jonathan909

Those sensors are passive devices and inherently pretty reliable. I'd have to take a look at the drawings to see what else might deprive you of spark, perhaps an ignition relay [edit: the "main relay"?]. Of course, a defective ECU could also be responsible, as it's what takes those sensor inputs and outputs the spark signals.

Forgive me for being slow, but are you saying that the failure mode is that the valve fails shut and excess pressure in the unventilated crankcase forces oil into the cylinders?

Where you at, canuck?

Can you explain this, please?

Thanks - yes, I saw this last summer when I was trying to make progress with the '02 Forester and don't think it contributed anything. But I'll give it another read to see if there are hidden details I might have missed.

Actually, no, I take that back. It came with some crap aftermarket keyless entry, so the first thing I have to do is get all up in that nonsense and see if I can install the Alpine to make it standard again. Then maybe I learn something.

I think that's the date range. I have an '01 Forester, so I'll be messing with it there as well. And I have a bucket of fobs from the junkyard to play with. Well, sort of. Unfortunately, the first part of the plan is to go on a raging tear through the house - when I first started looking at this for the '02 Forester, I printed some schematics out of the service manual and made a whole bunch of notes on them, and now I can't find them. Since I don't want to recreate those notes from scratch I'm going to be a real pain to be around until they're found.

Not sure what's meant by "confusion as to system". I'm certainly not confused about what I have here - it's all Alpine hardware, and the instructions are consistent with those published for later model years. I can't comment on what came before, as (afaIk) the keyless entry wasn't supported in my earlier ('95 and '98) Legacys. Unless someone offers some really revelatory new information, I think my next step is building a test jig for these things so I can, at least, control the I/O rather than just trusting the car to provide sane and predictable inputs to the module.

Not according to the 1999 Legacy (inc. Outback and SUS) manual. May have been a transition in that year, as our 1999 Forester had the under-dash pushbutton (and this OBW doesn't). The keyless entry worked in the Forester, so I never had a reason to mess with the programming.

That was where I lived before I moved here. Didn't have any luck with this question there either. I made the switch to USMB for a better balance of answers.

None of the above, I'm certain, for the following reasons: The battery was disconnected for at least a year while the car waited for me overhaul the engine (the product of both winter and an ungulate conspiracy, as I've previously noted). According to the owner's manual the security system was an option, and I don't think it's in here because there's no indicator light on the dash (to the left of the fog light switch) to show that it's armed (or that valet mode is active). Incidentally, I fought with the stuck-in-valet-mode problem with my late '02 Forester: I think that Alpine designed a trap into it, in that you use the key fob to enter and exit valet mode, so if it's entered, then you lose the key fob, you're stuck in valet mode with no way to exit it, and I'm pretty sure that valet mode inhibits programming a new key fob - so you're totally SOL stuck. I've dug around a lot and even called Alpine about it, and there's no detailed information out there that might, for example, explain how to exert a hard reset on the module. I've even started trying to figure it out by pulling the EEPROM off of the keyless entry module so I can read it out and see whether anything can be learned by comparing a bunch of them - but I can't make any progress on that without a running system to reference. Someone out there must actually know something about these problems. Flailing around at it is a waste of time.

It's never worked, and I've decided to make it. When I do the cycle-key-10-times thing it does not beep the horn to indicate entry into programming mode. If I use the driver's door switch to lock the doors, it does honk the horn when I close the door. The fuse that's supposed to supply it (according to the owner's manual) is good. I've tried a couple of other modules fetched from the junkyard (though their part numbers vary slightly from the one that came with the car), but none have brought a change of behaviour. Can anyone suggest any leads, any known gotchas that would inhibit its entering programming mode? I'm hoping someone can just pass me the secret answer, although I'm pissed enough to start reverse-engineering this thing

I had the long hard line running to the back wheels rot and leak out abruptly in my '95 a couple of years ago. I was in the city at night in very unpleasant winter weather. That experience is a sound argument for manual transmissions.

Understood - need to develop a feel for it as well as the understanding of system. To the original question, though, what counts for "any capable scan tool" in the free/cheap realm?

This is probably suitable for a fresh thread, but what is the best/most cost-effective tool for getting live data? A few years ago I got FreeSSM for windoze (which didn't look like it was being actively maintained) and went through the whole thing finding a USB-OBDII cable that it'd work with. I don't carry a tracking device, so the "smartphone"/bluetooth dongle combo doesn't really work for me. Are these the only choices, or is there something better our there?

It really is a job for a Hotsy.

Situation's rather more complicated than that. STBPOIH (Soon to be previous owner, I hope), who is a FOAF, left it there after a failed DIY oil change that resulted in a blown motor. It's been sitting for 14 months because he was severely dispirited by this (and other life events). Why the shop has allowed this is unknown to me. We're talking about my taking it off his hands for scrap price (or not too much more, I also hope), hence the need for the haul. A few possibilities have surfaced since my original post, including some local (to me) guys who may be flatbedding another car up into the neighborhood of where this one is and were otherwise going to deadhead the return. And if that doesn't fly, I just heard from another friend that U-Haul indeed does carry flatbeds up here - total news to me. So it'll get sorted out... So to return to the original suggestion: With some effort I might be able to convince CAA to do it, but I'd be conning them. Sometimes I'm okay with that, but not so much this time.

Please followup once you nail it down. I want to know if my answer was completely out to lunch.

Any time a fault responds to a wiggle, you really have to dig in and look closely. Last time I had problems that responded to wiggling stuff in the under-hood fuse box ('02 Forester with intermittent ABS fault), the trouble was corrosion in the box's connectors. Pull out the fusible link and look down into the pins it mates with. Any green residue suggesting copper decay?

In Canada it's CAA (and its provincial associations). Yes, we have it and use it with some regularity. Trouble is that the car is at a shop and I want to get it home, and I'm pretty certain that falls outside of their "roadside assistance" parameters.

I just don't think U-Haul does those things up here, but it's worth looking into. One complication is that the car is (predictably) dead, but we should be able to winch it onto a trailer like that with a comealong.

I'm struggling a little with this - just need a one-time hack that'll work "well enough".

Yeah, it just strikes me that if there were a problem with the clutch work, it would have shown up a lot sooner than 30K miles. I'm always extremely suspicious of "coincidental" failures - if you have two problems at the same time they're probably related. But that's an awful lot of time and distance for the two to be related problems; more likely "unfortunately neighboring".

Easy to phrase ambiguously. In case I wasn't clear, I meant "New problem with the transmission unrelated to the clutch change."

Just guessing, but it sounds to me like a new transmission problem unrelated to the clutch change.