Schmoo

I've run the VIN and it comes up all green, except for this: 08/22/2001Florida Police Report Accident Reported Involving a front impact with another motor vehicle I'm not quite sure how to forward the report to you, though.

He said it needed a new exhaust from the cat back, new rear struts, valve gasket covers and 4 new tires. I also think it has some AC issues. There are some threads to read in this forum about tires. If the tires have good tread, then you should measure them (search for threads about this) and see how much of a problem you have. All the other problems are things you can probably put off, in my opinion. You may wish to deal with the exhaust first. A bad exhaust system can potentially confuse the engine computer, though I don't really have any experience with this. Might also affect emissions testing, if you have that. Otherwise, it's just an issue of noise (assuming that no gasses can leak into the car). You should also probably take car of the cover gaskets. Shouldn't cost too much, and the important thing is that you'll be able to check for other oil leaks once this one is fixed. You can run a long time on leaky struts. You can put these off while you save up some more.

Well, I think I found the answers. I tried to start the car again today. First time, same as before. Then I started trying to shove my multimeter probes into the battery terminals in order to watch the voltage while I tried to start the car again. This time, the car started up okay. My conclusion is that the terminals weren't making good contact. My "cleaning" didn't include a good scraping or wire-brushing, and I didn't have any appropriate battery terminal goo handy. These will be addressed soon. Also, the issue about the extra fuse holder was solved by me happening to look under the passenger seat. I found a couple of extra-heavy-gauge power wires and a couple of RCA stereo pairs. I then looked again at the battery side and found that the wire matched. It was really nicely done, with wire loom that matches the factory style, and it went through a grommet in the firewill (near the brake booster) to look completely stock. The radio is just stock, but now this is giving me ideas. In any case, the good thing about the problems I have having is that I've found this forum. On the flip side, I'm now paranoid about my head gaskets (after reading a number of threads here). Hope mine hold out for a while.

Okay, so I've spent a lot of time searching here, but haven't spotted anything similar so far. Here's what's going on: I just got a '97 Subaru Legacy Outback. It behaved fine yesterday. Today it's more humid, and when I turned the key to 'on', I hear a bunch of relay clicking from under the dash, and the Check Engine Light is flashing in time with the clicking. In a few seconds it stops and things look normal, so I turn the key over to start. The car goes completely dead. All lights go out on the dash. When I release the key, the warning lights come back on again. So the first thing I check is the battery. The positive post had a lot of corrosion (powder) on the terminal, so I take that off and clean it up. I put it back on (and I figured out the flashing parking light deal - push 'unlock' on the key fob). But the problem remains. I check the battery charge, but it's fine. The battery looks fairly new. The negative post looks fine. Something odd I noticed: there's a fuse holder on one of the battery cables near the positive post. But there's no fuse in it. Should there be one? What value? What else should I look at?