boon

Is it AVCS? Wonder if this is one of the "oil in the ECU" (yes, I am 100% serious) ones. I'm about 95% sure these engines have two (at least two?) camshaft position sensors, I think one does cam position and the other two do cam advance if it has AVCS. These are at the rear of the motor, on top of the head. I'd start by unplugging the big engine loom connector on each side and see if it has oil in it. If it does, clean it out, then pull your ECU and see if the connector for that has oil in it. Long story short, if it's AVCS, the seals on one of the sensors fail and it pushes oil up into the loom. Because the loom is actually surprisingly well sealed, over quite a long time (like... 20 years) oil can work its way all the way up to the ECU and cause all sorts of weird issues. I think if yours was a genuine IACV fault, which is pretty rare on anything post-2000-ish, it wouldn't idle at all.

Dafuq is a quart? How many hogsheads does it get to a pigskin of kerosene? 4.1L btw.

I think you've drunk the kool-ade of "Subarus are unreliable blah blah blah" - 100k being around when they do head gaskets? What a bunch of s***e, nobody told the last 3 I've owned, guess I got lucky? 2.5 NAs are slugs. 2.0 NA is worse. I don't know how someone could conclude the BH 3.0 is better than the BP. Single exhaust port heads, enough said really, not to mention they make like 30kw less. The BP 3.0 doesn't drink oil, but has plenty of places it likes to leak it from when they get a bit older. Rocker cover gaskets being the obvious one, and mine sprung a doozy of a leak from behind the timing cover which was a bit of a bastard to fix. 3.0s sound extremely boring unless you spend $$$ on an exhaust. The only interesting-sounding Legacy is a turbo BH or earlier, but they're all twin-turbos (unless you're going way back to a BC) so their performance is average and reliability of the turbo system not super awesome either. Anything modern is going to be twin-scroll/equal length so will sound kinda not-Subaru, although I don't mind the sound personally. Buy a manual BP 2.0 Turbo or 3.0.

So by "VTA" you mean "just dribbles oil on the road"? 😮

The flip side that warrants mentioning - I asked around and found someone that has been running a PPD exhaust for a couple of years... admittedly on a diesel ute, not a performance car, and it has held up just fine EXCEPT that it has rusted, which is kinda funny considering it's "stainless"

It's only $750 more. There's a reason the PPD ones are so cheap. If you consider that the cat alone has to be worth a couple of hundred bucks, $300 doesn't leave a lot for things like quality, thick steel, good welding, and flanges that are actually flat.

Nice, where'd you buy from?

Guess they just changed year to year? If I remember right it was like, 2 or 3 wires I had to cut and join. EDIT edit: It might just be a little length of adaptor loom? You might be able to swap it if you can get like 25cm deep in the back of the headlight and around a corner. I just cut and joined it.

It's not a WRX/STI thing. My 01 STI had the chrome backed ones, the '02 has the black backed ones, as well as the better-looking one-piece grill. The connector is different for one of the bulbs, I did the swap on mine years and years ago and I definitely had to cut something. EDIT: Although maybe only the '02 STI got the black ones.... unsure. The light output is the same. Get better bulbs. Your low beams should be HIDs and I've always thought mine were really good so maybe you have trash bulbs.

The little rain shield thing? It's called a monsoon and they're almost impossible to find because just removing them from a car intact is very very difficult, they break all the time, and shipping them without a courier snapping it is nearly impossible too.

130 bucks to buy a nut you can take off with an oversized socket and a hammer? Probably not.

So there's replicas which are just... extremely close stylistically, but branded as what they are. See Rota Grid vs Rays TE37. While completely unoriginal, at least they're honest about where they're made. Then you have what I will call "fakes" where the rim actually claims to be something like Rays and has that brand cast into the rim etc, but is not made by them. The issue you have here is that if a manufacturer is prepared to blatantly infringe on a trademark, they probably don't give a damn about things like metallurgy and various safety standards, so the rim might just be a complete turd. Replicas like Rota, where they aren't claiming to be the rim they're copying.... are largely fine from a mechanical/safety perspective, just people with genuine wheels will turn their nose up at you, and you're kinda perpetuating a s****y business practice by giving them your money. EDIT: As long as you don't drive like an idiot, street driving is way easier on your rims than track.

Crazy as it sounds, see if the Warehouse has one that fits. They do (did?) Exide and their prices were better than anyone I could find.

Most commonly from taking cheap "adjustable" suspension and turning the adjustment way up. Or fitting wildly inappropriate struts. Bump travel is how far the wheel is able to move upward when you hit a bump. You need to have enough bump travel to handle most bumps you can expect to hit without running into the bump stops. When that happens you effectively don't have suspension on that wheel any more and your car can get very unsettled. The reason this all goes together is because often what people do is they lower the s*** out of the car by just putting short springs in which leaves the car with very little useful suspension travel. Then because they get sick of bottoming out the car they put in extremely firm springs and wind the compression damping all the way up, then they think it's racecar as cos it twitches and bobbles about. Yes racecars are all twitchy at low speed but it's because they have to be sprung and valved to handle bumps at high speed which accordingly have far more energy, they don't behave like that at high speed. Something like a KYB AGX is going to be valved/damped appropriately for the car for "spirited" use, and if you don't sack it on its arse you'll have plenty of travel. Generally speaking you don't use the coil springs to prevent body roll. That's literally the sway bar's job - sometimes they're known as an "anti-roll bar". Appropriate spring rates is pretty complex topic but the nuts and bolts of it is that for a street car you should really be running a fairly soft spring for maximum comfort and the best handling.

Bouncy is primarily too much compression damping or not enough rebound damping, followed by excessive spring rate, followed by no bump travel.

22 or 23mm rear swaybar, do the swaybar bushes and links as well as there's not much point increasing the bar rate if it's just squishing around in 20 year old flogged out bushings. Then... I think the "not going crazy" option is KYB AGX struts and the STI pink springs? Slight lowering, increase in spring rate, without being heinously bouncy. 18x8 with presumably around a 235 will need a decent pull on your arches. I put 235/45R17 on 17x8 on my STI (which is wider? I think? Yours is a wagon right?) and I had to roll the rear guards to not rub. Honestly I'd run the stock front swaybar and see how it feels. I have an incredibly w**ked suspension setup but still run the stock front swaybar with a 23mm rear and I like the balance.

Basically anything more supportive is going to be a downgrade comfort-wise. It's just the nature of the beast. I've planted my arse in quite a few aftermarket bucket seats (I was shopping for one a few years ago and Tokyo car tuning shops have lots and lots of them because reasons) so I have a decent sampling. The only ones that I thought were both more supportive and more comfortable than the stock WRX/STI bucket seats were some insanely expensive Recaros. Cheaper Recaro, any of your "JDM" brands like Bride, and any fixed-back bucket seat is less comfortable, they're narrower and have less padding so that's unsurprising. The closest I got to "woah this is really really supportive but the comfort is acceptable" in a fixed back was the Racetech RT4009XW, which they don't even make any more. The RT4100 probably gets close, I just wish they did it in a wide-but-not-tall because Racetech's not-wide is very snug for anything but dedicated track work if you occasionally eat a pie or two.

My old man ran a NZ-spec BPE Outback for years on 95. I ran my jap-spec BPE Legacy on it as well. Always ran well enough. If you're pushing it hard 98 is probably the way to go, but I always thought the NZ-spec-tune ones were happier on 95 than the jap ones, or maybe that was an urban myth?

Walk away. Swaybar mounts don't get broken from cars being gently driven and cared for.

No. Take it elsewhere. It's probably technically too loud, and you just got lucky last time. Challenging "your car is illegal" with "but you missed it last time" is not a winning strategy.

Slap on Torrens Terrace.

When mine did something very similar it was a cracked weld in the downpipe heatshield. Go round knocking everything with the handle of a screwdriver and see if anything sounds different.

Probably a write-off, I'll give you $500 for it. EDIT: Next time don't just dump your jack, sheesh, for someone who is so particular about looking after their car dropping the body 10cm+ onto jack stands seems like a strange idea, why didn't you let the jack down slowly?

As above - by the time you look at your gauge and go "oooh that's not right" you'll have the audible alert of your big ends going NOGGA NOGGA to confirm your low oil pressure. The oil pressure plummets because the engine has died, not the other way around, most of the time. Very very very rarely the oil pump dies and you go OH NO and turn the motor off but usually your crank oversizes your rod bearings and then the oil pressure plummets cos it's all pissing out the sides of the bottom end journals.

I'm gonna say you might get change from $5k? Edit edit edit edit: What do you actually want the gauges for? If its to protect your car then don't bother with gauges, your ECU will do a better job than you ever can. If you want some shiny things with blue LEDS buy some $30 ones from Aliexpress.