GeneralDisorder

I'm not so sure about the really old one's that required the air injection system - I don't think they are worth much. Also - many of the one's I've opened up had nothing left in them - just the chain-mail mesh and the metal brackets that used to hold the honeycomb in place. No actual cat material - it get's broken up and then the lack of flow from it breaking cause it to overheat and actually burn away to dust. GD

It's deceptive sometimes though - you can get into a hole that you can't get out of..... but it will feel like maybe you can because you can still move 5 feet in either direction - just not all the way out. But the more you rock back and forth - the deeper you get...... like a fly stuck in the cake batter...... And sometimes - occasionally - you will climb out of one after 10 minutes of working on it. But it's not typical. GD

Safety glasses are a requirement in my shop - ask anyone that's been here. I hand them out to everyone and it's expected that you will wear them anytime an air/power tool is running. Under a car is also a good idea but crap falling off your own car into your eye is not my responsibility . I don't want to see someone lose an eye over a shattered socket or die grinder wheel though. Not on my watch! GD

Getting stuck is fine - you have to in order to find the limits of your machine. Just be sure you have a shovel, come-along, and some straps. Someone may pull you out, but you had better be prepared to climb out the window and hook up your own strap! Once you sink in and you are at a dead stop - you probably won't get going again if it's any kind of decent hole. Knowing when to give in and stop trying to power out is important as well. GD

I'm a bit far away but if you want to take a run to Portland I could easily punch out the cat and weld it up for you. GD

I've done all of mine. The older cat's weld real pretty too - stainless steel . With the dust cover in place you can't tell it was even done. Of course - you probably won't pass a sniffer but one option for a bad/gutted header section cat is to add an inexpensive aftermarket cat to the mid-pipe. This is MUCH cheaper than a new header and has the added benefits that it doesn't require the air injection system to work properly, and it also isn't near the passenger side inner axle boot anymore . Come on down, pull your header and cut it open - I'll weld it back up for free if you do the pulling/cutting/installing bit. Or I can do the whole job for a small fee to cover my time if you don't want to get dirty. I have air tools so the whole job can be done in an hour or maybe a bit more. I have tons of EA81 parts too so you might end up going home with freebies - beware of my shed - it will suck you in . This was the last cat I did on my '83 hatch - I gained about 2 to 3 MPG from clearing this mess: (note that there's nothing left of the actual "cat" - only the remnants of what used to hold it in place. It's all burned away.) GD

Might be wireing. The sender's do go out as well. Check the resistance of the sender - if it's infinity then you have a bad sender. If you get a reading while it's not running and a different reading when it is running then you have wireing issues. GD

The thermostat housing cover's will not accept the spring side of the thermostat - this is to insure that you don't install them upside down - it also makes it impossible to bolt two of them together with a thermostat in-between. You might find an aftermarket stat that would allow it with minor grinding of the cover on one side. You still have to plumb the radiator hose to the coolant cross-over. The coolant cross-over shouldn't be any smaller than probably 3/4" ID and the radiator hose is 1-1/4" ID. With enough fittings you could do it but it won't look pretty. There will be issues with flow volume unless you first go to 1-1/4" from the 3/4" outlet's of the heads and *then* to the radiator hose. You can't bottle-neck them anywhere - they must flow freely to the 1-1/4" thermostat housing or you'll overheat for sure. GD

Your best bet is to only have the mid-pipe and muffler done up. No shop is going to remove the cat (BIG fine), and in any case there is not much to be gained by replacing the stock header - if you increase the size you will lose the scavenging benefits of the stock header and you'll actually lose low-end torque. Better to just have the mid-pipe and muffler replaced and leave the header as it is. Then after it's done you can drop by someone's place who has a welder - pop the dust sheild off the cat, cut a flap in it, punch out the contents, and weld it back up. That way it still looks like it has a cat..... GD

What about the upper radiator hose and the thermostat housing? If it were me, I would beg/borrow/steal a TIG welder and get busy with an EJ coolant cross-over...... GD

Sure - I actually have both styles of the Maxima alt already setup. I have one of each of the two possibly pulley configurations already built. Yeah - I can pickup the bearings. It's not all that far from me. Just send me a PM when you have an idea of when you want to get started so I can have a few days to clear a bay in my garage. There's a transmission swap that's going to happen shortly and there is always several vehicles waiting to have something done to them (not always Subaru's )..... GD

Oh - and of the two, front wheel bearings fail MUCH more often than rear's. I've seen plenty of EA series rear wheel bearings last the life of the car. Fronts are exposed to more severe axial loads from cornering and the bearings up in the front are not axial thrust bearings - they tend to fail about once or maybe twice in the life of the car (if they are installed properly). That's probably why the tech said it's lilkely the front's. I've done 20x as many front's as rears. Takes me about an hour to an hour and a half per side if everything goes according to plan. GD

Front wheel bearings are cheap - I'll do both sides for $100 + parts. The bearings themselves are $12 each from Meguire bearing downtown (there are 4 in the front - two on each side) so about $48 for the bearings and about $24 for the inner and outer seals on both sides. So probably about $175 for everything on the front. The dealer will not be cheaper than Meguire bearing even with your friends discount. Old Les absolutely is Hwy Robbery! They always are. Rear's are more expensive if you end up doing those - the bearings are $40 to $50 per side plus the seals and the labor is a bit more. I'm right on the freeway so I'm easy to find. So is Mequire bearing - east side of the river on 10th & Market. GD

E-Brake is on the front wheels so it's not that. Could be the rear brakes - it's possible. My experience is that the rear's usually just get out of adjustment and don't do anything anymore. No noises, but not much braking either. You would have to open them up and look - even then it might not be obvious and you would have to just overhaul the brakes and see if anything changes. GD

They are used extensively in electric motors as well. A very common size. Even the smallest bearing house will usually stock 2 to 4 of them at all times. GD

You will have to deal with the coolant cross-over, upper radiator hose, thermostat housing, and guage sending unit somehow - that's a lot of work for a Weber when the stock manifold is more than sufficient...... GD

A nice upgrade on the rear brakes is to convert to disc brakes. All the parts to do it run about $75 to $100 from the junk yards around here. You just need to find a 4WD turbo EA82. They are fairly common - I just got a set a few days ago at the u-pull-it in Sherwood for $74 after the 20% discount they are doing right now on $80+ purchases. It takes about 20 minutes per side to swap them over. GD

That's great - sure is nice you have a shop that stands behind it's work. GD

I have never taken the time to nail down when they switched from manual to auto-adjusting rear shoes, but I know I had an 86 or 87 wagon with auto-adjusters - one of them blew up and locked up the wheel on the freeway...... Maybe they went back to manual because of problems with the adjusters? It would be nice to know the story with that because frankly I've been confused about it for years now. Look on the back of the drums - there should be a sqaure drive adjuster bolt if they are manual - near the bottom center of the dust sheild. GD

Wheel bearings (bearings in general) are best left to people that know how to use a press. While they can and have been done without it, the risk of damage to the bearings is high if you haven't worked with bearings a lot. $250 sounds very cheap for a 4 wheel bearing job..... you sure about that? Subaru's have a very odd wheel bearing arrangment and I would be surprised if Les was even capable of doing them without sending the knuckles to a machine shop to be pressed out/in...... you should double check that price. Just the parts alone will run about $125. That doesn't leave much for labor - and I'm sure they would quote an alignment after removing everything to press the bearings...... You live in Sandy, OR? I'm in West Linn. I can do your wheel bearings if you like. I have both the socket for the rear bearing ring nut and the experience to do them properly. If it needs front axles I'll do those for free at the same time since they have to come off anyway. You buy the parts and bring the car here. GD

Cool. If the price is decent I'm not at all against the idea. I mean - gear's for the Toy's are probably cheaper than for the Nissan or Samuria t-case's anyway since they are so commonly lifted and regeared. If it's around the prices of his other stuff I'll definitely take one. I have no idea what size/shape the yota tranny's are - will they fit up in the tunnel of an EA81 without dropping the drivetrain much? I imagine being a RWD tranny they are probably smaller than the Subaru transaxles eh? GD

Dexron III is fully backward compatible with the Dexron II spec. It just has some additional additives and smells like moth-balls now. 75w90 in the front and rear diff. GD

If you are going to lift it, 6 lug. If you are staying stock height or lower, 5 lug. But the 5 lug conversion isn't a simple bolt-on for a Brat. You need custom lower control arms in the front and custom axles in the front. No axle exists that is the right length and has the correct outer joint style (EJ splines), and the control arms for the XT6 are too long, while the Brat's control arms have the wrong interface for the ball joint. No one makes these parts - you will have to custom fab them. GD

It can't hurt anything in your car - you *should* add a seccond wire from the back of the alt to the battery positive terminal to protect against a dead battery attempting to draw more amps than the stock wire can feed to it. If any accesories you add are wired correctly and safely the alt will not cause any damage. The potential for burnt wireing is only there if you don't add additional wireing to carry the load of your additional accesories. It will not change the spark - that is controlled entirely by the number of windings in the coil and the voltage supplied to the coil. It has nothing to do with the amperage capacity of the alternator. And in any case the stock ignition system is capable of igniting the fuel/air mixture with a 99.9999% success rate - which is all it needs to do. A hotter spark does nothing for performance if the weaker spark it replaced was already working at near 100%. I can certainly supply one for your Loyale. Just let me know how many grooves there are on the pulley and I'll get one right out to you. I have both already made up. GD

If it works out would we have to canibalize a Subaru transmission and send him a bell-housing section? When I have thought about this in the past - it seemed from the research I had done - that the best choice would be a Nissan RWD transmission and divorced t-case setup since the Nissan's use a similar T/O bearing arrangement. In fact older Nissan's seem quite a bit closer in engineering design to Subaru than either Toyota or Honda. There's a number of things you can point to that are the same or almost the same - the Maxima alternator's for example - Nissan kept the design of the Maxima alternator compatible with the older Z car case design which was identical to what Subaru used. I know that you can use a Nissan truck T/O bearing on an EA81 transmission in order to match up with the EA82 pressure plate fingers..... Just my thoughts based on what I've seen - maybe it will help with the toyota project or it's another possilibity for your guy to investigate maybe..... GD