jonathan909

Dude, look at my avatar and you'll get that I understand wet sanding - not just for cosmetics, but for performance (though actually less on the TriFoiler than on the catamarans). And from what I've seen the UV coating really makes a difference on these things - without it (that is, when I used the Mothers kit) the lens fogged again within months; with it the degradation of the lens has been slowed. I actually have the laboratory equipment here for a spectral transmissibility analysis, but at the moment I'm just going by subjective observation. You need to understand what I'm talking about here. I live in the country and wrote off two cars last year to deer strikes. Prior to that I wrote off a third in addition to a number of incidental non-writeoff collisions since we moved out here. Earlier this year a moose ran my girls off the road (moose are no joke - they kill people in cars). According to both the police and the body shops, half of the accidents reported in this area are from collisions with these stupid vermin. Overall, they present a much greater hazard than you suggest from oncoming traffic, and I couldn't give a bright orange sh!t what you or anyone else find "obnoxious" about a headlight's colour temperature. I'm not going to intentionally create a hazard for other drivers (nor do I want to attract tickets), but beyond that I'll do what's necessary to make these awful, substandard headlights minimally safe.

The Meguire kit - drill-driven pad, a couple of wet+dry papers to 2000 (iIrc), polish, and UV protectant which seems to help. I posted previously on this kit vs. Mothers. "LEDs are obnoxious" doesn't begin to approach "informative". The question was about effective brightness. Qualitative opinions require explanation.

The Legacy/Outback headlights seem uniformly terrible - our '95, '98, and '99 really are dangerous to drive at night, especially given the deer (that claimed two cars last year). The Foresters - with their huge lights - are vastly superior. So we've got to do what we can to crank up the brightness on the former, and I'm looking for the modern opinion. (Btw, if my notes are correct, the '95 needs 9003=HB2=H4, while the '98/'99 use 9007. Please correct me if I have this wrong. And the lenses still look pretty clear since my last Meguire's treatment.) Some time back there was a strong recommendation here for Philips Crystal Vision Plus (though I can't see the Plus online now, so perhaps it's been replaced by the Ultra) as the best halogen around particularly in terms of longevity. But I'm seeing a lot of LEDs out there (meaning "Amazon") that are only a few bucks more. We need bright, and I mean BRIGHT. What say you all?

No "Advanced Auto" in Soviet Canuckistan, but I get the point.

Okay, but doesn't UV dye imply adding refrigerant to a known-leaky system? Or is there "standalone" dye available that you inject into the system, then pressure it up with air?

I've just rebuilt the AC system (everything but the evaporator) from junkyard parts in a car that PO had stripped it of (he's originally from Africa and thus indifferent to air conditioning). Prior to attempting to charge it up, I figured I'd do a smart thing (for a change) and see if it leaks. Hung the manifold gauge, hooked up the vacuum pump, and ran it down. As soon as I closed the valve to the pump, though, the system quickly rose back to atmosphere. So how do I track down what appears to be a substantial leak? Pressure it up (with air through the gauge) and start squirting Snoop all over the connections? If so, to what pressure? If not, how? And if that doesn't turn anything up, how does one ID leaks in the evaporator or condenser? Answers to relevant questions I'm too dim to ask also welcome.

Will let you know next week when I get to work on it.

I did say "ignoring cable/connector issues", so I was asking whether the transducer itself would fit and work.

Wife's '98/2.2/5MT speedo died. Suspect xmission sensor; severe shortage of compatible donor cars in the boneyards at the moment. Have old leftover 4EAT pulled from '99 Forester lying around waiting for when I need a core. Ignoring cable/connector issues, will the sensor from the 4EAT work in the 5MT?

Yeah, that's going to work well with thermoplastics (e.g. polystyrene, ABS, etc.), but there are lots of non-thermoplastics (Bakelite, etc.) that won't play nice. Polycarbonate is a thermoplastic, but I've never tried heat-welding it. We'll see how the marine epoxy works and take it from there...

Update: Before I had a chance to shop for the "USA Gold Pro" or even get a fresh tube of cyanoacrylate (and thanks for the baking soda hack - never heard that one) a friend laid a tube of LePage Marine Epoxy on me. I tried a test spot on a spare headlight and the bond seems to be strong, so I'm trying it on the Forester's headlight. The only downside of this stuff is that it has a long (2 hr) set time, so I had to tape the broken spud in place, as the epoxy wasn't tacky enough to keep it there and it kept falling off (grrr...). I'll give it a day or two to cure and see how it looks. Btw, I didn't have to do anything with the mirror - it was smashed so it just got replaced from the boneyard.

I'm finally catching up with our '01 Forester's mashed fender and associated damage (e.g. mirror) from my girls' wisely choosing the ditch over a moose in January. I'm stuck at the moment on a broken piece of the headlight - the little rectangular spud molded into the grey plastic housing that the signal/marker light snaps into. I have the broken bit and would like to glue it back on, but I'm well acquainted with the difficulty of gluing many plastics. I tried methylene chloride (solvent cement) and it wouldn't attack it, and JB Weld's plastic epoxy, which had no bond strength. Looking at a similar headlight "PC" appears a couple of times where the part number is molded in. I'm guessing that indicates polycarbonate. Does anyone know anything that'll work? I tried to take the coward's way out last week, but couldn't find that headlight (intact) in any of the junkyard carcasses

Okayokayokay... if you're having fun watching me obsess over it (sicko), I've got one more bone I can toss you for now. I threw the 'scope on the three wires that are used for communication between the two modules, and at first glance it doesn't appear they're running anything as complicated as the synchronous serial protocol I speculated about earlier. I haven't done much with it yet - just watched the lines when I enabled and disabled the security system - and I think they just strobed one line to signal the change of mode. I'll have to read a little more closely to see how many different states there might be and try to correlate that with how the state change signals might be encoded, and look at the microcontroller's data sheet to see what the pins (on each board) serving those three wires are capable of. Other than getting in and out of valet mode I haven't been very interested in the security module, so I don't get yet what-all sets it off. The easy thing to do on the bench is just give the shock sensor (that little grey box in the upper right) a little rap, but obviously there are a bunch of other conditions that can trigger it, so they'll represent different messages being passed. We'll see about all that later.

Honestly, I just haven't looked closely enough at it to see how bad it is. There's a huge notch burned out of the valve - it happened just as winter hit and I wasn't in a position to do anything about it until spring, so I just pulled the connector from that cylinder's injector and kept driving it. I'll need another head in any case, whether I swap it in or just nick valves from it. And I really shouldn't even be messing with it right now - god knows I've got about a hundred other things that need attention first, and the lakes are about to thaw so I'm just going to want to be out on the water rather than dealing with any of them anyway...

When my '95 EJ22 burned a valve a few years back I just did the quick thing and swapped in another used motor (that's still running great). Now I'm catching up on a whole bunch of unfinished tasks and want to clean up the old motor so I have a spare on hand. I don't have any potential donor EJ22s here, and there don't appear to be any other '95 EJ22s in the local U-Pull yards, but there are some '96-'98s that I could get heads from. If the junkyard heads are in significantly better shape than my old ones, can I swap my '95 cams+rockers into them?

Right, but... before you make that trip, measure the bolt spacing on that bracket and make sure you find a compressor that matches it.

And here it is with the security module added. I really need to quit screwing with this stuff and go do something else...

Perfect. See, you don't need a bracket - the one you have is just fine. Those four threaded holes? That's where the AC compressor goes. And it's hard to tell from this angle, but there should also be two threaded holes on the front of that casting that the tensioner bolts into. Then there's just one more piece (and I don't have an EJ22 older than '95, so yours may vary), a little casting that the bottom two AC compressor bolts pass through and which in turn bolts onto the top of the head to stablize the whole assembly.

Why don't you post a picture of the alternator (and AC compressor) bracket on your engine? No point in getting another from the US if it's the same as you have now.

You may not have been careful enough in your choice of contact cleaner. It's easy to get one that's a cleaner and killer degreaser that, as you say, flushes out any lube. I always go for the cleaners that have added lubricant.

You still need to lift the hood and localize it. To the fuse/relay box, perhaps?

The fuel pump is in the tank, so it's not going to sound like it's under the hood. I suggest you lift the hood and localize the buzz.

That's starting to sound like a plan. I just spoke to the dealer (and confirmed online) that the switch is not a separate part from the lock, so the whole assembly has to be replaced (~ $150 USD, $300 CAD). And that assembly was only used for a couple of years, so the idea of getting one from a much newer donor car is a nonstarter; one from a car of the right vintage is probably going to be as worn and noisy as the one you're trying to replace.

I've now hacked the security module onto my test jig and answered the question I started with last spring. "Valet mode" does not inhibit the programming of new key fobs (transmitters). I suspected that it does because my '02 Forester arrived in valet mode, without a working fob, I couldn't get it into programming mode to connect a new fob, and someone over on NASIOC claimed that a Subaru tech told them that it does. I've now disproven that theory, and think that the same problem normally experienced preventing entry into programming mode was at work: A badly worn keyswitch. I continue to work toward (dis)proving this thesis.

Oh, who knows... could have been a designer with a formal stick up his butt over using a JEDEC pinning (however screwy), or the rep or disty giving them a good price on these ones because they're oddball and nobody was buying them... any number of stupid reasons. Certainly not to prevent reverse-engineering - too trivial a change, and the microcontroller's software (the part that counts) is locked up in mask ROM that effectively can't be read out anyway.