Your Personal Micro Blog(s)

The fact you are losing a quart of oil, suggests the engine already had preexisting damage (potentially caused by previous owner not addressing the subarus oil needs, common) that you as the owner have left go unchecked. Clutches wear, shifter bushings wear. A/C, that sucks. The radio was aftermarket. The belt is on a manual tensioner, its meant to start squealing and need you to tighten it, thankfully this procedure is documented in the owners guide (source: Have one).

So basically. Your list of unexplained failures is essentially A/C, everything else is either a) a maintenance item, b) damage as a result of poor maintenance or c) not even the factory parts of the car failing.

 

Your points are mostly correct, but by the time the A/C went out (about 2 months into ownership), I just stopped caring about the car and didn't want to bother fixing it. The wear on the clutch and shifter bushings shouldn't have happened at 150,000 miles, especially with the way I was driving it. There unfortunately was no owners manual, and the belt only squealed when trying to accelerate hard for highway onramps. The aftermarket headunit had nothing to do with the radio not working, it was the antenna not working right because the ground for it came loose. These things shouldn't have happened to a car that is less than 20 years old, especially not within 6 months/3,000 miles.

 

Pretty much everything you just said is normal at 150000 miles. The clutch isn't even rated for 150000...

 

The clutch I can understand being worn because the previous owner was a kid, but everything else being broken? I can't really convey through text how terrible the car was, you would just need to sit in it to experience the brokenness and how poorly built it was.

 

post gm saab isn't what it was
i have a 40 year old saab thats used weekly for about 6 years with no issue, other than the brake master cylinder dying

 

Its 20 years old. I own a subaru of the same age. By and large, its solidly put together, just, sure enough, the antenna is broken (actually not a bad ground on mine, just the motor that extends it), the A/C leaks, and as we're coming up to 100000 miles (the scheduled clutch replacement on a subaru EJ), the clutch is slipping. Squealing as you approach an on ramp is indicative that you just need to give the belt tensioner half a turn. Shifter bushings? Theyre literally a polymer with lubrication that on a 20 year old car will have long expired and the material will have weathered, leading to further wear.

Literally everything you said is par for the course with a car that old. The only thing thats kind of sucky is the A/C leaking, but its 2 decades old, metals dont last forever in open air, and seals dont survive heat cycling (which is another thing that weakens the head gaskets too btw on any car).

Consider that a factory automobile is generally only manufactured for 200000km of life, aka, less than 150000 miles Can you really call a brand unreliable when you've got completely normal issues 2 decades later and beyond the life the car was designed for.

 

They probably thrashed the car to within an inch of its life. With them being young and it therefore being one of their first cars, they also probably had no idea what maintenance was, and what upkeep the car needed. So, they probably sold it because they realised how much was wrong with it and didn't want to deal with fixing it.

 

Probably. I was hoping that they were like me and don't beat up on their cars. I never beat up on my cars, but I know people that do.

 

Other than the fact that I've heard of completely stock ones breaking on the dyno, an engine which is built to just barely survive its own stock output is by definition inadequate.

 

My truck is 30 with 236,000 miles on it and I only have to do suspension work. Nothing has been rebuilt or replaced besides regular wear items

 

My 1999 Buick Regal has only 95,000 miles on it and the only things I have needed to replace on it other than normal wear/maintenance were the result of it sitting for 2 years. Other than that, I haven't had any issues with it and it is a faster, more comfortable, easier to work on, and a higher build quality car.

 

My 528 has 175k on it, and it runs fantastic. The head was replaced under the previous owner, and apart from “old car repairs” i.e. the slave cylinder, shocks, it’s been really good maintenance wise. Subarus are only half-decent reliability-wise if you are watching them like hawks.

Subarus are crap in terms of durability.

 

Minus the many more coping with 50% increases in boost at stock

 

We haven’t even brought up stock autos blowing up after 80k miles.....

 

from what my experience was subies dont break more than any other car but most of the subies get treated like sh*t no regular oil changes and all. But regular service isnt always the only thing my golf has 100.000 miles now on it and it has always gotten service but it already needed more replaced parts than any other car i have owned or my friends had. A small overview of what needed replacing:
ABS Sensor (currently needs replacing but it costs more than the car is worth) 500 euros to replace
ESP Sensor (same as above) dont know how much it costs dont need that
Air mass Meter 85 euros
Thermostat 87 euros
some random thing had to be changed twice and i dont know what it is cost 50 euros second time was for free
alot of wiring is currently broken as well as the antenna and radio and some vacuum pipes are old and broken it basically needs a new wiring harness but the car isnt worth it anymore.
Airbag sensor 200 euros to fix
rear view mirrors need replacing because the heating doesnt work and the mirrors are fogged up
lots of rust everywhere bonnet wings and so on.
Basically it needs a full restoration but its on worth 1000 euros so im probably going to sell it at some point espacially because i already have a MK3 octavia vRS at home i currently drive around. All in all dont buy a used mk4 golf!

 

My school years in a nutshell:

Me in History: " The strategic utilization of the Luftwaffe in operation Barbarossa failed to account for the potent Soviet air force and the lack of German oil."
Me in English: "Macbeth did the thing do and hamlet became the dead"

 

Today didn't go entirely to plan...
Went out on my bike, and got a puncture (nail through the tyre), turns out the sealant was gone off meaning it wasn't fixing itself. Not only that, but the dropper seatpost stopped working at the same time. So I had to try and ride home 6km on a deflating tyre. Thankfully the puncture was slow enough to get me back. I then also managed to break a key when trying to unlock another bike from in the garage.

With that said, I still managed to get out and have some fun on a 30y/o mountain bike. So not all was lost, in fact, riding that bike again was quite a lot of fun

Gonna have to go and pick up some new tire sealant to fix the puncture, then head over to the local bikeshop to see what they say about the dropper post. Its within warranty, so hopefully they will sort it out. From what I have read, the cartridge may have failed. I guess I will see ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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On a side note, how bloody long is it going to take Mozilla to fix their add-on signing. They let the certificate lapse and now the Firefox browser refuses to run *any* add-ons until they get things sorted out (for all firefox users). Its a funny screw up, but its been 2 days now. I want my plugins back. Apparently the manual override for plugin signing isn't enabled for Windows users, so there is no way to work around it without doing some "not advised" stuff to your browser.

Literally got a browser update within an hour of posting that, hell yeah, I can now feel a little more comfortable again.

 

I have done something else! This time I used Autocad 3D to create this thing. The rendering time of Autocad is much longer that the one in 3DS Max tho. This image is the result of a 1 hour and 12 minutes rendering.

 

More programming. As always

Obviously there are a lot of issues shown below since its still very much WIP, so cars phasing through each other and not quite following the roads is on the todo list. With that said, it looks prettier now, has audio support, Anti-Aliasing support, etc. I guess its the small things that make a big difference.


And messing with game settings: Note: Some colour changes do require a game restart to take effect