I recently bought the Blue Fox (a 2005 Subaru Forester 2.5x @ 200K km) to help me work on a house I am rehabbing in Canada. The car, being 15 years old, has a multitude of little (and some not so little) problems that are common for a vehicle of this age. One of the more common problems with a vehicle that is more than a decade old is yellowed headlights. Not only are they unsightly, yellow headlights are not as good at throwing light down the road as they should be posing somewhat of a safety risk. Fortunately, fixing yellowed headlights is pretty simple. Just buy some BRASSO and polish the yellow off! In this case I bought a polishing/buffing kit for my drill, but you can just use elbow grease if you don't feel like spending any more than the minimum. After an hour (in my case) the headlight looked great, and then I applied some Castor Oil to the plastic headlights - and the plastic bumper too! It all turned out great - and you can do this too!\
On Day 2 of owning the 2005 Subaru Forester 2.5X I was presented with yet another mysterious situation...the windshield wiper fluid didn't seem to be working! When it comes to my 2006 Mitsubishi Outlander, when I pull back on the wiper control arm, the wiper juice pump(s) kick in, juice sprays on the windshield and the wipers move. Not so with the Subaru! When I pulled back on the wiper arm, the wiper blades started moving...but there was no way I could get it to spray any juice, even though the control arm is clearly marked "Pull Mist" - whatever that means! So I went about isolating the problem - which ended up being between my ears! This video details my deductive process to finally figure out how to get juice on the front windshield - a solution I finally reached - but one that was (clearly) non-intuitive! I can only conclude that it must be extremely foggy in Japan. That's the only reason I can determine to have a wiper mode in a car that actuates the wiper blades to cycle once...and emit no juice! N.B.: If you want juice, just push the button on the end of the wiper stem. :)
I purchased a used 2005 Subaru Forester 2.5X yesterday! Yaay! Another Subaru Forester! I just love them! This 2005 Subaru Forester 2.5X has many, many problems to discover and diagnose - some obvious and some more mysterious and hidden! The first problem to fix with this car was really obvious and quite serious. The only physical lock (the driver door lock) was not working right. It was *impossible* to insert the key because there was an object lodged inside the lock, obstructing it. It seemed to me that it was one of two things (1) The internal mechanism of the lock had broken and a piece of it had become stuck inside, or a key had snapped off in the lock. Either way, there was something stuck in the lock, preventing key insertion. Figuring that it was a snapped off key and that I would need to replace the lock entirely, I went about figuring out how to remove a lock from a 2005 Subaru Forester 2.5X, filming the process as I went. After a bit of a false start, I figured out how to access the mechanism, and then removed the lock. I discovered that the thing obstructing the lock was not a broken key, but rather the little steel flap that is integrated into car door locks to protect them from the weather. In this case, the steel flap had broken off and become lodged in the lock mechanism. Once I got the lock out of the door and tipped it over, the little flap just fell out into the grass! Then I could insert the key! So after that, it was just a simple matter of removing all of the accumulated rust from the lock, backing plate and door interior, and then re-installing the lock back where it came from. This video documents the entire process in such a way that a reasonably mechanically-inclined person could reproduce my intended result, which was to demonstrate how to take out and put in a driver door lock. Enjoy!