amptramp

Just a follow up and thanks to all who responded. I have a small 12 volt solar panel and I decided to use that as a power source to supply the necessary dark current to retain memory when I swapped out the positive battery terminal. I cleaned and reused the negative terminal as it was not a problem and it was either silver-soldered or spot-welded to the cable. I used a marine battery terminal with a lead body, steel screw and brass wingnut to replace the copper terminal that had fractured in two places and was not making contact. The solar panel was almost good enough and it was a cloudy day here in the Toronto area. I had to bore out the two positive cable terminals to fit the battery terminal but it all worked. The voltage never went to zero in the car but not everything was preserved. One of the radio presets was preserved but not the rest. The clock was about twenty minutes out from where it had been. But the idle speed was at 650, a welcome relief from the 500 it would have been with no voltage on the system, so this is one in the win column. The lead terminal on a lead battery post means no more blue copper salts all over the place. The old terminal had fractured in two places so it was never going to work longer than a month and I would not want to be outside in the weather we are going to get a month from now. I used the alternator screw for the positive connection and one of the grounds on the intake manifold for the negative connection of the solar array. The red cap on the alternator terminal has a push-to-release tab on the battery side so don't manhandle it. I'll save the other battery terminal for the next car.

The copper terminals on the battery are almost completely digested on my 2009 and I want to swap them out for lead terminals but there is one problem with that. When the battery is reconnected after being disconnected, the idle speed drops to 500 rpm and only over a period of a week in commuting service does it come back to normal. Apart from using another supply to maintain voltage during the changeover, is there a way of defeating the stupidity programmed into the CPU? As it is, this is dangerous to drive once the battery is reconnected.

You don't necessarily need a torch to loosen nuts and bolts. I was doing the rear brakes recently and found one bolt impossible to remove. I used a heat gun on the high setting and much to my surprise, I could loosen it after that. The problem with a torch is the bolts are heat-treated and if they get too hot they suffer a permanent loss of strength and there is nothing to tell you that has happened.

A colleague of mine once offered me his wife for $5000 because she somehow managed to bend the left front wheel of his then new Alfa Romeo GTV. (This was in 1971.) If your wife is on to you to sell her, see what kind of offers you get for her from someone willing to pad out his harem.

Do I hear a call for a Cannonball Baker sea-to-shining-sea memorial trophy dash to the west?

I had a 1988 RX-7 convertible until 2008 (2nd gen). It was a great car for highway cruising but it was a glutton for fluids - fuel, oil, antifreeze, brake fluid, it chugged them all back like a frat boy at a kegger. Then I got the Miata - four horsepower less but 600 pounds less.

The 2nd and 3rd generation Mazda RX-7 had a neat battery terminal / fuse block: It has four fuses (including a 120 amp one, three 30 amp fuses and a 40 amp fuse plus a puller for the 30 amp fuses.

I have had rear pads and rotors for a while and installed the left side a year ago because it had ground itself to powder back then. I did the right side yesterday because it finally had the steel pad backing touch the old rotor. It's official. I'm decrepit. Muscles I never use are complaining. My knees used to be in great shape but not anymore. My ability to find tools has disappeared. A set of impact socket extenders that would have made the job easy have gone AWOL. What I did learn is that a heat gun is your friend. It got a stuck socket off a screw and got the rotor off easily that could not be removed by any degree of hammering. I have seen mechanics use a torch to do this sort of thing before but my daughter went camping this weekend and took all the propane bottles, so it was nice to see a heat gun was adequate for the job.

The redneck cooler and BBQ combined into one compact appliance:

I might add that one popular and cheap aero mod with the first-generation Miata (easy to recognize - they have pop-up headlights) is the PNU - pool noodle upgrade. You can tuck a standard pool noodle up into the "parachute" section of the bumper and there are pickup points that you can zip-tie it to. Less than $2 to gain more than 1% in horsepower on the highway? Miata drivers will take that deal all day long. My Miata is a second-generation - nowhere near as easy to execute on that one but still worthwhile.

I have a Legacy wagon (non-turbo) and a Miata and one popular mod for the Miata is to cut the rear bumper upward to the support since the lower part of the bumper acts like a parachute. One person used fluid dynamics analysis to show this saved seven pounds of drag at 75 mph or the loss of 1.4 horsepower. The Legacy bumper is obviously wider so more power would be lost. What some people are doing is adding a diffuser at the back with some underbody streamlining. This could be a good project for someone. We already have a thread on streamlining so that would be a natural discussion to conduct there. This is an example: Normally the bumper is one smooth line from side to side at the level of the sides. Some people offer diffusers of dubious value to augment the venturi effect under the body.

How much oil have you been adding between oil changes? These cars chug down oil like a frat boy drinks beer at a kegger and the good readings may be from new oil. And I will second the question of apexi: what oil are you using?

I always used Wix filters for every other car I had but I had a problem where Wix filters would unscrew themselves on the Subaru. I currently have an Amzoil filter on the car now and this seems to hold tight with no problems. It got to the point where I would have to get under the car and hand-tighten the Wix filter on a monthly basis. The oil in a Subaru seems to have the same mindset as a 10 mm socket - it keeps trying to escape.

I had the timing belt replaced at 226,000 km and the shop that did the replacement used a Continental kit. They said they had used Aisin but had belt breakages with them, so they don't use Aisin anymore.

As a further permutation of the dash issue, mine is not sticky but the dust on it will not wipe off. Maybe I'm not down to the surface level where it does get sticky.

I wasn't there for it, but they did claim to have removed the dash. I said to the service consultant that I understood there was a way to swap out the airbag without removing it but he just said, "We don't do shortcuts." I am not sure what the vehicle was that I was transported in. It had eight seats originally but had the middle row of seats removed and a plastic barrier behind the driver for COVID protection.

I finally got the Takata airbag recall done today. In at 10:00 AM, done by 3:00 PM. Since there was no one else to bring me back in the morning or get me there when it was done, they had their driver take me in a 2.4 litre turbo SUV. That thing could move when he wanted it to. Basically, it was a 7-seat 3-row SUV with the middle row taken out. The entry was high, like stepping into a helicopter, and the head clearance was low. I don't think I would be in the market for an SUV.

We have a thread somewhere about the seatbelt indicator lights being faulty due to poor solder connections. This is located in the overhead module above the windshield. The first thing to check is whether these indicators are showing the actual status of seatbelt connection / occupancy and if they are not correct, resolder them, preferably with lead-tin eutectic (63% tin, 37% lead) because the original problem was poor connections in the overhead module due to the use of lead-free solder. I did have this problem and corrected it by following the advice of that thread. Apparently the indicators are necessary for the logic to operate correctly. The resoldering fix takes about 15 minutes if you are lazy. Could someone please let me know where this thread is?

I believe the old saying applies here: Virtue is its own reward. You have a fleet of Subarus. How much better can life get?

The Parrot and Thanksgiving A young man named John received a parrot as a gift. The parrot had a bad attitude and an even worse vocabulary. Every word out of the bird's' mouth was rude, obnoxious and laced with profanity. John tried and tried to change the bird's attitude by consistently saying only polite words, playing soft music and anything else he could think of to 'clean up' the bird's vocabulary. Finally, John was fed up and he yelled at the parrot. The parrot yelled back. John shook the parrot and the parrot got angrier and even more rude. John, in desperation, threw up his hand, grabbed the bird and put him in the freezer. For a few minutes the parrot squawked and kicked and screamed. Then suddenly there was total quiet. Not a peep was heard for over a minute. Fearing that he'd hurt the parrot, John quickly opened the door to the freezer. The parrot calmly stepped out onto John's outstretched arms and said "I believe I may have offended you with my rude language and actions. I'm sincerely remorseful for my inappropriate transgressions and I fully intend to do everything I can to correct my rude and unforgivable behavior." John was stunned at the change in the bird's attitude. As he was about to ask the parrot what had made such a dramatic change in his behavior, the bird spoke-up, very softly, "May I ask what the turkey did?" HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO MY AMERICAN FRIENDS!

I have tried NAPA Wix filters before and found that they loosen themselves after a period of time and have to be retightened on a regular basis. I am now running an Amzoil filter which has no such problem. I may try something cheaper next time - there has to be a decent filter out there that doesn't cost a ridiculous amount. As for the Subaru filter, there isn't one. Subaru does not manufacture oil filters, they buy them in. This is similar to the situation with my Miata where the filters that came on the car were Tokyo Roki filters but if you buy a filter at the Mazda dealership, it is a rebranded Fram, which is a low-quality filter.

My wife and I just got back from a weekend vacation up in the Muskoka and Haliburton regions. There was frost on the lawns in Huntsville on Saturday morning but the day was quite nice. The tree colours are turning. Huntsville has Three Guys and a Stove, the best restaurant south of North Bay (where the French influence makes even a food court at a mall a gourmet experience). The next day was the trip through Dwight and Dorset to Haliburton, a town in a land of hills. I had often left the Subaru in cruise control to maintain speed but I had never heard the automatic transmission downshift two gears to maintain speed on a hill - some places are steep. There was a lot of fog over Hall Lake in Haliburton in the morning but it had dissipated by 10:00 AM, just like the weather San Francisco used to have. We went north to Dorset, west to Bracebridge then around Lake Muskoka to Port Carling to Port Sandfield to Rosseau. This is a very wealthy district - once going into Rosseau from the west, I saw four men and a woman standing at the side of the road waiting for their car to come. No mistaking the woman - nobody else looks like Goldie Hawn. And her cottage is across the lake from one owned by Martin Short. We headed back to Huntsville and then south to Toronto. On the way back to Huntsville, we saw a couple of flocks of pheasants and on the road to Dorset, we say a wild turkey (the bird, not the beverage). Saturday was the first day I missed being on the boards this year. If you are travelling around, be aware that a lot of restaurants are only open for takeout meaning their washrooms are off limits, so this can be a problem if you don't plan or if you eat too much.

Washed and waxed the wagon yesterday but my version of washing and waxing went from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM because I include washing the gas filler recess and door, the four door jambs and metal parts of the door that are only visible when the doors are open and the body parts revealed by opening the liftgate. My supply of Mother's carnauba wax is dwindling. I also did some cleanup under the hood. We have a trip scheduled for the weekend beginning Friday night that will take us through Barrie to Orillia to Bracebridge to Huntsville and a lot of other places in the Muskoka and Haliburton areas.

Remember that tail/stop light I replaced a couple of days ago? I had to do it again. The lamp I used to replace it with burned out as soon as power hit it and both the tail and stop filaments burned out. I replaced it with another one that seems to be working. It was a Sylvania 7443 and they are sold in blister packs of two (so you might get one good one out of it). I have had trouble with short life on Sylvania bulbs before but this one turned milky as if they forgot to evacuate the air out of it. These came from Parts Source, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Canadian Tire. I wonder if I can get half my money back for the defective one. I will definitely try another supplier next time I need any lights.

Among all the posts about massive builds and intricate repairs, I replaced the right-side stop light bulb yesterday with the standard 7443 factory incandescent bulb featuring 19th century technology. I was born to work on steampunk cars.