legacycentral bbs

Well after a month, I finally got the new car last night. The transport truck arrived around 11, and in less than 24 hours I've started tearing it apart....hahaha Nah, I'm just taking the fender liners, side skirts, and front cowling off to get rid of the dirt and grime that's collected. The interior is in good shape, same with the exterior. There's a bit more rust & corrosion than I had anticipated. The car spent most of its life in New York. Overall, it should be good.

Here are the pictures from today. I need finish cleaning everything up and put it back together.

http://main.experiencetherave.com/subar ... gacywagon/

mkay, WHY did you buy a northeast rusted car, when you can find them rustfree where you live. even the price if it is cheaper is not worth the extra cost of rust and stuck bolts, borken bolts, etc on normal repairs......... I do not get it. WHY.




that is normal rust on a midwest or eastern car in 12 years time,

I've been looking for a legacy wagon, non-outback with MT since about April. They are only available from 2005 - 2007. About the only ones that are available are in the Northeast. There's a few others scattered around, but their beat up pretty good. This one is in pretty good shape, minus the rust.

hope you don't plan keep it long, rust is cancer.

You're brave Josh.

Had I known about the rust prior to purchasing it, I probably would have thought a little harder about buying it. I had a friend of the family look at it, but unfortunately nobody is going to be as thorough as I am when looking over a vehicle. Being that we don't have salty roads during the winter here in Tx I'm hoping the rust doesn't get worse. I've had spots on both the Impreza and a small spots on the Legacy undercarrage that have been the same for years. So we'll see. The good thing about the car is that the body & interior are in great shape, which is typically what everyone looks at when buying a car.

Being a north easterner myself I can tell you all the rust is not that bad. When did people on the interweb become so critical? lol

That really is nothing. I'd just do what I posted on FB. $30 this year and under $10/yr after for maintenance. That and weekly, thorough water blasting around the wheel wells and undercarriage kept Duchess looking better than I ever thought it was going to look—much better than my 2006 Mazda when I traded it in and I've seen the hidden places by now. As for working on it, and that is not problematic rust yet, you PB Blaster the bolts you intend to move and let it sit for a couple hours. If it's much worse than yours is (MUCH worse), you reapply several times over a period of a couple days prior to working on it. But with your level of corrosion, I'd blast it and wait the length of time it takes to pick up the tool I needed.

Yeah I'm not super concerned about the rust....I continued my cleaning efforts today. I'm going to probably wire wheel some of the worse spots on the body and paint them before I put everything back together.

Here are pics from today's shenanigans

http://main.experiencetherave.com/subar ... cywagon/02

Nice find! I can't believe that trailer hitch. It's unbelievable someone went through the trouble to rig that up, when they could have bought a proper hitch and not ruined the car.
The rust isn't anything worse than normal for it's age and previous location.
Recently, corrosion has become a serious problem here because they are now using liquid salt, which actually corrodes vehicles 3x faster than with regular salt. My SS was an upstate new york car with minimal rust on it back in 06. Now, it's scary how fast it's spreading, thanks to the crap they laid on the roads the past couple years.

looks good. some day i will have a car newer than a 98. and it will be a suby.

Haha me too. My newest car ever is my 98 metro.

Detroit was bad like that—straight salt. Where I am, they use sand, which is not as bad as straight salt. There are a lot of areas that actually have signs up saying "Low Salt", some kind of wetlands or something.

I would never even consider living in an area where they salt the roads. I could not tolerate my biggest hobbies rusting away and trying to work with rusted bolts and cancerous parts. I don't know how you guys do it. What also blows me away is how much they go for even with all the rust! Seems like you could make good money driving rust free cars over there and selling them.

It's just a matter of taking care of the car. The problem comes in buying used and neglected cars. The cost is because so many cars have rotted away, there are less good used cars to chose from and pretty stringent testing standards also tend to to remove a lot of shit boxes. I can't speak for Upstate NY, but there's also the standard of living here. Making what I make here in the Midwest in a house the value of the one I have here would put me in a mansion, but then I'd have to live in the Midwest and they wouldn't pay me what they do here. In a lot of places, $40k is considered good income. Here, that's just getting by. Things cost more, but people have more to spend and, then, new cars look pretty attractive as their prices are more nationally consistent. There probably could be some money to be made shipping over cars, but margins would be thin when you factor a grand to ship. You'd also have to pick the right cars.

40k is pretty decent living round these parts. I make a little over 30k and that's double minimum wag. I'd make a lot more but I only average probably 34 hours a week.

50k is doing OK here, if you're single. I make what I consider to be pretty good for a single guy, but I wouldn't want to be a single income family on it (or we'd be confined to renting and no car payments if I did—kids are more expensive than used exotic cars). When I was making 30k with relatively cheap rent, I was just scraping by. But this state has lower unemployment than most, taxes are reasonable, even for New England (in spite of the stupid "Taxachussets" nickname, and we actually get services in exchange for our taxes, unlike a certain neighboring state inhabited by anarchists who only pay less taxes if they don't own property and get virtually no services in return for it), and property values where I am on the north coast of Boston, haven't been hit too badly since the peak (which was overvalued anyway). There are, of course, people on the lower end around here and I don't know how they really do it if they have kids (government assistance, I guess). I love this area, but if I didn't have the ability to make OK money for here, I'd probably live somewhere with a more mild climate, but I'd still have to live near the coast.

I visited Boston a couple years ago. Friend was living there while his GF was going to med school in NY. They were paying something like $1,250 for a single bedroom shit apartment. I could not believe it. Most people there didn't own cars and just rode the trains all over the place. My friend didn't have a car the whole time he was there and his gf rode the trains and it took her like 40 mins to get to school and it wasn't even that far away.

For $1,250 a month here you can buy a home. A pretty decent home at that. You can rent the same size apartment here for as low as $450/month. I have a friend at my work who has one for this price and it's actually nicer than the one my other friend had in boston. That's quite low though. The average apartment around here is probably $700.

Boston is not for me. Nothing for me there. Didn't see any of the rest of the state though. But the weather alone kills it for me.

I personally don't like the city much—traffic, parking, expense, Southies, Irish bars, and "finance"-type douchebags—but it's like New York in that you don't need to own a car if you live and work in the city. It's the 3rd most expensive city (or was, at least, I don't know the recent rankings) after San Francisco and NY. You should see what people pay for Manhattan rents for apartments that are literally closets with bathrooms. NY is another place I'd rather visit than live in. Cambridge is much nicer than Boston, but I only really like the Marblehead-Cape Ann-Newburyport coast. I wouldn't live anywhere else in the US and I like having seasons, but I have PTSD, so I'm comfortable when things aren't comfortable. I'm not sure where else in the world I'd live either. Maybe Italy, but the government is a far worse mess than ours and I'd maybe get sick of it after a while.

Yeah I remember seeing a buddy's apt in NY back in 1999. My kitchen was about the size of his whole apt. He was paying around $1,000 a month.

Anyway, been busy on the car. I started treating the big spots for rust on the body, and a few brackets in the engine bay. The zinc spray worked well, and I put a silver rustoleum coat on top. I'm gooping the holes were the trailer hitch was. I've got two layers on now and may throw on a third. Once that dries well I'm going to undercoat the entire area on the outside. On the inside I'm going to put down a layer of dynomat where I cut out the factory sound deadening.

Right now, I'm kind of in a waiting mode because I need parts. I'll be placing the order tomorrow probably, so it'll probably be the 14th or so until I get all the parts and have time to start reassembling the cowling, side skirts, and mud guards. I may take off the rear bumper and tail lights. There's a bunch of pine needles stuck down behind some of the trim.

Here are the updated pictures

http://main.experiencetherave.com/subar ... cywagon/03
http://main.experiencetherave.com/subar ... cywagon/04


BTW, how are you liking the new image menu for the image gallery? Is everything showing up correctly? This was the first time I've used this, and would like to redo all my multiple gallery setups like this.

I like the new style gallery.

Seeing that cabin filter really makes me want to take a look at mine. I have never taken it out, it's gotta be filthy.

The instructions in the FSM for changing the filter omit a very important step, removing the glove box. They act like you can just swing it down, but I'm pretty sure there's no way that filter box is coming out without getting the glove box completely out of the way.

Is there a filter in 1st gens? Is it hard to get too? Does the dealer still have them? This car let's every and any smell in and I hate how there's no setting for recirculating the cabin air.

You have inspired me. Just bought a filter, haha. Now I just have to wait for the temperature to get above 10 degrees to put it in.

It's oddly satisfying seeing all those issues getting fixed up! Awesome wagon though, I love that body style.