Oscar

Some have asked about the special made for Subaru wrenches... They were a special-order item through our local Subaru dealership. It took about a week for it to come. I was under the impression that they were ordering the tools from a third party vender, rather than from Subaru itself. The wrenches I purchased were: Camshaft pulley wrench -- item #499207300 Crankshaft pulley wrench -- item #49977300A While it may not be necessary to have these wrenches to do the job, I found that they made doing the job a pleasure. I reasoned that since I was about to part with over $1000.00 by having the dealership do the job, $269.38 in comparison was a small investment towards making the job easier for myself to do as well as being able to use the tools over and over in the future, should the need arise. Thanks guys for the great feedback!

Thanks to all of you on this forum, I now have no more oil leaks! I own a '96 Outback with a DOHC 2.5 L engine with about 180,000 miles on it that one day began to leak oil profusely. At stop lights, a cloud of black smoke would come bellowing out from beneath the car, where the oil had splashed upon the exhaust system and was being burned off. When I would park, a puddle of oil would mark the spot. After a week of driving as such, I finnally made the time to take it down to the local Subaru dealership. They took a look at it and said, "We need to replace the crankshaft oil seal, the camshafts oil seals, and the valve cover gaskets. The timing belt will need replacing as well, due to being soiled by the oil. Oh, and your front brakes have less than 10% left on the pads and need to be replaced. Also you need new tires." "Oh?" I responded, "What would the repair cost be on just fixing the oil leak?" "For just that repair, it will be just over $1000.00 - that would include a new timing belt." "Thank you for the quote," I replied, "I won't be having it repaired at this time." I came home with my leaky vehicle and began reading this forum. First I downloaded the Subaru Shop manual from a link I got at this forum (http://techinfo.subaru.com/html/index.jsp). [incidently, I paid about $20.00 for a 72 hour subscription during which time I downloaded it. It took about me 2.5 hours with a T-1 connection to download all of the various sections and subsections.] After studing it, I decided to purchase two Subaru specialty tools through the Subaru dealership -- a crankshaft pulley wrench and a camshaft pulley wrench. These tools were expensive (About $250.00 all together), worth every penny, making the repair job work out very smoothly, a real pleasure. I also purchased a torque wrench from Snap-on [One I was wanting to get for a long time - now I had a justification for doing so!]. I took the frontend of the engine apart, all the pulleys, timing belt and all off, and examined where the leak was occuring. The camshaft seals were perfect - no leak whatsoever. The crank shaft oil seal was a different story. The seal literally fell out of its position as I examined it. The rubbers were all hard and clearly had no sealing ability. The valve covers appear to be o.k. I got a new crankshaft seal from Subaru and replaced the old one. Put a new timing belt on. Put the thing all back together and the car purrs like a happy cat. She appears to run even smoother then ever and no oil leaks! (I chose not to replace the camshaft seals or the valve cover gasket at this time in that they seem to be in excellent working condition.) The cost of the entire job came out to be less than half what the dealership was wanting AND I got some awesome tools out of the whole deal that will come in handy in the future should I ever need them. But I must admit, if it wasn't for this forum and all of you who posted your experiences of repairing such oil leaks, I probably would have given in to the dealership, thinking that the job was to overwhelming for me to do. So thanks guys! It was fun working on the car and I saved a whole lot of money in the process. Keep up the posting!! P.S. The dealership was wrong about the brakes. They had 30% still remaining - no need to replace the pads at this time. I did however get a brand new set of tires.