[2001 Forester Catylitic Converter or Blown Engine?]

If your O2 sensor has been failing for sometime you could have burned out the cat. Too rich or too lean for an extended period of time will cause your cat to fail. You'll know real quick if you try to smog it. Too lean will burn it out and your HC (hydrocarbons) will be way high. Too rich and you will "plug" the cat and you'll lose power. My father has a Dodge truck with a 360 that he bought with a bad cat. Those trucks run rich so it plugged it. Luckily it was under the 7 or 8 years manufacturers are forced to give on cats so the dealer put a new one on. I was there when my father drove home with a huge grin on his face and ripped the tires loose in the driveway... like a kid in a candy store. He said it was making gobs more HP after the new cat.

 

 

forgive my ignorance . . what do you mean by "smog it" how is that done?

[2001 Forester Catylitic Converter or Blown Engine?]

Mobil One every 6k-7k miles so oil maintainence is not the problem.. . not sure of the exacte code . . my mechanic said 'bad catylitic converter' thanks for the advice

[2001 forester . . rear struts]

the rear suspention on my 2001 forester seems to be getting kinda soft . . how hard is it to replace the struts yourself? anyone know?

[2001 Forester Catylitic Converter or Blown Engine?]

My 2001 forester has 90k miles on it. . easy, highway miles. The car runs great. The check engine light has come on and off now for the past 2 years. In as much as the car was running great . . i paid little attention to it. In the past 3 months the car appears to be using more oil than normal. I took it to my mechanic (not a subaru dealer) to check it out. The check engine light indicates that there is a problem with the catylitic converter. There is a small amount of black on the tailpipe. My mechanic . . admiting that it is difficult to diagnose, told me this could be signs of bad valve seats or piston rings. . . or . . if the oil consupmtion is less than a quart per 1500 miles . . a bad converter.

 

i did some research on line and there appears to be a known problem with the catylitic converter and the O2 sensors for this car . . .

 

is this engine really going bad? or is it just a converter problem? any thoughts???