jonathan909

You've all misunderstood the question. The clip at the end of the shaft that gets stuffed into the diff is not the issue. The clip is there and there's nothing to ask about. The question was about the clip that isn't inside the inner CV joint itself to prevent it from coming apart. I just looked at another couple of that type of shaft at a buddy's house, and there's nothing on them either. So I'm just calling it a $h!++y CV design that relies on the boot to keep it together without any positive retention mechanism for the greezy rollers contained within.

How long ago did you do that? If recently, there may still be prayer in your future. Depending on the severity and frequency of overheating, you may have compromised the main bearings - they're what goes if you overheat badly enough, often enough. So if you get the death rattle of spun bearings, STOP IMMEDIATELY and overhaul the engine. If this is caught quickly, it can still be salvaged. If not, permanent crank and/or block damage will result.

Oh - you meant the ignition switch. Okay, no argument there at all. Mechanical contacts like that degrade over time, and (as I proved years ago) that's exactly the reason for you not being able to program for your key fobs anymore. But "the ignition" refers to the whole system, and that would have been a bizarre claim, kind of like "my windshield wore out". "Cracked? Pitted?" "No, just wore out, stopped working, can't see through it anymore."

On your philosophy of grounds, Disagree Strongly. You can, in fact, have too many grounds, though probably not in this context, rather in small-signal applications that are really noise-sensitive. In that case an excess of grounds can result in what are called "ground loops", which behave like little circuits of their own in which very small currents can circulate and disturb the performance of other circuits, notably amplifiers, which will raise the voltages created by those circulating currents to a point at which they become interference. And while you may think you're being "strategic", you may discover that the electrons do not agree. So while you can often get away with adding grounds arbitrarily, they can come back and bite you in the @$$. Plus, in the Jeep case I cited above, that wouldn't have helped anyway, because it was a +12 line that failed, and the problem wasn't going to be solved without first identifying exactly which one it was.

That's a really weird thing to say. What does "ignition wearing out" mean?

Wow - this has been dogging you for more than a year? Awful. This is not going to be easy. It's easy to say "look for a bad ground". It's quite another to find it. Get the drawings for your exact model and year, because here minor variations count. Then trace every ground and +12V wire, and make sure that both the wire itself and the terminations are good. Here's the example I usually cite: I had a 1997 Jeep Grand Cherokee before moving to Subarus. Ran great for years, until the high-miles motor blew (rod through block). Then it sat over a winter until I dropped in a new engine in the spring. When I started it up again, all of the electricals were wonked out. Turning on the stereo affected the wipers. The lights affected the heater. All of this unrelated stuff was suddenly functionally coupled in the most chaotic manner. I bought the big thick book for that year's model from Chrysler and started tracing wires. Eventually I found that where the big harness passed through the firewall (in the most inaccessible spot, of course), a tiny pinhole in the insulation on a +12V wire had let in enough moisture over time to corrode clean through the copper conductor. Absent that supply line, a bunch of stuff found alternate supply paths - through other things, the result being that both were semi-powered and acted nuts. The lesson is that because the effects were so random and crazy, it would have been a waste of time to try to think them through - you just have to check every wire that can have that kind of global effect, what we call "exhaustive search". The other example is a simpler one: After I had the motor out of my (first) '99 Outback for I-forget-what, the AT got all kooky - the shift points were all over the place. Everything else in the car was fine. Turned out that I hadn't tightened down that big, most-obvious-ground-in-car ground lug on top of the intake. Tightened it and all was well. So the effects can can be globally insane, or just localized to some weird thing.

Not looking into the diff; it's just sitting on a jackstand (because we had no intention of messing with that) and hard to see in there. But the CV came out of it with a "reasonable" amount of prying, so my inference is that it's fine. I just don't know how to proceed with putting this joint back together. Obviously, Haynes can't be trusted absolutely, but prior experience with the older-style CV - and common sense - say that there should be a retaining ring... and a groove to hold it. So I'm kind of stuck.

I've been awfully quiet, not even lurking, just in one of those not-many-car-problems periods, which is fine with me. But now I'm back with a question. Daughter and I set out to change a couple of ball joints on her '03 Forester today. They were, of course, a PITA to get out, and at this point one is changed. But we ran into a bit of nastiness in the process: The inner CV pulled apart, which was a really rude surprise. I'm accustomed to the older cylindrical type that are roll-pinned to the diff shaft. This one just presses in and the housing is hexagonal. But the shaft and tri-pot roller assembly just pulled out of the housing. Haynes says there's supposed to be a retaining ring in there, but there's no groove for one. So do you just have to be careful never to tension one of these type, because all that's keeping it together is the boot, and if it slides off, you're SOL?

Wow - 2019. So many cars since then. Nice that I indicated which it was, otherwise I'd just be guessing. The '01 Forester must have been my daughters' car at the time, since sold, they briefly had a Jeep, then unloaded it in favour of one or both of the Subarus (one '03 Forester, one not-sure Legacy) they have now. I'm perfectly happy with all of the Mahles I've used. In fact, I think that one set I bought was actually of Subaru manufacture, according to the logo on the gaskets. So yeah, I think they're fine.

None of the above. Nothing so complicated, simply air getting past the bleeder screw threads. We got our Speedi Bleed yesterday and bled the system today. Quick. Silent. No pumping. Painless. No bubbles. Just Works. This is a great tool. I don't think I've ever specifically endorsed any such here, but it gets a hearty two thumbs-up from me.

True, but I'm getting more than "molecular volumes" here - this isn't exactly a micron filtration situation...

Hmmm. Good point. I may not have looked closely enough and it might be worth pulling it apart to confirm. Though if it's sucking air, it stands to reason that it'd bleed fluid when we step on the brakes.

That's what makes this so maddening - I do not suspect leaks elsewhere. This all kicked off when the hill holder (apparently) malfunctioned and locked the brakes while on level ground, causing the car to be towed home - twice. The hill holder is no longer in the car - I didn't just disconnect the clutch cable as suggested here, but yanked it altogether and joined the in/out brake lines together. I have no reason to believe there are any leaks, and, as an aside, point out that I've only suffered one brake line failure (corrosion) in the decade+ that I've been driving and maintaining these things, and that was in the 1995 Legacy Wagon - almost ten years older than this car. So my present sanity check is to push fluid until the bubbles go away. If they fail to do so, I will declare myself insane.

I've had a mityvac forever too, and I've got a vacuum pump (use it for AC evacuation and oiling), so there's no shortage here of potentially-useful kit. Before returning the PT kit I tried putting some Dow Corning High Vacuum Grease on the bleeder threads, but even that didn't stop the bubbles - whether they're actually in the lines or occurring locally is a mystery only solved by abandoning the vacuum approach, so that's what I'm doing. I'll have the Speedibleed kit on Monday and see how that goes.

Yes, it has ABS. Haynes said something about using a scan tool to cycle the ABS, but mine doesn't appear to support that function. If it's a simple matter of manually activating the ABS via a diag connector pin, that doesn't sound like a big deal - should be easy enough to track that down.

I've decided that the Performance Tool bleeder I linked to at the outset is junk because sucking rather than blowing is inherently flawed. In fact, here's what their product support person (who claimed that there are teflon tapes that resist brake fluid, but did not specify) said when I described the problem: "These bleeders... suck at bleeding the system" So I'll be returning it to Princess Auto today. I'd try the Motive bleeder next (a jug with a hand pump that attaches to the master cylinder), but ran across this one: https://speedibleed.com/ I like the idea of using shop air (or tire pressure - a cute hack) instead of a hand pump, it's cheaper than the Motive (which has no Canadian distributors - I'd have to buy it from Amazon), and comes from just over the border in BC. Should be here in a day or two, will advise.

They look like a Good Thing. My only question is: If you're stomping in the driver's seat, how are you to know when you've "stomp[ed] as many times as necessary"?

Back to my daughter's '03 Forester. I won't get into all the painful details of what a horrorshow this has been to date. Just trying to solve present problem: Bleeding. Since we weren't having any luck doing it Old School (stomp, twist, stomp, twist), I figured I'd give a power bleeder a shot. Someone mentioned the Motive pressure bleeder here in an old thread, but looking around yielded mixed reviews that suggested they used to be great but in more recent years the quality fell off and everything leaked. My local preferred source had the Performance Tool version: https://wilmarllc.com/w89204/w89204-pneumatic-brake-bleed-kit on the shelf and they have a painless refund policy, so it seemed worth a try. The difference is rather than pushing fluid under pressure into the master cylinder, this one generates a vacuum from shop air and sucks at the wheel cylinder. But on the first wheel (RR), we've already put 500ml of fluid through and the bubbles aren't letting up, leading me to believe that air is getting sucked through the threads of the bleed screw, as we have no reason to believe there are leaks anywhere else in the system. I just learned that teflon tape is NFG for sealing in this application, as the brake fluid eats it. Is there anything I can use to seal the threads and eliminate this (potential) leak during bleeding? I realize, of course, that this is an intrinsic problem with a vacuum vs. pressure bleeder. Helpful suggestions are, of course, welcome in addition to the actual answer.

"Open" being where it is when the clutch is not depressed?

Turns out the sonofabitch does have a hill holder. They thought not because it's never shown itself to be functional. But that doesn't mean it can't malfunction. So what's the shortest route to getting it out of the circuit? It looks like there's just one line that goes in and out of it from the master cylinder. So do we just get a F/F adapter for the flare nuts and mangle those two lines together?

As long as you can believe that it can also un-seize. That'll probably be the next thing we open up, just because it's easiest.

Yeah, and they don't "get better" after a ride on a flatbed. My information is that she had no trouble moving the shifter from gear to gear, and when she tried to go got a hot+stinky clutch for her efforts.

2003, and no hill holder in evidence, afaIk.

This is a weird one - a problem my daughter's having. The car is relatively new to her and in pretty good shape. Despite this, it's put her in a jam a couple of times, both after the hour's drive into the city center, downtown during rush hour - about the least desirable time/place for such a failure. The symptom is that she'll stop at a light, and when it turns green attempt to move, but letting out the clutch simply stalls the engine. Repeated attempts yield the same result. She then calls for a tow and the driver has to brute-force the car onto the flatbed because the wheels won't turn. By the time it arrives home via the truck, whatever jammed has let go and it's returned to normal. Frustrating, to say the least. I was hoping (as well all do) for the simplest and least invasive discovery, e.g. something loose in the rear brakes, but pulling those drums is itself a PITFA and all we managed to do is create more problems without finding anything. So before we go any further, can anyone suggest anything?

All of which is extremely informative, but doesn't actually answer the question I asked. Which was: Does anyone here have a problem with running tires from two different manufacturers, (probably) paired as a "front set" and a "back set", assuming (of course) that all four are of the correct type and approximate characteristics (e.g. M+S)?