doublechaz

I can imagine a ring that hangs up bad sometimes and passes a lot of oil. More than that I can imagine a PCV that hangs up sometimes and passes a lot of oil. Even a new one. Especially a new one, really. I can't see a valve seal coming in and out like that. The cats can scrub out a fairly large amount of burning oil, but it is very bad for the cat to do that. I would start by taking the intake tube off of the throttle body and checking the inside point where the PCV joins in and see if there is evidence of oil there. Better yet would be to clean it all out with carb clean and then check it after some driving. I would also try to minimize driving as much as you reasonably can until you have proved that the cats aren't eating a lot of burned oil.

For a considerable time I programmed the head unit in my 300 to show the Subaru logo on boot. Because I love my Subaru so much. Eventually I switched it back to a Chrysler logo because it always made me want to get out and get in the Subaru.

Last time I had my engine out I couldn't get the hill holder to behave even though I followed the manual on it. I learned without one, so I pinned it wide open and fagedaboutit. But since you are sure that isn't it I +1 to the booster vacuum line. Try running with it removed and capped at the manifold.

I put Whiteline diff bushings in my 2nd gen. It is pretty hard to get the old ones out and not great getting the new ones in. But it is fixed right.

I got mine from a junkyard. Probably the only option.

Huh. Is that a wrong key thing, or is there a switch? Good detail to know.

Blyat!

That sounds and shakes like it is running on one bank of cylinders. Have you confirmed compression is within spec?

That is tough that you can't get any live engine data. I'm surprised it doesn't have at least some of OBDII as my 95 USDM has it even though it wasn't required until 96. I don't suppose you can find anyone with the Subaru Select Monitor equipment and adapters for that market and year. When I had the massive intake leak I don't believe it set any codes as the MAF was electrically OK, it was just reading implausibly low air flow since all the air was coming in through the leak. Seems like the early ECUs only set electrical fault codes and didn't really do the reading out of range stuff like more modern ones. But mine only ran for like 8 seconds at a time, so that is a bit different. Am I right that it runs smooth and correct until it shuts down? One thought, if there was a strange problem with your water temp sensor for the ECU, not the one for the dash guage, then the ECU might get real mad. I'm thinking where the sensor shows the temp climbing from cold up util it hits a non-continuous response and suddenly the ECU thinks it is -44 and dumps a crap ton of fuel in. You would need to multi meter the sensor output to see that without the engine data. You could also partly test this by finding out if there is raw fuel in the exhaust right after it dies. Another thought would be to get an oldschool timing light on it and see if spark breaks up and goes away at the point when it dies. I've seen an ignition coil puke but only after it gets hot. Drive aroundd the block kind of thing. An analog fuel pressure gauge would also be nice. Could be that the fuel pump activation relay pukes after a certain amount of run time heats it up. Or even the pump itself, although I've only seen that kind of failing pump give it a fairly long stumbling die out. Once it dies after warmup, does it die quick on each restart with whatever is hot, or does it take minutes after each restart? Another thing the early ECUs don't set codes for is losing sync. I had to use a cheap oscilloscope to figure that out. But there shouldn't be anything heat related with your crank and cam sensors, they aren't in a place to get real hot. They are typically a work completely or not at all thing.

My second gen doesn't have an electronic key code. I didn't know any of them had that until later. We should be able to rule out crank sensor as it won't run without that. Clearly you are getting fuel and spark. How long does it run before giving up? Mine was just long enough that two tries got me out of my garage bay and partly turned. Certainly no where near long enough to drive it down to the mechanic. Maybe 10 seconds. I think I got it back in the garage in one try because I knew the pattern by then. Only took minutes to find the problem once I looked at the items I had touched before it started acting up. If I remember right it was the big vacuum line from the valve covers to the bottom of the intake after the MAF and before the throttle plate. At this age you could get a leak that bad on a large vacuum line from dry cracking and it might not be visible. It might take flexing the line to bend open the crack. I once had a car where the flexible part of the intake itself did this. It would only stall when stopped at a light and the engine torque against the brakes leaned the engine.

Yes. Pull the belt and sprocket and find out why that pin won't seat fully.

Some of the training is generic like don't point it at things. Some of the training is platform specific like don't Columbo style flip your revolver shut, or don't use the tip of your thumb on the tip of the hammer spur to lower the hammer unless you are doing a 100% accurate demo of ND before going to an ER or jail. I'm sure if you have a place that rents guns they will have a few minutes to show you each platform for any stand out diffeerences. It would be neat to do a meetup, but it would be tough as that is about a 2700 mile drive to get there, so not that practical, and I don't know how to deal with the laws in some of those states.

Thank goodness I live in the county so they don't complain about my fleet.

I like 1911, but it is a big thing to conceal. My EDC is a SIG P365. Personally I wouldn't go smaller than 9mm for a defensive gun. I use Valvoline high mileage. If you use anything else your car already blew up and your relatives drag their knuckles. Between those two ideas I should be able to get everyone on the internet mad and coming to punch me. I'm sure it is difficult there, but you would be well served to get a little instruction, and get in a situation where you can shoot as many pistols as possible under guidance so you can find out if they fit your hand right, if they act funny in your hand during recoil, if the sights work for your eyes, etc. For instance, old police .38s twist in my hand really awkward with each shot, but 1911 is perfect in every way, P08 Luger wrenches my wrist and I feel like I'm aiming at the floor. Out here there are ranges where you can buy a day pass to shoot pretty much any pistol they have on hand, plus the ammo of course. Out here there are also people who could do some of that with you using their personal collection.

I want one, but a vending machine wouldn't look right in my house.

I thought we couldn't post porn...

Mine did that once after I did some work on it. When I buttoned up I missed connecting a half inch vacuum line. It let in so much air that the ECU would panic and shut down just like you describe. Run perfect long enough to back out, and then shut down. Start right back run perfect same amount and shut down. I believe it did not set any codes when I went through this. Perhaps the PO had a rodent get in there and open something up real bad. Perhaps the extra vibration as it shuts down tore the main induction tube. Perhaps the PCV stuck wide open after that shutdown and there is a problem elsewhere letting air into the crank case.

My 2nd gen jumped to 3 teeth off. It would run, but it was unsafe to drive on the road for lack of power. I estimate it was something like 25 HP. Test drives during diagnosis were only in the middle of the night when there was no traffic on the side streets to worry about. From what I've seen one tooth off can make really strange symptoms and leave you about 25% down on power. The timing mark alignment isn't an 'I guess that looks ok from over here' kind of thing. If you do it right and use your phone or an inspection mirror to view from the right angle it is either absolutely lined up, or it is oh crap missed by a mile wide tooth again. It took me three tries once to get it right as things move when you pull the tensioner pin. You have to put it together estimating where the tensioner will pull it to, and then check it after a couple rotations to settle it. It takes at least five hands on a dual cam to hold everything, then you use your sixth and seventh hands to settle the slack part and pull the pin.

On that diagram I replaced 3,8,17. I made mine from delrin on a mini lathe. Work great so far.

I've never dry fitted the parts out of the car like that, so I'm not sure, but I expect a tiny gap would exist so that the clamping force is on the gasket. I say read the FSM, torque to spec, and send it.

It is more damaging to a car to park it for a year than it is to drive it like it is stolen for a year.

Only thing I've done to mine lately is fluid checks and tire pressure top off. Other than drive, of course.

TLDR; IT depends and is really hard to describe and probably can't be tuned out with the factory ECU. One good sign is you didn't say your check engine light is on. My 95 uses MAF for air charge sensing. That can be a problem for some setups where the intake is modified. I'm not sure that 97 GT is MAF only or even MAP only. If it is MAP only then your intake mod is very unlikely to cause the problem I'm about to describe since it uses manifold absolute pressure and carefully calibrated RPM dependant volumetric efficiency for air charge sensing. If yours is MAF+MAP then it would come down to the details of the software strategy used to combine the two sensors and arrive at a fuel control strategy. In the second gen Subarus the MAF is the heated element flow rate sensor. The more air flows over the element, the more electricity it takes to keep the element at the preset sensing temperature. The computer uses the temperature and current flow to calculate how much air passed over the element, and therefore how much fuel to start with. (later the O2 sensor is used to make a fine adjustment table called fuel trim from that starting point) This works great, automatically corrects for density altitude, and can be very accurate as long as you don't get the sensor dirty with the oil from your K&N wet filter or some such. The down side to this method is that there is a great deal of testing and calibration done at the factory to understand that relationship between current needed and actual air flow. Some intake mods can change that relationship. If the change is small and even the trim table will correct for it and everything will be fine. If the change is not even then the trim table will have more difficulty correcting things. The biggest way this can trip you up is that the factory intake is very carefully designed to not resonate in the RPM range the engine can run through. You may have noticed a weird bottle thing hanging off the side of the intake if yours had it (it is engine and year specific if you have such a chamber or two and what size and shape they are). That bottle is designed to cancel a resonant spot in the RPM range. The problem is that the sensor can't tell which direction the air goes past it, so if the intake resonates at say 3600 RPM you have nice smooth flow into the engine below that RPM and the sensor reads correctly, and you have nice smooth flow above that RPM and the sensor reads correctly, but from say 3550 to 3650 the air is actually going back and forth really fast and the sensor reads way high. This makes the computer deliver way too much fuel in that range. Worse, the range is too narrow for the cells in the trim table to trim it out so you start out fine, get too rich at 3350, way too rich at 3600, and are still too rich until above 3850. I suppose in theory if your intake resonated right at the RPM you drive on the highway for long stretches it would eventually trim it out and then when you went back to side street driving it would be too lean in that range until it trimmed again. Hard to say without knowing the short and long term correction rate in your version and revision of ECU. This kind of thing can be measured easily on a dyno, and can be corrected in a stand alone ECU. This kind of thing is why dyno tuners make the big bucks. On a stock ECU you probably can't tune it out, so you would have to measure and test to be sure your intake setup does not resonate. If you know enough about tuning, have a wideband O2 and can datalog all your relevant sensors you can do the needed testing on the street, but you ought to have a helper to deal with the logging while you only drive the test drive patterns called for. All that said, I run an intake I built from parts without issue, but that is only after I went through the anxiety you are now in, going back to stock, learning more about it and getting a wideband, and then building my way back in again.

I might guess from your description that the pins in the radio connector have failed solder. Might not hurt to take the cover off and check/reflow them if you are able. If by some small chance you are close-ish to Prescott, AZ I could help out with that.

In the lower part of Michigan where I grew up there were only a few days in the year where the car cranked hard with thick oil so we just tolerated it. The Great Lakes make a mess of the snowfall, but they really soften the cold temperatures that happen to the west of us.