jonathan909

Please. We're going in circles - and you're misquoting me. What I actually said was "just 'put the floor jack under the shock to compress the spring enough to get the knuckle bolt to line up'. " Yes, there actually is a top hat there (I mispoke when I said that the top of the spring is in contact with the body), but it's a "passive" part (i.e. no bearings) and its replacement is optional. A MacPherson strut is a self-contained assembly in which the spring is captive to the shock portion, and special tooling (a spring compressor) and a separate operation are needed to assemble the two parts into a single component prior to installation in the car. This is completely different from replacing the rear shock (as I just did with this pair of KYBs, which did not come with new tophats), in which the new shock is poked up into the spring from beneath, and a floor jack is used to slightly compress the spring (i.e. a inch or two) in order to align the shock's bottom mount with the knuckle, not to significantly compress the spring. Yes, some come with new tophats and are replaced as a (slightly) precompressed unit, but again, that does not significantly alter the fundamental difference, which is that in the case of the MacPherson strut the spring is seriously compressed and the tophat bearings form part of the steering gear. So we should now be clear that the rears are not MacPherson struts. If you still want to claim that they are a different type of strut (e.g. Chapman), perhaps you can offer a citation or reference clearly indicating what type it is. Otherwise, can we please kill this thread?

Well, since I've never formally studied the matter... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPherson_strut According to this, a MacPherson strut is a steering component, so it applies only to the front end. What Subaru's doing in the rear is another question. Does it qualify as a Chapman strut or similar? Not sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapman_strut Are there others? Dunno. I'd just call it a coilover shock unless someone can point to something more definitive.

Sure, but this is nitpicking. It's not a "strut" in the sense that the fronts are, with the tophat and taking the form of a single assembly in which a compressor is needed to swap an old spring onto a new shock. It's just a shock with a support for the bottom of the spring, as the top of the spring presses up against the body, not a tophat.

Fortunately, not struts on the rear of this car, just shocks within springs. So no compression/assembly required, just "put the floor jack under the shock to compress the spring enough to get the knuckle bolt to line up".

"Should" is the keyword there. I always lube anything that needs to be torqued - in this case I used the Amsoil assembly lube since I used it (at GD's suggestion) on the '06 H4 I did in the spring (it worked great on that one). On this one, even with it they creaked like crazy, so I cleaned and re-lubed with regular oil - no change. This was a greater-than-usual load, but by no means "huge". I could check, but I think the TriFoiler, Sea-Doo, and trailer itself are around 500lb. each, and those are highball guesses. This just had to do with the old shocks being flat. Since I first noticed they were low last summer when I started driving the car and I was getting weird VDC errors through relatively gentle corners, I made a point of getting the recommended KYBs. We'll see how it does.

Well, here's the coda: I was deeply apprehensive about this assembly because I was suffering severe creak on most of the head bolts during the torquing. Some of them had spots of pitting on the threads and I should have replaced them, but simply didn't have the time, given this summer's circumstances. So I cleaned them up as best I could, degreased and blew out the block holes, lubed 'em up and forged ahead. Probably should have chased the block threads as well. Anyway, the torquing was all my best SWAG, as I figured that if I could get anywhere close to the final ft-lb spec, the creaking probably wouldn't matter as I did the final angles. We finished slapping it together last Monday and ran it around town, putting on 200km in 30C weather with the AC blasting. When it held, I figured it was worth trying on a more serious trip. So last night we got back from MT - 1800km since the rebuild, and most of the trip in 30-35C ambient. Unfortunately, the AC stopped blowing cold when we got down there, but the clutch is still engaging, so I figure it's a hard O-ring and some lost refrigerant. And an O2 sensor decided to pack it up an hour or so from home, but that didn't cause any problems. And with the four of us, all our kit, and towing a trailer carrying both a Sea-Doo and a sailboat, the a$$ was nearly on the ground (I'd bought new shocks for it last summer, just hadn't gotten to them in yet, and am doing them now). But the engine temp was rock-steady-eddy throughout the trip, so it looks like I dodged a bullet. And now I'm going to dive into our other '01 H6 - the one I bought about a month before the initial COVID lockdown, $500 because it too needs HGs and the PO was clearly in way over his head when he thought he could change them in his back yard (not only no garage, but on his lawn). Sadly not the all mod cons of this one (i.e no VDC or McIntosh - sniff), but body in better overall shape. It'll be a first if we can actually go into this winter with every car running...

As they say out east, Lord Tunderin' Christ. I get now why GD says "replace it". All the time and effort is in the timing cover. Comes apart pretty fast if you don't have any stripped screws, but with 60 right out there, facing the elements, there are going to be bad ones. Putting it back together? Now you're talking about 150 screws, a dozen different lengths, locations important, every one of which has to be torqued. And taking apart both the water and oil pumps. And two long beads of RTV to seal the cover. The chains themselves weren't hard, but it took a little searching and a couple of tries to get it right - you have to line up the coloured ID links. Add the time to clean the front and back covers and all the bits, and the timing cover alone is a full day's work. [edit] I was going to mention the O-rings. Those weren't a problem at all - since I've been turned on to Molykote, it's the perfect stickum to keep them in place while bolting up the back half of the cover.

One valve in each of two (of the three) cylinders on one side, and less than a thou over, so leaving it alone felt like a pretty safe bet.

Damn straight. Highest level of service available - "RV", which means they tow both the car and the boat trailer it was pulling.

This is why my favourite thing in life is hanging around people smarter than me. Tribology is certainly relevant - and a tractable problem, because it relies as much on empirical data as theoretical, and probably moreso. Rugosity probably less relevant, but kinda more interesting, because it looks like a maddeningly difficult problem to tackle. I really want to dig into the etymology, because it sure sounds like a rug is a perfect example of the problem: We know what the area of the rug is. What is the surface area of all of the rug's fibers? (Back to the problem at hand, though: Started bolting the 3.0 back together tonight, and without doing much to one of the heads - we did a careful cleaning before maybe ten minutes on the emery board, and it handily meets the .002" flatness (warp) spec. A couple of the intake valve clearances were a teentsy bit over, but not enough for me to want to start screwing with the lot. We'll move on to the other head tomorrow morning. Oh - one other thing. I thought it was a good sign that the Mahle head gaskets listed the COO as Japan, but it's better than that. They have the Fuji Heavy Industries logo on them.)

Interesting - I've never had a reason to learn about roughness and its measurement (and I think this is the first time I've run into RMS used outside of an electrical/electronic/acoustic context). I would guess that there are probably relatively low-cost optical profilometers out there these days - or is this measurement capability still a pretty badass thing? Btw, spent three hours in the yard today fetching that set of three (including the one to the oil cooler) coolant hard pipes. Having to pull the manifold for the crossover tube was bad enough, but the heater return tube was trapped behind a pinch point between the head and the frame, so the engine needed a little lifting to squeeze it out. But I got 'em...

I have one head off and sorta cleaned up, and it seems pretty flat to me - I have a good machinist's rule (though it's only 12") and I can't get a .0015" feeler gauge in there anywhere. Unless someone smarter than me thinks I'd be an idiot to do so, I'm thinking that I may put this together without milling the heads - though they might get a pass over the emery board.

No sweat. We - briefly - had an '02 Forester as well. After a deer strike took out our first one ('99), I got the '02 from a local country junkyard for $500. Came with barsted motor. Replacement motor cost another $500, then I put two months worth of work into readying it for an out-of-province inspection, which is much more rigorous than the normal insurance inspection. Passed it. Drove it for two months. Then another fscking deer. So now we have an '01. I'm not crazy about the Foresters anyway, but my girls like it. Back to the '01 H6, though: The body barely casts a shadow, but it's the VDC model, and the McIntosh stereo is sweeeeeeet, so it's worth putting the effort and a few bucks into. Glad I pulled the motor, though. Now that the head is off I can see how much more of a bear it would have been to wrestle in-car.

Okay, so dealer confirmed the part numbers on both of those coolant pipes, and the easy one (return - the one that goes down to the thermostat housing) is available. But they say there are no crossover pipes in Subaru inventory in North America. Since that's the inaccessible one once the motor's back together, I'm acutely concerned about it. A quick search by part number shows it listed by a lot of online parts vendors, but I don't know where to start with those guys. I'm assuming I'll be dealing with the simplest shipping case (i.e. to my MT mailbox), so shipping to Upper Soviet Canuckistan isn't a consideration. Can anyone recommend any online sellers in particular for high probability they have what they say and low bullsh!t?

The intake/exhaust and those other loose ends should be in the Fel-Pro kit. Hope so, anyway, now that I see how many stupid O-rings are on the back of the timing cover...

Used cat <> junkyard. If you find a yard that'll sell you one, it's a unicorn. There's simply too high a premium on the recycled contents for them to be resold.

Their drawings are better, but still wonky - I thought I had one of the pipes but it's showing me a hose clamp. Hoping the dealer is open today (local holiday) so I can talk to them. I think I've sorted out one bit of confusion, though: Only two pipes, not three. The third one is actually an oil crossover pipe. Weird.

Thanks - I think that (subaruonlineparts.com) was one that I was looking at earlier, though it's confusing because - unless I was going in circles - there are a bunch that look the same. Is it unreasonable to think that the catalog should be comprehensive? Because I'm only able to find one of the three pipes in there (Return Pipe 14165AA014). The shipping is kind of a secondary consideration. At the moment I just want to ID the three parts and get a rough costing to see whether the local dealer's pricing is reasonable.

I thought I was going to do this in the car, but a single stripped timing cover screw convinced me to pull the damn thing. (GD: Yes, I know. Don't have either the time or money for that option at present.) Looking to Rock for parts, I would normally get the Mahle MLM gaskets because I've had good luck with them so far, and the price is good at $42 (CAD) each. But I expect I'll need others - one of the spark plug seals has already broken on me, so all the rubber is probably crispy. Unfortunately, I don't know enough at this point to a la carte the gaskets (as I would with an H4), and Mahle doesn't have a full kit. There are full kits (though expensive - triple the price of the head gaskets alone) from Victor Reinz, Ultra Power, Apex, and Fel Pro. I don't think I can trust Fel Pro and don't know much/anything about the others. Can anyone offer a recommendation? I'd lean toward the Reinz kit unless someone has had bad luck with their HGs. Also, what's the best online choice for Subaru parts? The final chapter in my trilogy of overheatings last summer was the hard pipe from the thermostat housing to the heater rusting through, so I need to replace it. And now that I have the intake off, I see that the crossover pipe is the same (no longer cast Al), and there's another one up there too, so I figure I'd better replace the lot. I'd like to get an idea what these are worth. Gotta get all these parts en route ASAFP. [edit] Or maybe I buy the Mahle HGs and the Fel Pro ($105 CAD) or Ultra Power ($120 CAD) kit and just not use the HGs in the kits... [another damn edit] And since it's my first time into one of these engines, is there anything else I should be watching for, any known gotchas??

A file is a pretty bad idea. Even an ignition points file is going to be too coarse and destroy whatever's been deposited on the contact surface, be it gold, palladium, etc. What you really need to use (in addition to contact cleaner/lube, of course) is a contact burnisher, something like this: https://tecratools.com/product615.html

I hope this isn't a gross breach of forum etiquette, but this group is high-traffic and highly trusted, and I've gotten very few hits in the "wanteds and for-sales" section.

That's a lot of weight for a small engine. When we go on camping/sailing trips with one of the ~2000 EJ25s (Outback or Forester), it's four people, our gear, and a boat+trailer that isn't much more than 500 lbs - single axle, no brakes. With that load, there are hills (Alberta, BC, Montana) that the car struggles to climb. The U-Haul empty probably weighs more than our entire load. Others may have more directly relevant experience. Sounds to me like in this case the U-Haul is a very poor choice of trailer if empty it weighs five times the load you plan to move in it.

Me too! I think I can visualize it, but a picture (if anyone happened to have one on file) would be great. How much do they displace?

That doesn't strike me as a good interpretation. Lack of coolant will result in a bad reading, but it shouldn't cause the ECU to see the transducer itself as bad. I would think that error would result from resistance (this is just a thermistor, right?) out of range i.e. open or shorted. Again, though, if it sees it as open it could be because there's a wiring defect, maybe the ground I suggested earlier.

Ground, or lack thereof. That just seems like too many unrelated errors.