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Don't believe that you saw mine on there - I haven't put it up for sale, and when I bought it it was an unadvertised word-of-mouth find. The General Grabber AT/2s have been on for about three months now, and are really great. Having had them in sand, dirt, and snow I'm impressed. The new...

Ooof... Only just noticed this reply. Sorry for being less than fast to reply, but: the project is semi-stalled. The car is still running as a daily driver, but work and life are where I've had to focus on for the past few months. That said: it's getting tyres soon (General Grabber AT2s...

As someone who is on his second EJ25 at 137,000 miles in a '99 Forester... I'm inclined to (somewhat) agree. That said: An EJ25 can be made into a reliable engine, but it has to be done right and they don't respond well to thrashing. I started out with EA81 Subarus (Brats), and the...

Time for another update... Just did the 1,000-mile oil change day before yesterday. No noticeable oil consumption, it was surprisingly clean, and the coolant level looks good as well. Despite an initial drop of a couple of inches in the overflow reservoir, it held that level from about 200...

Picked it up yesterday from the shop. I'm about 30 or 40 miles in to a 500-mile break-in period (no revving over 4,000 rpm in that time) and have an early oil change scheduled for 1,000 miles. Can't really get much of a feel for it until both of those are out of the way, but power is...

New (well, remanufactured) engine goes in on Monday. We'll see how it does once it's in, but, assuming all is well after a few weeks, another inch of lift is planned.

And, with that, the car is officially beyond economic repair. I'm looking at $4000-$5000 to fix it (don't have the time, space, or equipment to lay it up and take care of it myself), and its book value is around $4800. Just not worth it on a soon-to-be 13-year-old car. I've got a guy who is...

Well... Crap. Left Seattle at 10am on Tuesday to drive down to Los Angeles. Approximately 100 miles into the trip, the check engine light started flashing, power was down, and the idle was extremely rough. Pulled off the freeway in Chehalis and got out the code reader: cylinder #4 misfire...

Sounds about right. FWIW, the reason I picked the Mojave Road as a testbed for the Forester was because I did it back in '06 in the XJ, and that vehicle was overkill for it. We ran it from pretty much the Colorado River to almost all the way back to Barstow, and the one place where the XJ was...

Valid points, and certainly doable. The downside to this is that only the EA81/EA82 cars with manual transmissions received low range, so if you're talking about doing the conversion on a Forester with the 4EAT there's substantially more work involved. Not that it's not doable, but to the best...

Understood, and agreed. FWIW, I never had much in the way of trouble getting up a steep section - it was control on the descent that gave me a couple of brown-seat moments. This was at its worst on anything that was a loose surface over a hard one, which was a fair chunk of the trails at Moab...

Hm, two-and-a-half months since the last update. Well, here goes: The Forester completed its cross-country trip (VA to Seattle by way of Los Angeles) with only one hitch: a dead battery in Las Vegas. The one that was in it when I got it looked ropey, but I decided to not replace it before I...

Put some more trail time on the Forester, and am starting to get a better feel for its capabilities. Took some short videos yesterday on a couple of offshoot trails in the GWNF; this was a spur-of-the-moment solo run, so unfortunately I don't have any outside action shots. Brief explanations...

The new (OEM) transmission filter is on. Only have about 10 miles on it so far, but the vehicle's running noticeably better with it in there - the torque converter doesn't seem to be as confused as to what it should be doing and shifts are considerably less abrupt. Performance also seems...

One recommendation: if you've got an Android phone, the Torque app and a $29 eBay ELM327 Bluetooth OBD-II adapter from China is a hell of a combination. I've been running it for a while, and for $35 (counting the cost of the paid version of Torque) you end up with a scantool that does what the...

Checking against http://www.fueleconomy.gov, the 1999 Forester is rated (under the revised numbers) at 19 city / 25 highway with the manual, and 18 city / 24 highway with the automatic. 21mpg puts me at 50% over what I'd average in my XJ, so it's a definite improvement but not a stratospheric...

First fuel economy report: 21.1mpg (295 miles of travel for exactly 14 gallons of 87-octane gas). This is mixed town and interstate driving, with about 50 miles of trail use. It should be pointed out that probably 50 miles of that mixed (e.g., non-trail) use involved travel to and from the...

According to the shop, they were able to get it aligned within specs. What I can say is that the alignment was off when I got it, but it now tracks straight. I did have to have all four wheels aligned, but did not require camber bolts. In the meantime, I've managed to put about 50 trail miles...

It's on the road! :victory: Running great. Only thing it noticeably needs in terms of maintenance is an A/C recharge; it's cold, but weak. Picking it up on a 90degF day really showed up the state of that one. Ran a little over budget, so I'll have to do some careful planning on how far I go...

Good news :sombrero: Is the overall build plan still the same? My '99 is finally running again and I'm figuring out the build part beyond the springs, so I'm definitely up for swapping notes.