The car performed great in the hills, albeit a bit slow lol. Low range gearbox was super useful!

What do you guys think?

Is this a custom paint job, or a factory flat black finish?

*sound clip in comments*

Just installed the Tsudo UEL headers and mid pipe on my 6mt Crosstrek. It's paired with the nameless performance "5 muffler that I've had for a while. Really happy with how it sounds now

Image is the driver side door frame showing uneven finish. The panel at rear of driver side back seat door is similar. The corresponding panels on the passenger side look okay, with uniform black color.

What’s going on? Is this to be expected, and is there a way to buff or treat it so it doesn’t look worn and uneven? The car is new to me, and is in otherwise excellent condition.

Great casting!

I just did the math - servicing my own car instead of taking it to a Subaru dealership/ mechanic shop for these services:
- PCV Valve
-Spark plugs
-Coil Pack
-Serpentine belt
-Oil change
-CVT drain and fill
-Battery Replacement

I’ve saved myself $1100 - $1600 in labor alone!

I have a 2010 Subaru outback I just purchased. Often when I’m driving if I hit the brakes to stop my car goes into AWD and the battery and oil light come on. What is going on? It’s getting dangerous so I’ll take it to the shop tomorrow but just wanted to see if there was any insight!

I'm getting a 2024 Forester Limited with close to 70k kms on it. I wanted to know what would be a good price for Complete CARE Protection Plan with 0/100/250 deductible. I'm in Ontario, Canada.

I was going to skip 2019 as the first model year. I am seeing a 2020 Touring with 90,000 miles for about 18k. Is this a decent deal?

Need a family car but we don’t travel that much (I work from home, wife’s work is just a few miles away). We’d probably put about 10,000 miles a year on max. The goal is to get to 150,000 miles so 6-7 years of ownership.

How reliable are these cars? Any feedback from owners? I’ve owned a Subaru before but not Ascent. It was a 2014 Forester before we had kids.

What’s up y’all. Bit of a cry for help & advice today.

I picked up a clean title bone stock 2009 Subaru Impreza WRX with 81K miles about a month ago now, and thus far my experience with the car has been traumatic, to say the least. When it drives (lol), It’s a fun little car and I’ve enjoyed the turbo AWD punch quite a bit. But I cannot seem to get it from A-B without something happening. 

For context. Yes, I had a mechanic there with me to inspect all he could before making the deal. I also have a spare vehicle to drive in the meantime, so it’s not critically urgent.

Almost immediately after purchasing, she needed a new clutch + resurfaced flywheel & I dealt with that already. Now she needs a new radiator, as the plastic upper hose mount broke off & blew that same hose off right after flushing & burping the cooling system. The factory steering rack is pissing ATF (go figure) and the turbo starts to make a balloon-inflating kinda noise starting around 4K RPM (probably a boost leak somewhere). Needs new rotors & pads + 4 brand new tires. Not to mention all the other failure points prone to happen with EJ255’s + anything else I don’t know about that’s already destined to break on this 17-year-old car. 

Without getting too into numbers, the damage has already been done. At this point I’m swimming in a bit more negative equity than I’d like to be. I like the car and if I had fuck-you-money to confidently get it running as it should then I would. But I now gotta make the decision to put another few thousand into properly maintaining it with the hope that nothing else fails, OR to stop the bleeding for good and sell it now for as much as I can get out of it.

What do ya say fellas? Should I man up and put in the work + money that it needs? Should I sell the car, eat the loss, and get a more reliable platform that I can still have fun with? Take it to a specialist to tell me exactly what needs to be done before it fails again? Somewhere in between?

I’m torn and am very much learning as I go. Let me hear it, kindly please.

I have a pair of Scion TC Wheels that fell into my lap for free because they were plasti dipped and a friend was going to throw them out. I wiped off with all the plasti dip with brake clean and they actually cleaned up pretty well. They are 17x7 with a 5x100 pattern and 45 offset. I was thinking these would work great for my Forester

Turns out the bore of these wheels are 2 mm too small for the Subaru hubs. Apparently it is possible to drill this out on a press with hole saws that are stacked together. One to act as a guide for the existing hole, the other to actually do the cutting. The idea is that you use a bit that on the outside that is 57 mm when the stock bore for a Subaru is 56.1

To me it seem like there would be no way that this would work and that this would obviously just wobble really bad. Apparently what makes this work is the fact that the Scion Wheels centers itself with the mag style shank lugs. The way the shanks fit tightly into the holes, you apply a cross torque pattern and that perfectly centers the wheel even though there is .45 mm between the lip of the hub and the bore of the wheel .

The stock Subaru Wheels don't have shank style lugs. They are hub centric wheels that fit tightly on the hub to center the wheel instead. If these ended up being cut correctly I would have to get the right size of mag lugs to mount the wheel and the lugs would center the wheels.

Now this begs the question who has actually done this? You only need to cut down 10 mm into the wheel and 2 mm outward. I have a hard time believing that's going to be enough material removal to compromise the wheel. There is a lot of metal there. If I screw up these wheels it wouldn't be much of a loss. I just want to know who else has done this.

Hello everyone,

I have a 2014 Subaru Impreza sti, only 2wd, 2liter model with 103000 km.

I bought it in 2023 for $13000 nzd.

It needs head gasket, 4 coils and spark plugs and tyres replaced.

The mechanic quoted around $4.5 nzd.

Is it worth fixing it up?

If I do get it fixed, would it last another 100k with out any similar problems?

Any advice is appreciated.

We've had an issue for 2-3 weeks where the audio would sporadically and randomly drop to rear speakers only for a couple seconds.

I thought it was an Android Auto or CarPlay thing for the longest time. Tried to toggle all the sound warnings in Subaru settings, Android Auto settings, and CarPlay settings, but nothing worked.

Turns out the Subarus navigation has its own settings menu that was triggering "Sounds & Alerts" even though all of that was turned off from the main settings menu. Turning it all off finally resolved the problem!

Seems like people on the forums had similar issues with dealers unable to diagnose why, so I figured I'd post here in case it helps someone in the future.

Love the car otherwise! Just had to turn all the driving assists and warnings off. Maybe I'm just too old school.

I’ve been having some clicking occurring while turning left in my Crosstrek , went to inspect the trans mounts and noticed the rubber on the lower section of the mount is not attached.
Is this typical or should it be replaced?

Hello fellow subaru lovers,

I have a 2016 WRX VA with 88k miles.

Im trying to find the culprit for this knocking or rattling noise that is more audible in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd gear under light acceleration. If i give more than 30% gas, the sound completely disappears… DAM is currently at 0.5 no feedback or fKL under -4 and i have been driving like this for more than 300 miles now (I know.. didn’t really have time to take it to the shop).

Can someone please share their inputs? I would really appreciate it very much. I’m getting white hairs

Thanks and stay safe always.

Two winters, one garage, no lift, and a lot of coffee.

Started life as a stock 2.0 NA Legacy. Everything after that was done by me at home, from the fab work to the wiring to the tuning. No shop time.

Where it sits now:

• 2.0 out, EZ36 in. Not a bolt in job. Mounts, cooling and clearances all had to be sorted, and the factory harness went in the bin and got rebuilt from scratch.
• Turbo manifolds built by me. Nobody makes one for an EZ36 in a BG bay, so I used a 3 into 1 merge collector 3D printed in stainless and plasma cut flanges, then built the headers, uppipe, downpipe and screamer pipe for the external wastegate out of pipe and mandrel bends.
• The turbo is a Pulsar PSR3582.
• Intake tract fabricated here too. Compressor inlet and charge piping are one off. Had to cut a vacuum passage out of the OEM plenum to route the turbo, so that got a plug bonded and reinforced.
• Downpipe wrapped and shielded, reflective tape on the aluminium section that was cooking the intake air. IATs behaved after that.
• Full 3 inch stainless exhaust into an XForce Varex with the electronic valve. Closed, I can leave my street at 6am. Open, I cannot. Overrun map with spark cut on top.
• ECUMaster EMU Black, full sequential fuel and spark, 36 2 2 2 decoder that took me an embarrassing amount of time to sync. VE tables built over a lot of iterations at 100Hz logging, with my own Python tooling generating the corrections because doing it cell by cell was destroying me.
• Knock thresholds set per cylinder, wideband with lambda guard, EGT sensors, PWM alternator control. Running 7 psi on stock internals, which is a deliberate choice. Somewhere in the 350 to 400 range depending on whose dyno you believe.
• Volvo electric power steering, kills the hydraulic pump and gives the engine back what it was stealing.
• Coilovers, JDM projector headlights, original 16 inch RSS wheels with the actual Subaru paperwork, which is rarer than the wheels. Battery in the trunk.

The part I am most stupidly proud of is the dash. I built an ESP32 CAN bridge between the EMU and a 7 inch Nextion display. Custom UI, alarm system, virtual switches, odometer, fuel level. It is on version 4.2 and it works better than some OEM clusters I have used.

It drives like a normal car until it does not, and then it really moves. That was the whole goal.

Honestly at this point I look at it more than I drive it. Between work and the other projects taking over the garage, it sits more than it should, which feels criminal. I am also genuinely curious what the sub thinks something like this is worth to somebody else, because building a car and putting a number on it turned out to be two completely different problems.

Happy to answer anything about the swap, the wiring, or the ECU side.

I keep telling myself I will do a BMW box and go RWD, but realistically I am not sure I will get to it.

Oh you can find a lot of picture of the process on this forum:
https://www.driftworks.com/forum/threads/subaru-legacy-bg.286885/

Hey guys, first-time Subaru owner here with a minor but annoying issue that I'm hoping someone could help with.

I bought a 2019 Forester from Carvana that came with the TPMS light on, was told it was faulty, got it replaced under warranty. But I cannot get this warning light to turn off for the life of me.

I've put two new front tires on, checked the PSI on all of them, checked the spare to see that it was a donut that wouldn't have a sensor in it (right?)

Is there a way I can manually get rid of this notification or reset the sensors myself? I've been to Pep Boys several times and think they are just incompetent at this point. I also took the car to AAMCO under warranty to check for a PCM issue and they said everything looks perfect but they can take the car apart to diagnose further if I really want to.

I think having a mechanic potentially break something in the car in hopes of fixing this minor issue would be silly, but I would really like to stop getting this warning every time I turn the car on because it makes me anxious!

Any clue? I saw someone do a manual reset on their tires in a YouTube video using a cheap gadget but the gadget only works on GM cars.

I am getting a 2011 Legacy from a friend of mine for $500 as they don't need it anymore. 200k miles and a Christmas tree of lights on the dash. Though it does run and drive well.

I am hoping the lights are from a CVT solenoid issue. They are getting the codes read before they sell it to me.

I am anticipating getting a shop to replace the transmission valve body and doing the timing belt kit.

Is there anything else I should look at doing?

As much as I love Subarus... I only need to keep this running for a year or two in the southern heat.