enchained

are you guys sure the older legacy exhaust manifold will work in the impreza (i.e. will it match up at the other end)?

how much more work would it be to make a pre 96 one work? found a 2.2 from 93 legacy with 142k for $300

thanks for the advice folks. I searched on car-part.com and yeah it looks like most of the ones local to me are pretty high mileage - they do have a 94 1.8 with 150k that might be interesting - there are a couple more lots I know of that I don't see coming up on there so maybe they aren't in that database. I have some spring chores to get done so I'm going to back burner this for a few weeks but I'm sure I'll be back with questions once I dig into it =D

here's a video if anyone would like to second my amateur diagnosis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-Whiq0Vkds I am messing with the injector wires in the video, you can hear it go away when I pull #4 and it seems to get louder when I pull the others

Hi folks, I haven't had a Subaru in a few years but I just picked one up. Here's the story: 97 impreza outback, 2.2 auto, 236k. I know the last two owners (since 109k) - both are coworkers, one bought it from the other a couple of years ago. last year it started using coolant, so the previous owner parked it and drove her truck through the winter. she went to start it this spring and the battery was dead, when she went to open the hood to jump it the hood latch cable broke. she decided to junk the thing at this point. I thought it'd make a nice gas saving winter beater if I could fix it (rather than driving the old landcruiser @ 12mpg...) so I offered to match what the junkyard would pay. she called AAA it showed up in my driveway a couple of days ago. I jimmied at the latch through the grill with a screwdriver for a while until I finally hit it just right and got it open. checked for presence of oil and jumped it. It started right up, and I was happy until I noticed....clackclackclackclack...I have heard subaru lifter noise before and it's much more hard and metallic than that. I came in the house and googled a little, went back out, checked the timing belt tension - it seems tight, jumped it again, and started pulling injector wires. sure enough, when I pull #4, the noise is gone - so it sounds like this is a rod knock and this engine is done. I did not grill her too hard about it but I can put 2 and 2 together, using coolant plus not super car-knoweldgable owner = it likely overheated at some point. I guess it's a moot point but I drove it around the block and don't see any signs of HG failure (no milkshake oil, no steam in the exhaust, didn't overheat)... what are my best options for this car? I've never pulled an engine before but I have a shop and tools and more time than money so it might be a fun learning project . I was a little confused as to what will work in it - when I searched there are tons of people talking about 2.5 swaps and so on - I am not trying to get high performance, just a semi reliable good mpg winter commuter. I am into it hardly anything at this point and would be happy if I can get it on the road for a grand or so - think this is possible? from searching it sounds like the consensus is that it's more cost effective to replace with used rather than rebuild? what should I ask for when I start calling junkyards? my objective is cheap and reliable, no go-fast.

Morgan, if you end up switching cars and, er, want to find a home for your BYB EA82 kit, let me know. my plans have been put off for a bit because we're having some issues with our landlord and are trying to find a house (whee).

topic should be self explanatory. I know the fronts are different but I'm not sure about the rears. I need to replace a rear on my '88 turbo and we've found a few good used ones from N/A cars but none from turbos. thanks.

I just went and had a look at the manual...I think you can do what you're talking about if you can get the axle off the diff (you should be able to, mine came off easily, even the one that's stuck at the hub, just had to unbolt the strut & swaybar from the arm and flex the arm down) -- it looks pretty involved compared to just taking the axle out. can you drill the pin out or something? when you say the same thing happened on the other side, do you mean the other axle, or the other side of the pin? I'm assuming at this point that you're not in Duluth since your parts car isn't up here, so if you want to pull the whole mess out of the hub let me know and I'll scan that part of the FSM for ya.

are you in Duluth now? I have another punch if you want to try and push the remains out (it's a craftsman so you can break it all you want =p). I'm not sure about taking the piece in the hub out, I have a set of FSM's now so I can look it up later today (they're up at the house, not here). did you get them loose from the diff ? hopefully you don't end up with the problem i'm having too. one of my rear axles started clicking/rattling last week and I took a look back there and both had split inner boots =( it literally took me about 5 minutes to get the left one out but the right one is completely fused onto the hub end...the pins are all out, the axle just won't budge off the shaft.

blah, don't call it your *fault* =] you act as if it's a bad thing... Chux, talk to me on AIM or call me about the car arrangements -- i have an idea in mind but not exactly what you suggested. I don't think we'll buy another soob, if I want to go the 2 car route it would be cheaper & more sensible for me to keep that crummy old camry my friend offered us for free and mod the turbo in a more offroad-friendly direction. and it may not sound that bad in theory but the parking in our neighborhood sucks, odds are 10:1 i have to park a few blocks away if i come home anytime after about 6pm, and i think we have 2 vacant apts in our building so it's only going to get worse when people move in. we've only lived here for 2 months and i'm already determined to never live in a place without offstreet parking again... i'll talk to ya about it later on. anyway on to mudrat's questions...car has 114k, I assume the tranny is original, seems to be in good order -- no wierd behaviour, fluid is clean. minimal rust, car came from 1200mi southeast of here. I haven't installed a lift before but i'm pretty sure i can manage it, and it sounds like chux might be willing to help anyways. will do on the tranny cooler, dunno about the exhaust, we don't have emissions here but i may just have too much of a consceince...plus the guy we got the car from put brand new stuff on it from the DP back a few months ago so it seems silly to replace it while it's still shiny. I'll post back once we decide what to do. right now i'm busy wrestling with the rear axles, one of them came out in about 5 minutes, other one has stood up to 5 hours of beating and heating and i'm about ready to take a hacksaw to it ;p

thanks for all the replies...I think we're probably going to go for it. I've got a couple things to sort out on the car before I get to doing this so it'll probably be a few weeks, I'll keep ya'll updated once we get to work on it (I think my wife wants to help! she actually took a bunch of automotive tech. stuff in high school, and her dad is a mechanic, so she may very well know more than I do -- i'm pretty much self taught, heh). one question though, can you still buy the byb/ozified kit in the states? I have some reading to do before I decide which kit to go with, but they've got a big red banner about orders being suspended on their webpage, which would make all the research in the world a moot point. also, I'm still trying to sort out in my brain how the 4wd in the 4EAT works in practice. I understand the idea with the computer controlled cluthces and such, and we know it can be locked into FWD with the fuse under the hood. so if it really works like an open center diff and I can get stuck spinning only one wheel, couldn't I just -- if it's a rear wheel that's spinning, put it in FWD momentarily via the fuse (wired to a switch on the dash), and if it's a front wheel that's spinning, yank the parking brake, stopping the front wheels & sending power to the rear? and does anyone know if it really is like an open center if you wire up a switch like in the thread i originally linked to? A tranny fluid cooler sounds like a good idea, I'll look into that. I must confess i've never owned an automatic car before so I need to do some research =] does the AT oil temp warning light come on at a low enough temperature that it'll be useful to avoid doing damage? I'll try and find a rear LSD too, but I'm not all that hopeful about my prospects around here, and the ones that pop up on ebay now and then are on the spendy side. and i think my mom would be annoyed if i stole the one from her forester:rolleyes: which isn't the right ratio anyway.

how much lower is "much lower"? can I frankenstein the mounting bits in such a way that I won't lose the height? I'm 6'1" and fit fine with the GL-10 seats, wouldn't want to be much taller, but I've yet to hit my head....on the other hand my wife is like 5'4" and I don't want to make her sit on a phone book =]

I'm not terribly impressed by the stock GL-10 seats comfort wise, but the standard I'm going by is Volvo 240 seats, which isn't exactly fair -- when the floor on that car finally rusted out part of me really wanted to take the seats out, bolt them to a piece of wood, and stick them in the living room. I'm not sure that would've made me terribly popular around the house though ;]

hi, recently I caught a glimpse of a set of XT6 seats in a friend's wagon...is there any functional difference between these and the seats in my GL-10? I'm thinking about picking a set of these up mainly for the reason that they look about 100 times nicer than mine (i don't really like the drab blue-gray interior in my car, heh) and the fabric seems a bit more durable. I already have the height adjust and lumbar and stuff, just wondering what other differences there are other than the fabric -- same height? any difference in side bolstering? etc... thanks.

Well, we've had our new old subaru for all of 2 weeks, and after spending a few minutes in the presence of board member Numbchux's rather sweet lifted wagon (my wife and I were *both* drooling all over it...how often does harmony like that happen? it's a sign )it's been settled that we've *got* to do this with ours. Neither of us have any hard core off-road experience but we've both played around a bit -- I had a smashed up old Cherokee in high school that I bought for $600 and had plenty of fun with, but it was more along the lines of "whee, a rutted up muddy parking lot!!" than serious trails and stuff like that. I probably would've kept that thing except I ended up commuting ~700 miles round trip from college to home and back every weekend and it had some downright scary handling characteristics on the highway due to crash damage. anyway, I'm not interested in building a serious rock-crawling machine, I just want to play in mud & deep snow, and be able to explore whatever funky little trails I can find out in the woods up here. The troublesome bit is, our car ('88 turbo wagon, fulltime 4wd, 4EAT auto trans) isn't exactly ideal for offroading. A second dedicated off-road rig isn't an option due to living circumstances (apartment, parking on the street, i *do* have access to a garage to work on the car but I don't live where the garage is). It must remain an automatic for my wife -- this is actually why I bought the turbo car, in order to get the supposedly more reliable & better driving 4-speed auto, I couldn't care less about the extra 20 hp, if I wanted a fast car I'd have bought something else . It also needs to remain reasonably reliable (duh) since it's our only car. given all this, am I nuts considering a lift for this car? are the full-time auto trans & lack of D/R going to make it useless for offroading anyway? some searching turned up this post showing a way to get the 4EAT to lock up like "real" 4wd so I'm not worried about that, and I guess I'm hoping that the torque converter can help make up for the lack of low range. maybe if I'm lucky it'll let me get enough rpm's up to get into boost even. I searched the forums hoping to find someone who's offroaded a turbo/auto before but no such luck. I'm also wondering if the auto will cause problems with the lift install, I'm presuming that the makers of the popular lifts assume (with good reason) that everyone's going to be running a manual D/R trans, so I'm afraid I might end up with problems with the tranny crossmember, shift linkage, and so on. anyone with experience on that?

Hi there, last week after a lengthy sequence of events touched off by my little corolla wagon developing a rather nasty rod knock I drove a crummy old truck 1200 miles away from my home, deep in the land of really rusty old cars, bought an '88 GL-10 4wd turbo wagon, and drove it back home, leading most of the people that know me in real life to decide i'm completely insane , but anyway I much enjoyed the trip and the car. this is my first old soob and really the only one I've been in for more than a few minutes (my mom has an '02 5-speed forester which is quite nice, but also quite out of my price range) so I'm sure this board will be quite a handy resource. er, I'm not really sure what else to say, I had a couple of questions originally but searching managed to answer them. I suppose I was just saying hi...and maybe I'd better apologize in advance for whatever stupid questions I end up asking =] anyway, back outside to get back to learning a new engine bay =]