Wayne Boncyk

BTW - What's up with that shovel on your roof rack? Don't you expect your subie to pull you through almost anything??

From personal experience, if there is a scant amount of gas left in the tank, then you can stall the car going uphill on moderate grades. I made the mistake of telling my wife that there was plenty of gas in my Outback for her to run a short errand just a couple of weeks ago. Sure enough, she chose the "steep" route to the store, and stalled it out about 1/2 way there. She called me, I showed up, we pushed the car so it was facing downhill, I promptly started it up and drove home. Boy, was she P.O.'ed! :-\

Almost, but not quite true, porcupine! Actually if you line up everything according to the Subaru alignment marks BEFORE you remove the old belt, the driver's side cams will be under spring tension and will tend to SNAP away from that alignment when the belt is removed, BUT they are both tending to go to a spot where the valves are closed, and so no valve interference will happen. Also, the pistons are all far enough away from the heads in that alignment that there is no danger of piston-valve contact. HOWEVER, if you don't start from the proper alignment position before you pull that old belt, you very well can do some valve damage. In my experience (having done the job twice on my 2.5 now), it is handy to have a tool that keeps those driver's side cams from snapping out of position, but it is not necessary. Proper alignment of things before you take the old belt off is critical, though.

Ahh - He's still "West River." That's far more benign an environment than East River South Dakota (that's east of the Missouri river, which pretty well splits the state in half), where most of the torrential flooding rains, tornadoes, arctic blizzards, etc., happen. If you're heading east, nip, then when you get 2/3 of the way between Mitchell and Sioux Falls (closer to Sioux Falls), look north. You'll see -- farmland, about as far as the eye can see. But if you were to drive about 25 miles north you'd come to a little town called Colman. Population around 493 when we lived there. That's where I was when I got my '96 OBW, and it was in those SD winters when I discovered just how right I was when I made the decision to buy it!

Make sure that every mark on cams, crank, etc. are lined up with their references, and then you can install the belt using only the guide marks. Still better to double check by counting belt teeth. The cams, et al, do NOT line up in exactly the same places with each revolution; the marks will definitley be off after just a single rev of the crank.

Sorry, as the owner of an Outback with a 2.5, (and as the past owner of a Honda CRX that ran for 162K miles before the belt broke -- was my first small import and I was used to Detroit timing chain designs prior to that one -- I had no idea that they used belts, and that the belts could break!!) I don't take any chances. Most I've let mine go has been 92K miles.

Nice summary! You have basically condensed into one post that which most of the rest of us have taken pages of postings to describe!

Exactly. The same IS true of airbags in general.

I'm not an expert in Sube airbags, but I know a little about the theory behind why they work. There are several crash sensors that should be located in different places in the front of the vehicle; it takes a circuit closure from more than one of these in order to fire the airbags, and the airbag diagnostic module determines if the trigger is legitimate enough to fire the bag deployment circuit. The diagnostic module in most vehicles monitors the resistance of the crash sensors; too low or too high a resistance indicates a fault in the cct, and causes the airbag light to come on. So missing sensors SHOULD immediately trigger the airbag light, unless someone was clever enough to substitute a resistor of appropriate value for the crash sensors that had been removed. I suppose its possible that someone did that in this case, and that if there were resistors in place of the crash sensors that they somehow just came loose after some months of driving, but that's a bit of a stretch.

Yeah - but it's gotta be the thrill of a lifetime. I've done some driving both in NYC and out on Long Island. You're lucky if you get a stretch of road empty enough to get 'er up to 60 MPH -- and that's only at 4AM!

Yeah, Nip, I imagine that if you really did have broken belts, you'd have been splattered all over the road if you pushed it up around 100 mph. I have a suggestion -- especially since you're not used to mudding it up a bit in your usual haunts, if you did find yourself in the goo somewhere on your travels you may have picked up some dried mud clods on the inside surface of the wheels. This is known to happen with your vintage OBW (especially mine when I lived in eastern South Dakota and routinely drove thru the muddy clay that was my driveway in Spring), and the result is an out of balance wheel. A simple cleaning and scraping of that crud off of the wheels cures the tire balance problem, and can both eliminate the high-speed shimmy as well as restoring "smooth" braking.

Go Nipper!!!

Wow! I found a website that gives recommended torques for lug nuts based on bolt diameter: http://www.tirerack.com/wheels/tech/techpage.jsp?techid=107 I always thought that there was an issue with torquing alloy wheels too tight and causing local fatigue and/or deformation at the point where the wheel meets the nut, but the more I poke around for info, the less I see anyone care about that any more. Maybe with the nuts properly designed to spread the load over a greater part of the wheel, that's no longer a problem. Anyway, Tire Rack says to follow mfr's torque recommendations, but if you don't have those handy, then these torques should suffice. Interesting -- I always learn something here on this Board, although sometimes I have to go off-Board to learn it!

Hey, nip! Is he kiddin' or are you going cross-country with your Outback? If so and you are heading thru Colorado, stop by when you get to Evergreen!!

My usual ROT (rule of thumb) is 80 ft-lb for alloy wheels, 100 for steel. That is close to mfr recommended torques for many cars, I think.

Yeah - I'd probably have the same approach as you if I had slightly more time or money available. For me, it's always an issue of balancing the need for repairs that are over and above "absolutely necessary" against the time and cash budgets -- which oftentimes can't even support the necessary! :-\ That's one of the biggest reasons that I drive Subarus -- I can trust them to "get me home" most of the time, even after they've been doing so for a couple hundred thousand odd miles, as long as I do the recommended maintenance.

Well, you're really going to want to hear from nipper on this board, since he's much more in tune with the guts of these ATs than I am, but the fact that you said the AT OIL light is flashing pretty much tells you that something in the control circuits for the AT is acting up. 16 flashes of the AT OIL light at startup is a failure indicator that should tell your mechanic to poll the TCU (transmission control unit - one of the computer boxes) so the exact error code can be extracted. There are procedures for doing this pretty well documented on this board already, so I'd suggest that if you want to do it yourself you read this old thread: http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/showthread.php?t=55422&highlight=AT+OIL+light+read+codes You'll want to read about halfway down the thread to OB99W's posting taking you to some sites off the board that detail exactly how to read the codes. Not too difficult if you're handy with tools and a voltmeter!

Now I'm suspecting something in the tranny, rather than linkage related. Does not bode well, my friend....

cookie - I almost sort of agree with you, but only in the context of doing all that other work. If you're gonna do seals & separator, then you're going to yank the engine anyway and you obviously would have easier access to the heads. Then it might make sense to do HGs, if you're paranoid, or if you have any suggestion that there may be an issue in the future. I still would hold off without some sign that they are needed... but that's just me. I tend to do only the work that I KNOW needs to be done.

Can't tell unless I could see it. Can either be minor linkage issue, or major tranny problem. It really can't be narrowed down any further without some inspection.

Personally, I wouldn't replace HGs unless and until I saw evidence of failure. That's a lot of work to do on the chance that they will fail. Remember, although we all talk about the problem incessantly around here, that less than 20% of the 2.5L engines (either Phase) have had to have HGs replaced. Unless you're really into doing the kind of contortions required to do the job with the engine in the car (my way) or you have a lift and the time and sufficient other reasons to pull the engine, I'd leave well enough alone and just watch for the signs of a problem B4 doing any HG work.

Yup - if the solenoid is bad, the FWD fuse will do nothing to relieve torque bind.

I can speculate that they left the switch in the Duty C solenoid OFF position, which ties the rear wheels in with the 50-50 split at all times, which will cause both torque bind and excessive heating of the clutch pack if all you do is drive on dry hard pavement. That would be enough to fry a clutch pack, eventually, maybe.

Mine was a '69, and I wonder if it had been installed backwards!