My first time replacing motor oil, gear oil, air filter, spark plugs, and oil filter since i got my car 4 months ago. I'm going everything synthetic.

Any suggestions, comments, or anything that I'm missing?

 

Maintenance schedule. How many miles on the odometer? Your MY03 car might need a major service performed.

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0==WW==0
"…axles of evil…" - george w. bush

 

its at 25,040 right now. read the site and i have about 5k more to go for 'major fluids' service. which ones are these? are they basic if it is then i'll just probably do them by my self.

dealer inspected my car when it was about 24k, change my 2nd and 3rd gear. factory warranty coverd it

 

how come they changed your 2nd and 3rd?

 

actually it was, 1st and 3rd gear. most of the time it wont go in 1st at all without double clutching and 3rd grinds often. brought it to the dealer and they said that 1st and 2nd gears needed to be replaced. car is still underwarranty so it covered it.

 

In addition to the engine oil, tranny and differential gear lube, there is the engine coolant and brake fluid. I asked the shop to replace all of the oils in my MY02 WRX with synthetic, along with Motul RBF 600 synthetic brake fluid, and then inspect, clean, and re-pack front wheel bearings with synthetic bearing grease.

The front wheel bearing design is good but a few MY02 cars have suffered front wheel bearing failure after hard street use or track days on a road course. Subaru now specifies a different grease than what they originally used in the MY02 models.

Use care when replacing coolant (scalding hot!) to make sure that all air has been purged after replacement. I had to top off coolant in the overflow/reservoir bottle for several days after replacement as residual air made its way out and coolant was drawn from the bottle.

--
0==WW==0
"…axles of evil…" - george w. bush

 

Do some research before using Mobil 1 in the trans. A number of people have had poor results with it (synchro issues). You may be better off with an alternate synthetic, or a standard organic GL-5 gear oil.

 

that sounds interesting. my other choice was gm synchro, but i heard that gm synchro is too slippery? the store i went to only have the two thats y i went with mobil 1

 

You may be better off with standard GL-5 organic gear oil, people's experiences with synthetics have been mixed. Also since your trans was just repaired within the last 1K miles the fluid was undoubtedly changed at that time so it's not necessary to do anything with it now, just leave it alone. You also want to maintain the warranty on the repairs that were done, should something fail again and non-standard fluid be found when the trans is disassembled, there might be issues with warranty coverage. Although synthetic should technically not be a problem with warranty as long as it is GL-5 and meets Subaru's viscosity recommendations, the safest course of action is to leave in the fluid the dealer used.

 

thats a verygood point the fluids thats in there right now only have about 1k in it. i'll just probably pass on the gearoil

 

no need to change plugs until the 60K tune up on WRXs

 

update; just did my oil change, spark plugs, air and oil filter. i did notice a difference in performance wise. totally worth it.

one thing that i found out that my front passenger side wheel had grease around it. i was for certain that my cv boot somehow torn and leaked grease. took it to the dealer and found out that it had a bad cv boot and needed to be replaced. stevens creek subaru replaced it under warranty got my car back a few hours later.

my car have about 25k on it and dont know why this happened. so it's just something too look out for, while doing your regular oilchange.

chris

just wanted to change it anyway, so i have fresh oil and good sparkplugs to go with it.