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jonathan909 last won the day on April 20

jonathan909 had the most liked content!

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About jonathan909

  • Rank
    Eat, Live, Breath Subaru

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  • Location
    Calgary AB
  • Referral
    ej25 phase i vs phase ii via google
  • Biography
    Engineer, amateur wrenchpuller
  • Vehicles
    95&98 Legacy 2.2, 99 Legacy 2.5, 01 Forester

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  1. It's a good point. The illumination from a handful of point sources isn't going to be as uniform as that from a single filament. Again, though, I think the only way to find out how much and what kind of difference it means is to try them.
  2. Your argument would hold water if we were talking about glass, but if these headlights were made of glass, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because the headlights wouldn't suffer UV degradation. Okay, they might, but over the span of hundreds of years, not a few. You know perfectly well that plastics don't behave as do glasses, and that not everything just sits on the surface. Plastics absorb. Which, unfortunately, doesn't really answer the question I asked. Apparently the only way to get a nuanced answer is to get a set and try them out. And btw, we have elk here too - but they don't behave at all like the deer. They travel in pretty big herds, when they cross the road they take their time, and there's no missing them - unless you've got terrible lights (or, yes, you're going way too fast). Deer are so stupid, fast, and unpredictable that one of our writeoffs was a product of the deer broadsiding us. It launched out of a deep ditch (where we couldn't see it from the road) as we passed, slamming into the front fender and rolling along the length of the car, wiping off the mirror and pushing in every body panel along the way.
  3. Dude, look at my avatar and you'll get that I understand wet sanding - not just for cosmetics, but for performance (though actually less on the TriFoiler than on the catamarans). And from what I've seen the UV coating really makes a difference on these things - without it (that is, when I used the Mothers kit) the lens fogged again within months; with it the degradation of the lens has been slowed. I actually have the laboratory equipment here for a spectral transmissibility analysis, but at the moment I'm just going by subjective observation. You need to understand what I'm talking about here. I live in the country and wrote off two cars last year to deer strikes. Prior to that I wrote off a third in addition to a number of incidental non-writeoff collisions since we moved out here. Earlier this year a moose ran my girls off the road (moose are no joke - they kill people in cars). According to both the police and the body shops, half of the accidents reported in this area are from collisions with these stupid vermin. Overall, they present a much greater hazard than you suggest from oncoming traffic, and I couldn't give a bright orange sh!t what you or anyone else find "obnoxious" about a headlight's colour temperature. I'm not going to intentionally create a hazard for other drivers (nor do I want to attract tickets), but beyond that I'll do what's necessary to make these awful, substandard headlights minimally safe.
  4. The Meguire kit - drill-driven pad, a couple of wet+dry papers to 2000 (iIrc), polish, and UV protectant which seems to help. I posted previously on this kit vs. Mothers. "LEDs are obnoxious" doesn't begin to approach "informative". The question was about effective brightness. Qualitative opinions require explanation.
  5. The Legacy/Outback headlights seem uniformly terrible - our '95, '98, and '99 really are dangerous to drive at night, especially given the deer (that claimed two cars last year). The Foresters - with their huge lights - are vastly superior. So we've got to do what we can to crank up the brightness on the former, and I'm looking for the modern opinion. (Btw, if my notes are correct, the '95 needs 9003=HB2=H4, while the '98/'99 use 9007. Please correct me if I have this wrong. And the lenses still look pretty clear since my last Meguire's treatment.) Some time back there was a strong recommendation here for Philips Crystal Vision Plus (though I can't see the Plus online now, so perhaps it's been replaced by the Ultra) as the best halogen around particularly in terms of longevity. But I'm seeing a lot of LEDs out there (meaning "Amazon") that are only a few bucks more. We need bright, and I mean BRIGHT. What say you all?
  6. No "Advanced Auto" in Soviet Canuckistan, but I get the point.
  7. Okay, but doesn't UV dye imply adding refrigerant to a known-leaky system? Or is there "standalone" dye available that you inject into the system, then pressure it up with air?
  8. I've just rebuilt the AC system (everything but the evaporator) from junkyard parts in a car that PO had stripped it of (he's originally from Africa and thus indifferent to air conditioning). Prior to attempting to charge it up, I figured I'd do a smart thing (for a change) and see if it leaks. Hung the manifold gauge, hooked up the vacuum pump, and ran it down. As soon as I closed the valve to the pump, though, the system quickly rose back to atmosphere. So how do I track down what appears to be a substantial leak? Pressure it up (with air through the gauge) and start squirting Snoop all over the connections? If so, to what pressure? If not, how? And if that doesn't turn anything up, how does one ID leaks in the evaporator or condenser? Answers to relevant questions I'm too dim to ask also welcome.
  9. Will let you know next week when I get to work on it.
  10. I did say "ignoring cable/connector issues", so I was asking whether the transducer itself would fit and work.
  11. Wife's '98/2.2/5MT speedo died. Suspect xmission sensor; severe shortage of compatible donor cars in the boneyards at the moment. Have old leftover 4EAT pulled from '99 Forester lying around waiting for when I need a core. Ignoring cable/connector issues, will the sensor from the 4EAT work in the 5MT?
  12. Yeah, that's going to work well with thermoplastics (e.g. polystyrene, ABS, etc.), but there are lots of non-thermoplastics (Bakelite, etc.) that won't play nice. Polycarbonate is a thermoplastic, but I've never tried heat-welding it. We'll see how the marine epoxy works and take it from there...
  13. Update: Before I had a chance to shop for the "USA Gold Pro" or even get a fresh tube of cyanoacrylate (and thanks for the baking soda hack - never heard that one) a friend laid a tube of LePage Marine Epoxy on me. I tried a test spot on a spare headlight and the bond seems to be strong, so I'm trying it on the Forester's headlight. The only downside of this stuff is that it has a long (2 hr) set time, so I had to tape the broken spud in place, as the epoxy wasn't tacky enough to keep it there and it kept falling off (grrr...). I'll give it a day or two to cure and see how it looks. Btw, I didn't have to do anything with the mirror - it was smashed so it just got replaced from the boneyard.
  14. I'm finally catching up with our '01 Forester's mashed fender and associated damage (e.g. mirror) from my girls' wisely choosing the ditch over a moose in January. I'm stuck at the moment on a broken piece of the headlight - the little rectangular spud molded into the grey plastic housing that the signal/marker light snaps into. I have the broken bit and would like to glue it back on, but I'm well acquainted with the difficulty of gluing many plastics. I tried methylene chloride (solvent cement) and it wouldn't attack it, and JB Weld's plastic epoxy, which had no bond strength. Looking at a similar headlight "PC" appears a couple of times where the part number is molded in. I'm guessing that indicates polycarbonate. Does anyone know anything that'll work? I tried to take the coward's way out last week, but couldn't find that headlight (intact) in any of the junkyard carcasses
  15. Okayokayokay... if you're having fun watching me obsess over it (sicko), I've got one more bone I can toss you for now. I threw the 'scope on the three wires that are used for communication between the two modules, and at first glance it doesn't appear they're running anything as complicated as the synchronous serial protocol I speculated about earlier. I haven't done much with it yet - just watched the lines when I enabled and disabled the security system - and I think they just strobed one line to signal the change of mode. I'll have to read a little more closely to see how many different states there might be and try to correlate that with how the state change signals might be encoded, and look at the microcontroller's data sheet to see what the pins (on each board) serving those three wires are capable of. Other than getting in and out of valet mode I haven't been very interested in the security module, so I don't get yet what-all sets it off. The easy thing to do on the bench is just give the shock sensor (that little grey box in the upper right) a little rap, but obviously there are a bunch of other conditions that can trigger it, so they'll represent different messages being passed. We'll see about all that later.