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Well I've Gone And Done It Again!!! Got Another Subaru!!!


MeanGreenZ28

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The plan is to get her running good first. Have plans of a custom turbo kit but only if I can afford it. Also, this block can't handle much more than a few PSI so it'll be expensive to swap to a wrx or sti engine. I may end up selling it before anything crazy happens, lol

Stig, not that hard to get to spark plugs.

Thanks for the link Scooter, hadn't seen it before.

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The plan is to get her running good first. Have plans of a custom turbo kit but only if I can afford it. Also, this block can't handle much more than a few PSI so it'll be expensive to swap to a wrx or sti engine. I may end up selling it before anything crazy happens, lol

Stig, not that hard to get to spark plugs.

Thanks for the link Scooter, hadn't seen it before.

Good to see an update on this machan... Good luck with the getting her running part. And don't chain up the madness man, where's the fun in that?

Awaiting further updates!

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Well, mounted the new rear main seal and oil separator plate. Here's a pic of them mounted and also the part numbers for the plate and the two different types of bolts required

35684354051.jpg

next is to clean up the front crossmember and the general engine bay area and drop here in!!!

Edited by MeanGreenZ28
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yeah dude, I wish I could afford to do a STi/manual swap right now. At the least, get a wrecked WRX and swap everything. Found one local for $1500 with rear end damage but just couldn't get myself to spend that much right now. Damn family obligations! lol

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Cleaned the front subframe and some of the lower engine bay of all the oil/dirt today. Got most of it, will get the back/underneath later when I can ... or get it steam cleaned when it's on the road. Had heard about it, but I only just noticed the ~2" subframe spacers on the Outback ... may take them off if I plan to lower it later (that would require different shocks I've read).

35684354086.jpg 35684354087.jpg

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Damn, who cut the cheese!?? haa, getting ready to drop the new motor in...

35684354140.jpg

Trying to line up the damn dowels and get the engine and trans mated...

35684354141.jpg

IN!!! Well, my joy was short lived 'cos I forgot to put the TC bolts in, so the intake ducting needs to come back off. Also, only got what I can get from the top, need to complete everything from the bottom next week ... Baltimore Grand Prix starts tomorrow!!!

35684354142.jpg

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thanks guys. Well I haven't had the time to work on the car since I got it running on Monday; have had to run around and help ship some boxes for my mum. Got spark plugs on the way home today so hopefully I can get them in tomorrow and take her for a test drive ... with video if possible.

Ripper, lol dude yeah I have too much shyz!!! also have a welder, toolbox full of tools and an air compressor ... total work is over my wife would like to know, haha. I'd put it all in the $15K range (SnapOn shit is expensive!), gulp! Most of it's what I collected while I worked for the speed shop through college but I'm still paying some of it off on the credit cards 'cos I had to close my shop account and transfer it when I left; can't exactly sell them (man law, lol) ... although I did get the engine hoist for free, haha

Edited by MeanGreenZ28
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Super Job Meangreen! what more needs to be done before she can hit the road?

to pass inspection ... needs a side marker light and I need to figure out why none of the turn signals/etc. aren't working. Also needs new tires, 'cos they've dry rotted and 2 of them keep losing air if they sit for about a week. May just need to be patched, hopefully. Or, I can pay someone and get an inspection ticket written up ... What? no Sri Lankans don't do that ... haha
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thanks guys. Well I haven't had the time to work on the car since I got it running on Monday; have had to run around and help ship some boxes for my mum. Got spark plugs on the way home today so hopefully I can get them in tomorrow and take her for a test drive ... with video if possible.

Ripper, lol dude yeah I have too much shyz!!! also have a welder, toolbox full of tools and an air compressor ... total work is over my wife would like to know, haha. I'd put it all in the $15K range (SnapOn shit is expensive!), gulp! Most of it's what I collected while I worked for the speed shop through college but I'm still paying some of it off on the credit cards 'cos I had to close my shop account and transfer it when I left; can't exactly sell them (man law, lol) ... although I did get the engine hoist for free, haha

heh heh...yeah man.

my wish list of toys too is very long.

compressor, welder, bench drill, pipe bender, circular saw, recip saw, random orbital sander, mini lathe etc etc...

slowly getting stuff without alerting head of ops at home :D

thanks god for these cheap chinese power tools :) for a DIYer they hold up pretty ok and you cant beat the initial cost :)

for other tools like wrenches and stuff i buy the best i can afford...chinese shit wont hold up for those

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Well I spoke too soon about the spark plugs. I guess since there are subframe spacers, the spark plugs line up exactly with the frame rails and there's literally 2"-3" of space to work with. one of the plug boots left it's rubber ring stuck in the plug way deep and it's been a pain in the ass to get it out. Between a cranky 2yr old (because of the next statement) and the wife going out for "girls night out" with the neighbors' wives, I said f*** it and came inside last night

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Finally got the damn plugs replaced. After fighting with the one rubber ring on the plug, I put some glue on the plug boot and reinstalled it, waited a bit and pulled it out again. IT WORKED! Should've thought about that before, it would've saved me a whole lot of asking god for forgiveness for swearing so much! lol

Also, when I replaced the spark plugs I found one spark plug that was in there to be extremely short?! When the spec'd plugs have a thread length of ~1" or so this was like .5" ... it wasn't even close to the combustion chamber! lol

Now I'm still trying to figure out why the damn engine still vibrates so much. It runs very well and has spark and fuel but just vibrates! Gonna re-torque the flywheel/TC tomorrow to see if it's that. Hope it isn't something worst...

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So I re-torqued the flywheel/TC bolts and it got much better, there's still a slight bit of vibration/hesitation when first getting on the gas. May have to run some fuel system cleaner through it ... or maybe re-torque them again; third times the charm! lol

This was the first time I had it running for longer than a few minutes and also outside in the daylight. There was a bunch of white smoke coming out the tailpipe and it got me pretty worried that it may be headgaskets. However, after taking the maiden voyage up and down the street and around the neighborhood, it cleared out and there's only a very slight hint of it now. Possibly was coolant in the exhaust (it dumped a bunch of coolant through the exhaust valves when it blew the block) burning off ...hopefully. it's not perfect, but it'll do for now.

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  • 6 months later...

looks like this thread is my little personal journal on this car .. lol

turns out the engine needs new head gaskets so I pulled the engine out a few days ago and was putting it back together when made an expensive mistake and broke a head bolt in the block. It's sitting at the machine shop right now; hopefuly they can take it out without much fuss or $'s

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Ripper, lol dude yeah I have too much shyz!!! also have a welder, toolbox full of tools and an air compressor ... total work is over my wife would like to know, haha. I'd put it all in the $15K range (SnapOn shit is expensive!), gulp! Most of it's what I collected while I worked for the speed shop through college but I'm still paying some of it off on the credit cards 'cos I had to close my shop account and transfer it when I left; can't exactly sell them (man law, lol) ... although I did get the engine hoist for free, haha

Hey 'MeanGreenZ28' kudos on doing all this yourself. Pretty cool to have that ability and the tools to back it up. Anyways to come back to your point about the tools: So you mean to say that as a mechanic working in a tuning shop you have to buy your own tools? Why would they not just have one or two sets of tools for all the mechanics to share? Isn't it cheaper for all that way? And how does the shop pay you? Do they pay you by the hour or by the job? And what about the cost of using things like the hydraulic lifts, dyno's etc? How does that get charged?

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a typical shop, be it a tuner shop or a mom and pop owned garage, would invest in a few special tools like an alignment rack, air compressor, strut/spring compressor, some special tools if you're speciallized to one Manufacturer/etc. and ofcourse the immovable capitol investments like a lift/etc. ... but the everyday tools are up to the mechanic to provide. That's how it is. If you're a career mechanic, you get used to the stuff you work with and you are going to be very protective of it and it's understood that nobody messes with anyone else tools. Tools are a huge investment but that investment also gets you paid in the long run. Most shops usually have a "tool guy" that visits every week. It's basically a truck filled with tons of tools and you open an account, pick tools you want whenever he comes by and pay the guy in installments. They'll warranty broken tools, give you tips on the best ways to save time with your tools, let you test out the latest and greatest diagnostic devices/etc.

For me, it was a hobby to collect tools. Most specialty tools, I've used just once or twice but not having it would've been worse than buying it for a rainy day. Just today, a broken bolt removal tool I purchased 6-7 years ago came in handy when I broke a bolt in the block ... more on that later, lol.

As for pay, there's different ways of doing it. It's rare that someone just gets paid salary or by the hour (as in working hours at the job, more on that later) in this field; unless you're really junior and help the senior techs. Typically, you get paid a percentage of the hourly rate for the amount of hours called out by the book for that job. Every year, this book/record is updated by manufacturers and aftermarket suppliers giving an estimated time to do the repair/task. So if a head gasket job calls for 10 hours, and the hourly rate a customer pays is lets say $100 (kinda high but it's a nice round figure), and you're paid 25% ... your pay for that job would be $250. You'd get paid the same whether you work hard and do it in 5hrs or slack off and take two days. You work as hard as you want to get paid. I've had 20hr weeks (did it part-time while in college) that I got paid more than the full-time 40hr week guys did 'cos I got really good at certain jobs. Some shops that require you to talk to customers regularly and sell repair work/etc. also give you a commision on the parts sold, but that's pretty rare.

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getting back on the build...

The machine shop couldn't get the broken bolt out; they can't get a drill on it (2 inches below surface and broken off at an angle) and they'd already tried a bunch of stuff and even broken off a drill bit in there. f**k.

Picked up the engine, brought it home and then was talking to an oldskool hotrod guy at work and he and I both stumbled upon using Aluminum Potassium Sulfate (Alum) to dissolve the bolt out; doesn't dissolve aluminum but the acidity dissolves rust realy fast. It was worth a try ... but would take a heck of a long time and I'd have to constantly heat the water for it to do its thing. Gave up on that real quick, lol ... it's more suited for tiny little things.

One thing I remember from my machine design days was using a collar for precision drilling and punching, so I was out to find something hard to use as a collar. I came upon a Chrome socket in my toolbox that fit the bolt hole's counter-bore perfectly and had a hole through that was slightly smaller than 1/4". Stuffed it in the hole with the head downwards and got a drill bit the size of the hole and just pecked at it for a few minutes until I got a pretty decent dimple in the bolt, then just went at it!!! haha, finally was able to get my stud extractor out and use its reversed drill/extractor tool to back the bolt out ... PHEW! what a freaking fiasco!

One head is already on and tomorrow, hopefully, the engine will be ready to drop in ... now the wife says I need to cook tomorrow so that may have to wait, lol A friend's wife is craving hot butter cuttle fish that I've got pretty good at making (remember I'm in USA and we can't just go and get it from a restuarant, lol). Can't complain, I love feeding people...

Edited by MeanGreenZ28
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craving hot butter cuttle fish that I've got pretty good at making...

Vietnamese restaurants make a variation of it: 'Deep fried cuttle fish with hot chilli and garlic' which is pretty close for those less culinary inclined folk...

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a typical shop, be it a tuner shop or a mom and pop owned garage, would invest in a few special tools like an alignment rack, air compressor, strut/spring compressor, some special tools if you're speciallized to one Manufacturer/etc. and ofcourse the immovable capitol investments like a lift/etc. ... but the everyday tools are up to the mechanic to provide. That's how it is. If you're a career mechanic, you get used to the stuff you work with and you are going to be very protective of it and it's understood that nobody messes with anyone else tools. Tools are a huge investment but that investment also gets you paid in the long run. Most shops usually have a "tool guy" that visits every week. It's basically a truck filled with tons of tools and you open an account, pick tools you want whenever he comes by and pay the guy in installments. They'll warranty broken tools, give you tips on the best ways to save time with your tools, let you test out the latest and greatest diagnostic devices/etc.

Yeap, I think I've seen those (snap-on tool) vans in and about the place. I saw an electric powered one the other day, and I thought that it was kinda neat for a commercial vehicle in the automotive tool / repair industry to be promoting that technology.

Interesting info about the tools and the pay rates. Thanks for sharing.

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getting back on the build...

The machine shop couldn't get the broken bolt out; they can't get a drill on it (2 inches below surface and broken off at an angle) and they'd already tried a bunch of stuff and even broken off a drill bit in there. f**k.

Picked up the engine, brought it home and then was talking to an oldskool hotrod guy at work and he and I both stumbled upon using Aluminum Potassium Sulfate (Alum) to dissolve the bolt out; doesn't dissolve aluminum but the acidity dissolves rust realy fast. It was worth a try ... but would take a heck of a long time and I'd have to constantly heat the water for it to do its thing. Gave up on that real quick, lol ... it's more suited for tiny little things.

One thing I remember from my machine design days was using a collar for precision drilling and punching, so I was out to find something hard to use as a collar. I came upon a Chrome socket in my toolbox that fit the bolt hole's counter-bore perfectly and had a hole through that was slightly smaller than 1/4". Stuffed it in the hole with the head downwards and got a drill bit the size of the hole and just pecked at it for a few minutes until I got a pretty decent dimple in the bolt, then just went at it!!! haha, finally was able to get my stud extractor out and use its reversed drill/extractor tool to back the bolt out ... PHEW! what a freaking fiasco!

One head is already on and tomorrow, hopefully, the engine will be ready to drop in ... now the wife says I need to cook tomorrow so that may have to wait, lol A friend's wife is craving hot butter cuttle fish that I've got pretty good at making (remember I'm in USA and we can't just go and get it from a restuarant, lol). Can't complain, I love feeding people...

something similar happened to me sometime ago. managed use a punch to carve out enough material from the broken bolt and stick a flathead in there.

with a lot of wd40, hammering and turning at the same time...managed to pull it out :)

luckily for me,,,the hard bit was to get the initial cooperation from the stuck bolt and once it moved a bit...the rest came out without a fuss :)

I did soaked it with wd40 for like 2 days i think

Since that day....very careful with these engine bolts :P

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