i've had a small overheating problem lately. tried replacing the thermostat and running with out it. but when i drive i little hard the temp rises to almost overheating and the fall back to normal. has anybody esle had anything like this happen. i water pump job would run around 400 bucks so i hope its not the water pump.

Congratulations!! I'd be willing to bet that you just joined the DOHC Blown Head Gasket Club!! If you do a search for "head gaskets" in this forum you'll find a number of threads that discuss symptoms just like yours. I know your symptoms sound identical to mine - I just had mine replaced for the second time in 6 months.

How many miles do you have on the car? I had mine done at 59,975 miles, and again last week at about 79,000 miles (although symptoms appeared around 77k). If your car is beyond 60k my suggestion would be to call Subaru of America, regardless of the mileage on your car, and try to get them to help pay for it. The weak head gaskets is a known problem on the 2.5L DOHC, so they may offer "good will assistance" to help with the repair cost. They paid in full for my recent repair.

Pat Olsen
'97 Legacy 2.5GT sedan

i have just went over 70k . did you lose any performance at all ? it seem like my car is still running strong. damn it i hope that i haven't racing around with a blown head gasket.

2.5 is a sohc

98rs has a dohc 99 to 01 are sohc

try a flush when you do flush it check the hose`s haven`t perished inside. My be a blockage somewhere. I would say this rather than a blown head gasket because with a gasket you'd know the water would be a diffrent colour and the oil would be a dirty brow

i'm going to change my oil look at my plugs and anything else i can think of to finger this out

Running with out a thermostat is BAD! Your cooling system is designed with that restriction. The water pump does not create pressure you need the thermostat to create pressure. No thermostat = low pressure. Before jumping to headgasket, make sure yor fans are coming on. It may just be a blown fuse or something. Take off the radiator cap and if you feel puffs of air from the radiator when you rev the motor it's a headgasket.

I had a similar problem, actually I just posted this on another thread.

Make sure the Thermostat is not hitting the engine block when it is fully opened. If your thermostat is hitting the engine block then it is only opening 50% at operating temp causing the coolant flow to be restricted.

Also when this was all going on, before i knew it was the thermostat, the service people said it may be a severe air pocket in the engine causing an overheat.

that's happend to me lots of times all i do is bleed the cooling sistem and i'm good for a couple of months before it happens again

Acher, your thermostat was hitting the block? Was it the right thermostat for your car. Why would it hit the block?

ok guys here is the deal . i change my oil and it look fine. i put in a new thermost making sure it would not hit the block . and fresh coolant. it seemed to fine until about !/2 way home and it boiled over. so a sat in the side of the road for a bit with the fans on and the heat on. i took off again once i took off agian the heat got cold . so i think there is a air pocket some where. right now my car is sleeping , tomorrow a real temp gauge goes in and some new bosh +4 plugs.

The thermostat they gave me was not symetrical, meaning the raised part that the spring is wrapped around is only a quarter of an inch from the OD of the Thermostat. 180 degrees across is three quarters of an inch. Do you know what I mean??
Hopefully so, but the issue is when you put the thermostat inside the block, it needs to be placed in there opposite a piece of casting that obstructs the full motion of the thermostat. IN other words the low clearance side .250" needs to be opposite the casting in order for the thermostat to function properly.

Does that make any sence? Let me know, I am trying to enhance my technical writing skills anyway :lol:

Acher, your thermostat was hitting the block? Was it the right thermostat for your car. Why would it hit the block?

Originally posted by donut:
did you lose any performance at all ? it seem like my car is still running strong.

I would never have known there was a problem if it weren't for the fact I glanced down and saw my coolant temp gauge pegged. Both times the gaskets have gone bad the car seemed to run perfectly fine, with no performance loss.

Originally posted by Wheels:
I would say this rather than a blown head gasket because with a gasket you'd know the water would be a diffrent colour and the oil would be a dirty brown.

Actually, both times my head gaskets have gone bad I did not have any of the "classic" signs of a bad head gasket. Trust me, I know those signs - I've blown the head gaskets on my supercharged Mustang. With the Subaru, I didn't get the chocolate milkshake oil, my coolant looked fine, there was no sweet anti-freeze smell in the exhaust, no clouds of white smoke/steam from the exhaust, etc etc. The only indicator was the car actually overheating, which was due to large volumes of coolant being blown right out of the overflow reservoir. From talking to other DOHC owners on the iClub who've blown their gaskets, it seems that everyone had the same lack of the classic indicators.

I'll be honest, I don't know what about the design of the Subaru head, coolant passages, oil passages, and gaskets makes the indicators different, but they are. On both occasions the car failed the leak-down test, which is a dead give-away that the head gaskets are bad, so the gaskets were definitely done, it wasn't just an air pocket or bad thermostat. (By the way, I replaced both the thermostat and radiator cap after the car overheated on me the first time back in March. A couple days later, it did it again, at which point I decided to seek the dealer's assistance.)

Originally posted by alexdude:
that's happend to me lots of times all i do is bleed the cooling sistem and i'm good for a couple of months before it happens again

How hard do you drive the car in between these bleeding sessions? Does the problem recurr (sp?) soon after you do some really spirited driving? If so, I'd be willing to bet you, too, have bad head gasket(s). Once again, based on my own experience, and from talking to others who've gone through the same thing, the cars seem to do fine in around town normal driving. Take the car to the back roads and run the RPMs up a few times with the engine under heavy load, and it won't be too long before the temp starts to climb. If you catch it early enough and ease off, the temp might return back to normal once the fans and reduced load kick in.

Pat

Pat,

I've had a blown head gasket as well. Noticed the exact same symptoms as you. I was considering getting the head gasket replaced but after reading your post about TWO headgasket failures I'm leaning more towards an engine swap (especially since the dealer quoted me $2200 for a headgasket replacement - unbelieveable!!). Is it really worth the trouble of replacing or should I just go drop in a newer engine. I'm thinking just a SOHC engine for safe measure.

Jason

well i just droped of my car at the dealership. but 2200 bucks damn thats alot. but maybe i'll get lucky (dought it)!

well i just picked up my car and i have a blown head gasket. they quoted me 1610.41 for the whole deal . does that sound good or should i keep looking . :mad: :

Oh man, I feel for you...that sucks to pay that much money. You know its probably because half the front clip has to come off to get to the head bolds and crap. There is about 1 inch between the inner fender and top of the head. IF I were paying that kind of money, I would check every sub dealer in my area. Theres got to be a better price out there :(

the search is on . it won't be a very long one there is only two dealerships in OKC . but the light at the end of the tunnel hasn't burnt out yet! one place gave me a not to sure quote of 700 to 800 . but his subaru mechanic had gone home for the day. so it will wait until mondayor tuesday. does anybody want to give to the donut needs head gaskets fund?

Jason and donut - Call Subaru of America! 1800-SUBARU-3. They might not hook you up the way they hooked me up, but who knows. It can't hurt to call. How many miles do you each have on your cars? If you're at 120k, you're almost certainly on your own. If you're at 65k, just outside the warranty, you might get some assistance - maybe not full payment, but they might help pay for the repair.

As far as the engine swap goes, Jason, that in itself is a pretty damn expensive proposition. Unfortunately, not only would you need the new engine, but you'd also need the SOHC ECU. I'm sure you could find that stuff in a wrecked car, but I would guess that just the parts alone are going to cost you over $2200. Then you have to add in the labor of doing it (unless you have the facilities to do it yourself). And I don't know how easy or difficult swapping to the proper ECU would be. That topic might be worthy of a separate post here - maybe some of the technical types on the board could help you out with the electrical side of things. I'd say if you think you can swap the engine yourself (thereby saving yourself lots of labor $$$) then an engine swap might be worthwhile. Can't hurt to talk to the wrecking yards to see what a full engine would cost you.

Pat

ouch...it looks as though i'm in the same boat as you donut. my legacy is having extremely random overheating issues as well. i've had my thermostat replaced a couple months ago and it's been running fine up until last week.

after dropping it off with suby specialties, very reputable shop in la, they believe it may be a blown head gasket. they're going to do further checks to be sure, but right now, i'm praying that's the only issue.

symptoms: milky substance in coolant. coolant bubbles while engine is running (indicates exhaust leak), gaseous smell in coolant.

damn...i hadn't realize this could cost that much.

Thanks for the info, Pat. I'll try giving SOA a call. Thing is, my Subie is at 107,000 miles. Way passed warranty. As for the engine swap, I've found two DOHC engines for $1700 and $1500 (1999 and 1998 my). I've heard that the 99's are less prone (although I think GTrocket's is a 99 - oh well) so I might go with that one. My friend is actually in the process of taking a few engine repair classes and we have access to a lift. Shouldn't be too hard to do. Not sure about the SOHC swap, though. Might look into copper headgaskets while I have the new engine out.

Another reason for the swap (instead of just replacing the head gaskets) is that I've driven my car overheating on many, many occasions (still haven't gotten around to fixing t as I don't have enough money for the repair). I'm suspect that I've done some heat related damage to both the block and the headers, but I could be wrong.

BTW, you know what the insurance company did with your MY99 GT? I wonder if your engine is the one of the engines I found.

Jason

My '99 is at F&S Auto Salvage up here in Roxbury, CT. The car had about 34-35,000 miles on it, I don't really remember.

As for calling SOA, don't mention your mileage unless they ask for it. Tell them that one of the major reasons you elected to purchase a Subaru is because of their excellent reputation for drivetrain reliability. Now you have a vehicle that has seen less than 5 years of normal street driving and it has bad head gaskets. Since you had your car's problem diagnosed, you've done some research on the i-Club (I'm sure they know about this forum, so specifically mention it) and discovered that a lot of people with the Phase I DOHC engine have had head gasket problems. Blah blah blah - you get the point. Give them a guilt trip, ya know? ;)

As for engine swaps, a '99 DOHC might be better, but only if it has the Phase II block. I know some of the '98 2.5RSs came with the Phase I (DOHC) heads with Phase II (SOHC) block, and apparently some of the '99 2.5GTs did also.

If you read here: http://i-club.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=44757&highlight=phase+block you can learn how to distinguish between the two types of blocks. Unfortunately, Trey's picture link is dead, but you can read the description and perhaps figure it out from there. You could also talk to bill harvey (that's his screen name), as I think he did a lot of research into this recently for his turbo build-up.

Pat

When the dealer replaced your headgaskets, did they use the sandwich-style gaskets or the solid gaskets. I'm just wondering if they learned from the first time around or whether they'd still use the weaker gaskets for a replacement.

Jason

Jason - I just posted a new thread about the gasket thing: http://i-club.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=100257 . To make a long story short, they used the sandwich style gaskets again. I should have had the parts pulled ahead of time so I could have talked to the service guys about the different gasket styles. Oh well...

Pat