offroading my Loyale, but never had any trouble with the power steering rack. That was with 29" tires on it too.

Make the auto fun. Watch the opposite light at an intersection, when it goes yellow stand on your brakes with your left foot and floor the gas with your right with the trans in D. The engine will hit stall speed on the torque converter and when your light goes green you sidestep off the brake pedal. There weren't many commuter cars that could holeshot as quick as an old outback 2.5 with 4.44 gears when launched like that. Of course after it shifts to 2nd the acceleration's over, but hey being snappy of the line catches people by surprise. Wire in a 4x4 lock switch and it will handle much better when sliding around in dirt or snow. Also makes it easier to hang out sideways. FWD mode is fun too if you want to waste some tires. I've swapped a car to 5spd, but that was only after reverse failed in the auto. It's pretty straight forward. But I don't see much advantage to it.

The reason it stalls is because it's in deceleration fuel cut mode. When you are coasting to a stop under engine braking, it shuts off all fuel. When you push the clutch in, the ECU doesn't have warning to switch back to idle fueling and the engine stalls before it can catch it. On the 90-94 cars there's a clutch switch that tells the ECU the engines getting disengaged from the drivetrain. On the 95+ cars it uses the VSS signal to know it's coming to a stop.

The pic that numchux has of the flare unions is inside the interior of the car under the back seat, that's why there's no rust. So that's the best spot to join your new lines back into the system.

NZ is relatively next door to you and they got carbed EJ16's in the early 90's which came stock with a distributor.

buy bill's adapter bellhousing and run the toyota 5spd/transfer combo. Lots stronger and more compact without the un-used front and center diffs taking up space.

If your car isn't rusty, might as well throw another used engine in it. Miles on the body don't really mean much.

Splice to the lines inside the body under the back seat with flare unions. That way you have clean unrusted brake line to attach too. Cut the old line off just before the nut at the brake hose and use a 6 point socket on the nut, don't even bother with a line wrench it will just round it off. Hold where it threads into with vice grips so you don't tear the bracket off the car trying to loosen it.

A few listed from $150-350 scattered around the country on car-part.com junkyard database. Looked up 05 baja, selected Hood, picked Turbo model, there you go.

95 legacy is OBD2, 100%. Any of the generic scan tools will talk to it, and an Ultragauge works too. Fuel economy goes down in winter, that's normal and to be expected. All the gear oils and greases are thick in the cold, so it takes more power to move the car, and that uses fuel. Add in the longer warm up time of the engine and the change in winter gas formulation to a more volitle but less energy dense mix and loosing 3+ mpg is normal. If you idle the car in the morning to warm it up, that's more fuel wasted. Second thing is the low fuel light. If you're using that as your indicator that it's time to refill, it's hard on the fuel pump. That light really should never come on, you should be refilling when it gets down to an 1/8 of a tank. Going lower serves no purpose, and it greatly increases the chances of overheating the pump or it sucking air. The light is an idiot light, as in "hey dummy, go get gas NOW", not a friendly reminder. That's what the gauge is there for. If you are calculating the mpg based on a fixed amount of gallons in a "tank full" when the empty light comes on, that's innacurate. The better way is to record the gallons it takes to fill the tank from whatever level it was at and divide the miles since the last time it was filled to the top.

The gear reduction in a dual range transmission happens in the input shaft between the clutch and the 5spd gears. It's in the front of the case right above the front differential. The single range trans just has a solid input shaft all the way through, and the case is not machined for the dual range reduction gears. The rear transfer case section is the same between the two of them. So you have to put the ring and pinion from the single range into the dual range case to be able to keep the low gears.

You can download factory service manuals from subaru if you buy a 24 hour membership.

Auto/manual ECU's are usually interchangable, you need to add a ground pin to one of the ECU connectors to tell it that its now running a manual trans setup. The change is made in the wiring and the ECU runs the program to match.

Buy all 4 struts for a 1998 Legacy Outback, re-use your springs and top hats. In the rear you will probably need to put a couple lockwashers under the nut that holds the top hat onto the strut because the threaded portion of the Outback strut rod doesn't go far enough down so the nut jams before it actually clamps the top hat. Other than that it's pretty easy. Instead of un-doing the brake lines and bleeding them after, just cut into the bracket and bend it back so you can slip the hose out. do the same to the new strut, slide the hose in, bend it back flat and put the spring clip back on.

Towed home a 99 forester which still ran but had jumped two teeth on the drivers side cam. The toothed idler pulley had blown out its bearing and was riding on the races. That was more slack than the tensioner could compensate for. Put a new idler on it, set the cam back in time, and it ran great for another couple years before the driveshaft blew a U joint and punched the auto trans shifter through the center console and the owner junked it for heroin money instead of fixing it. Jumped time on a non-interference EJ22 when plowing through a snow plow bank trying to get on to a trail. I was running without T-belt covers and packed enough snow in to slip the belt. I've got an 01 forester ej25 with bent valves on the passenger side. It hit a tree in the drivers side, the fan motor broke the timing belt cover right under the A/C compressor and a broken piece of plastic rode the timing belt over to the pass side and skipped it over that cam pulley.