parsonski

diverdave - i would be interested to hear how things panned out with your cracked cylinder issue!?! did you get Subaru or your dealership to help out any??

we just bought a used 1998 forester from a subaru dealer less than 6 months ago & everything was rosy until 1 month ago.......first an overheat & had to have the water pump replaced, head gaskets and everything else along with it & they did the timing belt while they were in there. Then an oil leak - found that a seal they had replaced was faulty, so the garage remedied that at no cost. And the overheat is still recurring - the garage thinks it is a cracked cylinder (we seem to be losing coolant out of the radiator even when the reservoir appears full)!!

i have to admit that my knowledge of car mechanics is not great, but we don't know if we should get this sorted & keep the car, or just admit that the car is a lemon and get rid of it (sucking up some loss)!

any thoughts much appreciated!!!

webguy

This is a known issue with the 2.5 engines. You can get more information or help on the head gasket problems or cylinder problems here:

http://www.subaruproblems.com

TBOAWD

I own a 1998 Legacy 2.5 GT and love it but like everyone else i blew both headgaskts and being the unfortunate person that i am i actually cracked a head also, this was a $2,900 expense that i chose to live with. shortly thereafter i became a student at UTI in avondale AZ and was becoming excessively more interested in subys. Moral of the story is that after spending about 2.5 hrs. on the phone with one of the guys from cobb tuning ,which by the way are very knowlwdgeable and pretty cool, and a year or so of going to UTI the general consensus is that the EJ25 is a great motor @ 165 hp. (we all know this otherwise we wouldnt be here) but under modification and under heavy load these cylinders have a severe tendancy to walk due to the open deck on the block ( for those of you who dont know an open deck just means that around the cylinder walls at the top of the waterjacket where the cyl head meets the block has little or no support) also one other factor contributes to this the sleeves in the EJ25 are iron and the heads are aluminium. This is pretty simple metalurrgy. Ok so these heads were designed to run @ 195-220 degrees and the first time you overheat it (240+) the heads swell like baloons and the cyl walls stay relatively the same size forcing the gasket between them to slide and compress and eventually crack. Moral of this drawn on story is invest some money in replacing the thermostat and radiator cap more often than recommended ( i do every 10K or so) and if your real serious about building that motor get a 3-4 core radiator an electric H2O pump and maybe a bypass around your Tstat incase it overheats in the middle of nowhere. Best suggestion is that water wetter stuff, and regular replacement of Tstat and cap. A lot of newer subys and i think anythin turbocharged has a closed deck which is simply better for building HP whether it is boosted or NA. What i am doing and probably the cheapest suggestion id do a swap (EZ33,EJ20 or 22, EJ25T) just do somethin cooler than stock, anyone can bolt **** on , not anyone can swap motors. And to the kid who is getting the entire kit and kaboodle done on his EJ25 and expecting 180-190 Hp you may as well have a big bonfire with that cash cuz for half of what your spending you could put in an EJ20 out of a wrx and get 227 and its turbo and its newer technology, just lookin out. Let me know what you think guyz and happy tuning