Offroading Subarus

  Not wanting a protruding CD player I opted for the new style Digital Media Player, it’s a radio/usb/aux, basically a headunit without a CD player. I bought the Kenwood KMM U256. It’s a fairly capable player with plenty of customisable settings and equalizer. Also it is only 120mm deep! Since this car was fitted with a spacer already, and they did a bit of a hack job at it I decided I needed to… Read More

          I’ve got a 87 Brumby/BRAT which has gone 430,000km. With this distance obviously the seats took a beating. The drivers seat was half colapsed and you could feel it was broken on the edge as well as the rails having severe wear. I had an 01 Outback wreck so I pulled it’s seats, few cuts and welds and in they go. Comparison of the seat rails. Due to the design… Read More

Subaru’s usually have a negative or upright caster angle. This causes the wheel to tuck under (increase in positive camber) when turned in turn causing bad tyre wear on the outside edge of the tyre when turning (especially when driven hard). I touched on this topic back in 09 with the 83 Leone. Have a read here. In that post you can see I changed the radius rods for modified Toytoa Crown rods. This gave… Read More

I had battled with a very sensitive throttle in the BH Outback for 2 years. What the issue is, is you only need the top 10 to 15mm of the pedal for normal driving. This is plenty to accelerate you to 100kph in a respectable time. You may think this is great, the car has so much power! But in reality this makes it extraordinarily hard to keep a constant speed. My first thought was… Read More

Just a quick disclaimer… I would do many things differently if I were to do it again. Mainly I would make a completely custom wishbone instead of using one from another car. The standard control arm and MacPherson strut design on the older Subaru’s is too weak for the racing we compete in. To remedy this problem I decided on converting the front suspension to double wishbone. All this work was done without a lift… Read More

PART 1 – PART 2 At this stage you want to clean all the casings, remove old gaskets, wipe out oil. I find a sharp blade can be useful for cleaning off the silicone and gaskets from the mating surfaces. Make sure you clean off any swarf or tiny bits of contaminants that are on the gears or in the casing. Assembly the main shaft with the input shaft and low range synchro. Ensure the… Read More

PART 1 – PART 3 You may have noticed by now the EA82’s bearing is smaller than the Outback’s. To be precise the the EA82’s bearing is 62 OD, 25 ID and 17mm wide; while the Outback bearing is 68 OD, 28 ID and 18mm wide. The inside diameter is the problem here, as you need to use the Outbacks input shaft casing but also the EA82’s input shaft, You could either make a sleeve… Read More

PART 2 – PART 3 If you are looking for more offroad gearing in your Outback or Forester this might be for you. You will need experience and access to a lathe (preferable a decent one) and tungsten carbide tools, or you will need to take a few parts to get machined to your local machine shop! You will also need a bench grinder. This page is for 8 bolt Subaru EJ D/R gearboxes with… Read More

A common feature to any car is the windscreen washer system. Normally a button located on the steering wheel column stalks that sprays the windscreen while wiping it. But what if your windscreen was very dry and dusty or worse muddy, and you didn’t want to wipe those rubber blades across incase of scratching it? Here is my solution for an 99-04 Gen3 Outback, this may (probably will) be the same on similar aged Liberty/Legacy/Impreza… Read More

Wanting my new Gen3 Outback to be a tourer/camping rig I set out plans to live out the back of the car. I needed enough room to store tools, recovery gear, food, burners, chairs, esky, etc. But I also wanted to fit two people in the back. First thoughts were drawer systems. After much thought that idea became too complicated, wasteful of space and heavy. As I wanted the back seats easily accessible while touring… Read More

Written by N. Stokely One day as I was pulling weeds in a friend’s yard, I happened to notice a seemingly abandoned station wagon sitting on his property. Closer inspection revealed it to be a 1992 Subaru Loyale 4WD. At the time, I was in between cars (mostly on a bicycle) and very short on cash, however, I inquired about that lonely old subie. My friend said it had sat there for about 3 years… Read More

Because of how Subaru wired their headlights in the 80’s you get between a volt and 1.5v loss at the filament. This is because the power for the headlights must go through the steering column dip switch. Even though the headlights have relays on the positive side they are still powered through that switch on the negative side. I can’t really quite understand why they wired like this, and it gets worse… The principle behind… Read More

The idea behind this was the ability of having AWD while not losing the 4WD advantage. Aussie’s won’t know much about the FT4WD gearbox I am talking about and American’s won’t know much about the dual range (D/R) EJ gearbox either. But I will explain everything here. Just so you know, I spent 5 months reseaching this before I bought anything or even pulled apart anything for that matter. The idea spawned from wanting to… Read More

Written by Caboobaroo, from USRM I have done a conversion from points or older electronic distributor to a newer electronic distributor for EA71 vehicles. It was very easy to do because the hardest thing to do is the distributor timing. Anyways, you will need 2 parts to do the conversion. First, you will need a distributor from an ’83-newer EA81 vehicle. Second is the coil and bracket to match it since you will be eliminating… Read More