idosubaru

cam seal leak. pull timing belt, cam sprocket, replace cam seals. it maybe, could be the valve cover. the rear timing cover and front lower valve cover corner are so close to each other and both wet and i don't how that oil got spread around particularly if you sprayed degreaser on it. so it could be valve covers depending how the degrease went down - but otherwise that looks far more like a cam seal than valve cover. clean that front area of the valve cover and timing cover and see where the oil comes from.

nah nah, joking with carfreak (who i had quoted) about the author of that article...jokingly, eye roll, like we're having a coke and wings at a table in town together. Explore away! There's a ton of great information on EJ25D's on this thread to explore, packed full of excellent data and experience. Did you know that EJ18's and EJ22's use the exact same (same part number) cooling system components as EJ25D's - water pump, cooling hoses, thermostat, etc - and no overheating or headgasket issues?

are you listening? you're ignoring that one guy on a website who races, with zero credentials, no EJ25D experience, but has solved it's headgasket issues! man some people..... LOL

the cars aren't OEM dependent - the aftermarket parts are just low quality. The average consumer also keeps quality down. If companies offered better parts for more money - very few people would buy them and it would be a capital loss. look no further than aftermarket axles - people keep buying trash axles, it's amazing. if a company started making high quality axles they'd cost a lot of money and no one would buy them. those of us that care already have long term solutions to this issue and the rest would buy whatever is cheap. there might be a few sales - but they'd have a very low volume of sales not worth the tooling, manufacturing, listing, accounting, stocking of a new tier part. shops wouldn't want to quote high prices to customers who don't know the difference and woudl call them "thieves" for quoting more than the shop down the road using cheap axles, so they'd have no incentive to use them. then stores wouldn't carry them due to low volume, people would want whatever is in stock instead of waiting and thereby drive sales even lower. I don't own a global enterprise producing parts but even with small time business experience it's obvious this is a loose-loose endeavor.

Inferior gaskets, surface prep, bolt torque - happens all the time. Who installed the headgaskets? Cheap gaskets typically fail by one year. The heads always have high and low spots and issues around the fire ring mating area and aren't at an ideal finish for MLS gaskets. Were the heads resurfaced properly (a wire wheels or disc doesn't count)? Was the block face cleaned and prepped? Bolt torque - was it done right? The days of easily graphite gasket slapping a head are gone, modern MLS gaskets need precise prep and install. Trapped air did not cause the headgaskets to fail unless they were driven for extended periods of time with additional cooling system issues (leaks, cap, burp, etc) which then caused the HG failures...but that's operator error, not air.

theoretically yes, in practice not really. that aftermarket axle is trash anyway, it will have the FAR higher failure rate than the axle seal. report back in 100,000 miles. i've seen new aftermarket axles blow to pieces, click, vibrate, you name it. i don't even know how many bad aftermarket axles i've seen and i genearlly avoid them. google it - there is unending issues with subaru aftermarket axles, you could read all day long. huge liability when they blow apart at 70 mph on the interestate. OEM axles never do that. how many catastrophic axle seal failures have i seen? Zero. it doesn't happen. no more need to worry about the dust shields i can tell you that.

placement is an interesting thought exercise but ultimately it's a system wide design, not a single choice. while I can poke holes in this comment and I don't subscribe to it precisely, one could also say the tstat at the water pump guarantees every engine "sees" the same incoming coolant temps. one could view that as a plus...and so it is with stuff like this - you could pick apart hoses, temp senders, fans, tstat, diameters, pressure, flow volume....etc in the same way.

if cavitation was an issue wouldn't we see 250k and 300k water pumps, housings, and blocks, or something with damaged vanes? i would guess this topic would be well known in the forced induction world if it were common.

The key thing you said is "you have current overheating issues" - that's a problem. Fix that and then start looking at additional options. I guess you're asking if this coolant mod can prevent headgasket issues - is that your question? i gave it a 20 second cursory glance - Racing is not daily driving. If racing/high performance is an end goal - the first question is even more importantly proper diagnosis and repair before deciding which upgrades are best. It's not worth reading because it's not addressing any pragmatic/practical issues for EJ25D daily drivers. Facts: EJ25D's have been perfectly maintainable and repairable with high success rates for 20 years - billions of miles, hundreds of thousands of vehicles, tens of thousands of headgasket jobs. EG33 engines are highly touted as reliable as well. I guess your question is whether some coolant modification would prevent headgasket issues? I highly doubt it and that would be hard to prove. GD might have the best data driven experience on that, he could talk circles around that guy. I'm pretty sure he'd say that oil supply issues will be the death of a race engine before any tstat issue. He says high performane subaru engines pushed hard only have a 40k lifespan and it's not due to cooling. A significant issue with EJ25D's is that they're let go and allowed to have multiple overheating events. diagnose and repair properly and they're good to go. The issue is that they are highly prone to multiple overheats and do not respond at all to the typical methods of "turn the heat on high to dump more heat" or "let it cool down, top off, drive again, wash-rinse-repeat" that you can do with most cars overheating/blown headgaskets. those don't work at all with factory installed initital headgasket leaks. People try to use them, think it'll help, then run them hotter on average than other vehicles that do respond to that. 1. They're hard to diagnose. They can overheat randomly and have weeks and months between overheating episodes, so people tend to limp them along longer than normal. They were confusing shops frequently in the 90's and early 2000's who couldn't get them to overheat or would see them not mixing/oil coolant, not blowing coolant out the exhaust and passing compression tests and passing the cheap liquid "block tester" kits. I'm not even a trained professional and shops and mechanics would ask me to come look at a EJ25D overheating . They would replace radiators, hoses and scratch their heads, then the car is let go to the customer - where it will overheat again and comes back to them with coolant blown everywhere and theyr'e confused. 2. Turning the heat on high or letting it cool/topping off/driving - are common methods to drive a car with overheating issues. This doesnt' work on EJ25D's - further promoting additional miles and excessive overheating. Extrapolated out to thousands of samples - this means EJ25D's are frequently overheated more often and more severely than other Subaru engines. The main issue then is oil/bearing compromising. Anyone around a lot of subaru's for a long time is not surprised to hear this story "i replaced the headgaskets on my EJ25D and then the rod went through the block" - yep seen that plenty of times. They have new radiators, hoses, headgaskets - and a neat Exxon Valdez replication on top the block.

Absolutely not - properly burp, diagnose, and repair the overheating before wasting time and money. It's not going to mitigate headgasket issues - you can drill a hole in the t-stat or get a vent release radiator cap if you're trying to limp this thing to a slow death. As hard as burping might be - it's done thousands and thousands and thousands of times without issues, it's not magical or mysterious. If you can't burp it then that probably means you have a blown HG. Once you don't have overheating, then decide if relocating it is helpful for various reasons.

250 pounds is nothing, just put it in there and carry on. 250 pounds is so small, it's like adding up how much dirt is in the bed, how much a TN license plate weighs, how much water is in the exhaust at start up, weighing brake pads, and adding in your empty coke cans in the bed....what exactly are you concerned about? position may be as/more important than amount - getting the weight centered over the rear axles rather than closer to the front. if you ever do a strut swap the baja turbo springs are a bit higher spring rates, we use them in 00-04 Outbacks for a 1/2" lift and keeping the vehicle level with frequent loads/towing/etc. the "people and packages" are referring to tire pressure guidelines and i get that they're related but i don't think you need to try and extrapolate anything about your current question from them.

Yep huge waste of time. Diagnose it right and don’t guess.

Those aftermarket axles are the questionable parts/liability in that photo, not the dust covers. Same as Dave - seen them missing and damaged many times. Non issue. pull a part, junk yard axle with split boots might be cheap, or post in parts wanted forum. I probably have some on the shelf but no time to piddle around. Or try returning them and asking for a set with shields...but it’s pointless in the end.

$150 is a great deal for an unavailable windshield. With two drivable brats - drive them while you fix the other? or sell one to fund some extra/spare windshields.

It can take 100 miles or so before they quiet down after sitting or being apart for extended periods. But it probably is something in the system 1. Reseal the oil pump 2. Every single ticking EA/ER engine I’ve encountered has quit ticking with a new oil pump (not counting the honorable mentions in #3 below). But they all rusted away around here 10+ years ago so Im talking about much younger ones. A Subaru forum owner (not this one obviously) was trying to remedy ticking with multiple pump reseals with no success. I gifted a new oil pump to him and bibidi bobidi boo - no more ticking. Granted they’re not available any more but try a few used ones and see what happens? Even If the noise changes that may suggest the pump is the cause and you can go from there. id like to know what about the pumps causes it and if it can and remedied 3. Replace the HLAs. If it’s HLA specific ive been able to deduce which one or two HLAs it is and swap them out without replacing them all. In my limited experience this has occurred in problematic engines with prior, or existing, overheating issues.