bushytails

I haven't cleaned that exact valve, but usually you want to blow a bunch of brake cleaner through every part of it, with the solenoid removed so you can manually move it to all positions, then put a drop of very light oil on the bearing.

Voltage fluctuating with turn signals is 100% normal. Also, no alternator problem, except for a bearing locked solid, will significantly affect idle speed. Valve issues are not caused by sudden deceleration. Any issues with valves closing slowly would show up at high rpm, when they have less time to close, not at idle. At cold start, the computer has the idle air control valve wide open and the mixture rich, like the choke and fast idle cam of a carb. As it warms up, it needs less air to maintain idle speed. To test the booster, stomp on the pedal as hard and long as you would for an emergency stop, while you're already stopped. If it does the same thing, you've found your problem. If it doesn't do it, it's probably not the problem. My money is still on the idle air control valve.

Dirty idle air control valve (long thing with a big hose coming out the top of it, bolted on next to the throttle body), or leaky brake booster, would be my guesses.

I run 45PSI all around, on 13" wheels... I load my wagon heavy and drive hard, and lower psi always gives uneven tire wear, with the edges (especially outer edges) wearing before the center tread. I've been running Tornel Direccional 205/60R13 lately. Not a common size, but I've been happy with them. Been tempted to get some 15x7 Diamond Racing wheels so I can run much easier to get 15s... What brand bushings are you running? I have DRW everywhere up front except the lower control arm bushings, which are now the odd-shaped Trupro ones. Have been wondering if other brands get better life than DRW's. I still need to find a source of Gen II rear outer bushes - DRW said he can make them if I give him specs. I might mail him the shells from a worn-out factory bushing.

A lot of ebay parts are listed for Leone II... I think they're borrowing the UK nomenclature for stuff. Others are done by 1400/1600/1800, which seems extremely imprecise. AU5/AM5/AJ5 seemed to be the most accurate way to find parts... but ebay's fitment tables were *all over the place*. Doing overly broad searches and filtering by hand seems to be the way to go.

So far I'm loving mine... but my recent experience is sitting on the bump stops with my seat being the primary suspension... I also have an EJ, lift, and various other accessories making the front of my car a bit heavier than stock.

Here's the parts I got: KYB 333227 Struts: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/335669990575 These are the most common/available with tons of sellers. Trupro lower control arm bushings: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/143967618417 Also available as a few other brands. Fuel filter with vapor vent nipple on top: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/132887997822 Trupro outer tie rod ends: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/132430778076 King standard height heavy duty coil springs: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/232612195500 Not an endorsement of any of these sellers; those are just the items I purchased. I got KYB SB103 boot kits and Mevotech MP902931 strut mounts from rockauto. The Mevotech strut mounts are substandard, but seem to be the only thing available if yours are torn. The included bearing plate (if you can call a piece of greased plastic that) does not fit the upper spring seats. My original ones were in re-usable condition. If yours are cracked or worn too thin, you'll need to enlarge the hole in the spring seat with a large step bit to use the new plastic ones. Also, the D-shaped stamped hole for the threaded part of the strut shaft is either the wrong size or too poorly formed, and the strut shaft spins freely in it so you can't tighten the strut nut. I shimmed them with strips of copper roof flashing to adjust the fit to where the shaft couldn't spin. Copper is easy to cut, and I could have it slightly proud and it would squish with the nut, unlike steel. Also they don't have the markings for which way they should face, so look at your old mounts. The FSM is backwards compared to the markings on the mounts! The lower control arm bushings pressed in without too much work with a large C clamp. Put your 36mm on one side as a spacer, then press the bushing in from the other side. You have to press it in until end end you're pressing is almost entirely in the hole, then flip the clamp and the 36 around and press from the other side, to get both end pieces in place properly. Will see how long these last for. Got less than six months from each set of DRW bushings, so figured I'd try something new. There's also two brands of polyurethane bushings on .au ebay. The KYB struts are indeed 4wd length, even though they have a fixed spring seat. They're identical in dimensions to my other 4wd struts, and longer than 2wd struts. If you normally run your height adjustment all the way up, and it's for ride height and not just to compensate for worn springs, you might want to opt for the 25mm/1" lift coil springs. The free length of the coil springs is shorter than my OEM coil springs, but the end result is still standard ride height, because the heavy duty ones are much stiffer being made with much thicker wire, and so compress less with the weight of the car on them. They even came with a sticker on the side reminding you of this. lol Some other items that I did not purchase, but may be what people are looking for: Sachs 317002 struts. Cheap but supposedly great quality. https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/226638327659 Also available from several other sellers ranging from slightly higher price to vastly higher price. Gabriel G55726 struts. https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/205853986218 Also available from many other sellers. Some sellers show these with an adjustable spring seat, some with a fixed one. I emailed one of the sellers, and they checked with their supplier, and it sounds like they're moving to non-adjustable ones and you'll probably get a non-adjustable one even if they have a picture of an adjustable one. If it matters to you, you should email each seller you're looking at and check in advance. There's also Monroe struts available, but the seller with them is charging so much that I'm not going to link to it. There's "Protex" struts that may or may not fit. No one has a photo and fitment info is useless. Silly expensive caliper rebuild kit: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/154070387492 Lovells Standard Height: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/143552513395 Lovells Raised: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/133357720022 This always makes me laugh: https://www.ebay.com/itm/336366210724 Things I wasn't able to find: New calipers, either front or turbo rear, late '84 clutch cables, steering racks, proper steering rack boots, torsion bars, rear outer bushes, ...

There's been several threads lately about options for front struts, now that they're entirely unavailable in the US. With one of mine getting really wobbly, and my springs so flat that I've been sitting solid on the front bump stops (and ruining tires with the resultant camber) for the last year, I decided it was time to really look into my options for new parts. It turns out that ordering from Australia is a lot easier than I expected! This post will mostly focus on Gen II parts, since that's what I drive, but the info in it applies to all vehicles and anything else you want to order. I've looked in the past, and even emailed several places, both ebay sellers and local businesses, and very close to absolutely no one in Australia will ship to the US. There's one person on ebay with a small selection, charging a very hefty markup, and they have poor feedback. Australia has many parts options available - all of KYB, Monroe, Gabriel, and Sachs struts, both 4wd and 2wd and for every generation, two manufacturers of new springs, King and Lovells, in standard height, heavy duty, 1"/25mm lift, and lowered (are there people this silly?) versions, at least four options for control arm bushings, new copper-brass radiators, caster/camber adjustment kits, complete front caliper rebuild kits, fuel filters with the third nipple on top, brand new tie rod ends,... and no one will ship to the US. So what to do? Freight forwarding! I used AUSFF, https://www.ausff.com.au/ but there's other options. For a small fee, you have sellers ship them packages, then they ship them to you. All the steps I provide will be for AUSFF, but I assume the other options have a similar process. My experience with them was about average, so other options could be better or worse. Here's a little writeup on the whole process. First, you sign up, and pay a fee for the "plan" you want, which starts at AU$5 for one package. I got the AU$20 plan, which will ship up to 10 packages a month, with various extra services. The signup process is fairly typical. They talk about verification documents, but their faq mentions these are for high-risk transactions, and they didn't ask me to provide any of them. I guess no one scams people for old subaru parts. Next, if you're shopping on ebay, go to https://www.ebay.com.au/ , and log in using the same login you use for the US .com site - no need to create a new account or do anything special. Go to your profile, and add a new (additional, not primary) shipping address. Enter the address AUSFF, or your chosen freight forwarder, gives you. This will be an address in Australia that you can ship all your stuff to. AUSFF gives you a unique number you should ship things care of, like "C/O R123456", that you enter as the second line of your shipping address. If you don't do this, they won't know who the package is for, so make sure you enter it. Enter AUSFF's provided phone number and everything else they give you, none of your own address info. You can also order from local businesses. For example, Sparesbox, https://www.sparesbox.com.au/ , also has a good selection and significantly lower prices than ebay sellers (and they sponsor 4WD 24/7, so I'll give them a shout-out), and I would have ordered from them except they were out of stock on the springs I wanted. You should probably stick with sites that use shipping services rather than local store delivery, but you can also get local deliveries if you talk to AUSFF beforehand. Ship everything to your AUSFF address, of course. If you can't enter a second address line, put the c/o number on the end of your name, i.e. "John Doe C/O R123456". Note that AUSFF will not ship food, so no snacks, alas. Now, go shopping! I'll put links to some of the deals I found in a reply to this post, since they're probably transient, but here's an ebay search for most of the strut options I found. When shopping, you need to keep in mind the naming/model differences, and the currency differences. The latter is easier - at the time I'm writing this, an AUD is about 0.70USD. So, as a rough mental estimate, figure your USD cost is about 2/3rds of the AUD price. An AU$300 part is US$200. etc. The exchange rate will likely be different by the time you read this, so look it up before shopping. And then shipping and tariffs bring it up to about the same number again. Then, there's model names. "Brat", "GL", etc are US names (and one is a trim package that for some reason is used as a name, for reasons I still utterly fail to understand), and won't find any parts anywhere else in the world. The Brat is the Brumby in Australia, while other models were Leone, with Leone II being Gen II vehicles. There's also model codes, for example AU5 is a Gen II Brumby, while AM5 is a Leone II Estate (Gen II Wagon). You'll need to search with these names/models to find parts. Take note that ebay and other sites' fitment information is often **very** random. As an example, the fitment table might only specify a part fits the Sedan version (looking at you, Lovells Springs!), while it's identical on Wagons and Brumbys. Also common, parts will only say they fit Brumby (Aussies love their Utes!), while they'd also fit every other model of the same generation. Or the year range will be wrong (King Springs this time). Or they might be listed as fitting both your Gen II vehicle and a Gen III vehicle, but you know the parts are different. So do very wide searches and mentally filter based on your subaru knowledge rather than trying to search for exact model parts. Also remember some parts are still available in the US - you can get the KYB boot kit locally without paying international shipping and tariffs, for example. Add all the items you want to your cart, and go to check out. First, make sure to switch to your AUSFF (or other forwarder) address. It will then show correct shipping (usually free) and let you pay. When you pay, ebay will ask if you want to pay in AUD or USD. If you pay in USD, they will do the currency conversion for you, at a rate that's slightly worse than the current rate found elsewhere, and bill your payment method (credit card, paypal, etc) in USD. If you pay in AUD, they'll bill your card in AUD, and your bank may charge a foreign transaction fee in addition to using an unknown exchange rate. I used USD and let them handle it. If you pay with paypal in AUD, paypal will ask you the exact same question again, with a similar but slightly different exchange rate - again it's probably easier to let them do it, especially if you're using the pay later options. With non-ebay sites you'll probably pay in AUD and the rate will be up to your card issuer/bank. And now the waiting begins. But not much waiting. Most places ship AusPost or Aramex. Aramex has a rather spoob reputation, but I don't think the actual experience is worse than the budget couriers in the US. Both will get parts to AUSFF pretty quickly. Every time AUSFF gets a package, they email you with the tracking number of it. When AUSFF has all your packages, the next step is consolidation. Log in, select all your packages, and click the button to consolidate them. They'll open up the larger boxes and try to stuff the smaller boxes in too - for example, they stuck my tie rod ends inside my springs. This saves you a lot of postage getting them to the US, by shipping one package instead of several. They'll then wrap everything with plastic and tape it up. You can also ask for pictures of the items you got, scans of printed information, etc. When you get the notice that they've consolidated your parts, log in again, and select to ship your new consolidated package. You'll be given several options for how to ship it. FedEx Express was only a few dollars more than AusPost, and was 3-5 days instead of 3-5 weeks, so that's the one I went with. You'll need to provide the tariff information for your items, which is a short description of each item, a tariff code which you can look up at https://hts.usitc.gov/ (for example, 8708.80.1300 is McPherson Struts for non-agricultural vehicles), the value (price you paid), and country of origin (enter Australia if unknown). You can estimate the tariffs at https://www.simplyduty.com/import-calculator/ and other sites. At the time I write this, the Australia special rate for automotive parts seems to be 10%, but that might change in five minutes. With FedEx, they deliver your parts then bill you for the tariffs - I'm still waiting for my bill, so I don't know how paying them works yet. AUSFF has a box to check if you want insurance; I selected it. And now for more waiting, which is maybe little or lots depending on the service you selected. And then installing! Overall, the process was fairly painless. I spent a lot more time selecting parts than with the actual shipping. And with how much nicer my AM5 is driving now, I regret not doing this long ago!

They're from your part of the globe!

So shiny... I'll do a writeup later, maybe this weekend if I have time.

I forgot it had electric power steering. So that's one less thing to worry about. lol 99% of the time the AC won't turn it, it's because you're low on refrigerant and the low pressure cutout switch is tripped. There's no point in doing any other diagnostics until you get a set of gauges on it and check the charge. An ER27 is a big EA82 engine, with the same bellhousing. A newer engine will need a bellhousing adapter and redrilled flywheel, unless you run a newer transmission too, which is its own whole set of adaptations. Pitch stop is the link on top of the engine to the firewall. You have to fab brackets for it for an engine swap.

On Gen II, inner and outer are the same seal.

Someone in another thread recently said they couldn't find the right driver for installing front wheel seals, so here's the random find I've been using for Gen II seals, a HyperTough 64P-14 oil filter socket, with the outside very slightly filed for a looser fit in the knuckle.

There is no back-and-forth. The mods needed to fit a newer engine are extensive - you'd need to do a lot of work to make anything repeatedly swappable, and it'd still be a big project every time. For just a small part of the list, you can start with engine mounts, bellhousing adapter, modded flywheel, starter, fuel pump and plumbing, custom radiator hoses, custom power steering hoses, custom a/c hoses, engine computer and complete wiring harness, pitch stop, radiator fans, air intake, alternator wiring, vacuum hoses to body-mounted vacuum stuff, ignition coil stuff, etc etc etc... all of which you'd have to have two sets of and swap each time with the engine...

I haven't worked on one of those engines (I'm more of a Gen II wagon fan), but those problems could just be it's time for routine maintenance... Change your spark plugs, wires, cap, and rotor, check for vacuum leaks (vacuum hoses, brake booster, stuck evap, intake gaskets, etc), clean throttle body, clean MAF sensor, check temperature sensor, clean idle air control valve, adjust idle throttle stop, change fuel filters, check fuel pressure under full load, etc. Some lifter tick is normal with that many miles - you can try various flushes and such, or just live with it. It sounds like this car is new to you, so keep a close eye on the oil level until you know just how fast it uses it - running it with no oil will make that engine swap suddenly a high priority. https://charm.li/ is good for quickly looking things up, https://project-car.net/technical-info/ has a pdf service manual, and you can google for other manuals... or ebay a full set. Will come in handy with the amount of work you plan on doing.