Replacing Valve Cover Gaskets

I’ve had a fairly bad oil leak since I got the Subaru running. Turns out that the valve cover gaskets are a fairly common item to go out on this model, so I decided to replace them. As long as I had everything apart (the drivers side in particular isn’t easy to get to), I also decided to do plugs, wires, the fuel filter, and the inline ATF filter.

Here is the passenger side valve cover. You’ll need to remove the airbox to gain access to this. It is held on with 3 bolts(10mm) and a hose. Depending on the age of the car, the lubricant on the hose may be dried and powdery, or the hose may crack as you’re removing it. I was lucky enough to have both issues. Blah.

Carefully remove the cover by pulling straight away from the engine, and then upwards. You can throw away the grommets on the mounting bolts – your replacement gasket kit should have new ones.

To access the driver’s side valve cover, you will need to remove the battery and battery tray. You’ll also need to unmount the washer fluid reservoir, and set it out of the way (on top of the strut mount). Finally, you’ll need to disconnect the oil filler neck. All of these mounting bolts are 10mm.

Depending on the model year, you may also have an inline ATF filter that was added as part of a recall. If you do, you’ll need to unlatch the filter from its mounting bracket to get enough clearance to pull the valve cover off.

You can use any degreaser you’d normally use to clean up an engine to clean up the valve covers. I found that using a wire brush and small screwdriver helped get into the nooks and crannies. On the inside of the valve cover, q-tips work well to clean the groove the gasket rests in.

With everything cleaned up, insert the new gasket into the groove on the valve cover, and mount them back on the engine. The bolts don’t need much torque at all (41 in/lbs I read somewhere).

Legacy Rustoleum Paint Job

(most of this is copied/pasted from my post in the LegacyGT Forums back in September last year)

This past week, I did the $50 Rustoleum Paint Job. I’m not going to cover everything in detail, since a lot of the guides already do an excellent job.

I went from this

To this

I mostly followed DrSimon’s guide from Instructables. Before this, the only other painting experience I’ve had has been refinishing some homebuilt arcade cabinets.

The total cost was under $100, but certainly over $50. I ended up using 3 quarts of Rustoleum High Gloss White Enamel, and did 4 coats. I used 4 cans of Rustoleum spray primer.

Prep Work
First of all, make sure you have plenty of room. I wouldn’t want to try doing this outside, and I ended up using most of 2 garage stalls during the process.

If you have any rust spots you need to repair, this is the time to do it. If there are any parts you can easily remove (bumpers, grilles, etc), take them off and paint them separately.

Make sure to wash the car good first. Paint won’t stick to any road grease or wax on the body, and it doesn’t come completely off just from sanding.

Sanding
Other than repairing rust spots, you do not need to sand down to bare metal. I used 220 grit followed by 400 grit to get through the clear coat.

Masking
Proper masking will give you the crisp lines you want. I had a couple slipups that will take some time to clean up later. The best advice I can offer is to use smaller strips of masking tape when doing curves. Automotive masking tape (green) will stick better than house tape (blue), and at least around here, was a couple bucks cheaper.

Garbage bags work great for masking off the tires/wheels, and ziplock bags work well for the mirrors.

Priming
With everything masked off, you can start priming. I did 2 coats of primer, waiting about 10-15 minutes between coats.

Painting (& More Sanding)
I used a spray gun that came with my air compressor for the painting. You’ll have to experiment a bit with your sprayer to figure out how much you need to thin the paint. It seemed to work best when it took 4-5 seconds for the paint to start dripping from the mixing stick. If the paint is too thin, you’ll have a lot of runs, if it is too thick, it won’t dry fast or level out enough.

The first coat will look horrible. The 2nd coat will look like you did it with a can of spraypaint. I waited 6 hours between each coat. Here it is after 2 coats:

After 2 coats, I wet sanded with 800 grit. It was handy to have a spray bottle full of water when doing the wet sanding.

After the 3rd coat, it looked like this. You can still see some orange peel in the reflection, which I was mostly able to get rid of after some more wet sanding with 1000 grit:

Afterwards
I would do it again, and did learn a few good things from this. Paint did get under the paper in a few spots, and I had to scrape off some of the glass. Wetting the glass with soapy water and using a razorblade worked well for getting the paint off.

I let the paint dry for about 18 hours, and it seemed fine once I took it out of the garage. If it’s muggy or cooler out, you might need to wait longer.

’91 Subaru Legacy

(this is actually from November 2010, figured I’d post it and then follow up with a couple ‘since then’ posts)

Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a 1991 Subaru Legacy I got from my parents. While it’s hardly a sports car, it would be a significant improvement over my ’99 Durango in terms of MPG.

It had been sitting in a barn for over 6 years, used as storage, and as a home for mice, cats, and various other forms of wildlife. It has close to 120,000 miles on it, most of which are from when it was used as a rural mail delivery car.

I picked it up shortly before winter hit, and wasn’t able to work on it much right away. So far, I have replaced the engine knock sensor (to get rid of a Check Engine Light), installed new fuel hoses (the old ones were cracked and leaking), put a new fuel pump gasket in, and replaced several stripped wheel lugs, along with the tires. I’ve also gone through some of the normal (way overdue) maintenance, such as changing the oil & coolant.

Dead Monitor

What better way to revive a near-dead blog named SmashTech than by smashing a dead LCD with a 3 lb drilling hammer?

Error 0×80005000 using LDAP in VBScript

While rolling out a new logon script, I started getting reports of an error message like this one showing up. Error 0×80005000 with a source of (null) isn’t particularly helpful. The particular section of code referenced in the error dealt with pulling a user’s group membership from LDAP, and mapping drives accordingly.

After stepping through the script, I found that it was bombing out on a group with a forward slash (/) in the name. The / was throwing off the LDAP query, since it is a reserved separator character. There are 2 fixes for this. You can either do a substring replace, and replace ‘/’ with ‘\\/’ (yes – double backslash slash), or you can do what I did and just rename the group in ActiveDirectory to not contain a /.

RAID is not Backup – My Experience

It’s a common theme you read on many sysadmin forums – ‘RAID is not backup!’ I have always agreed with that statement, but it didn’t hit home until recently.

A little over a month ago, I was on site in Kentucky to switch some T1 lines around. When I got there, I noticed one of the drives on their server had failed. I requested a replacement drive from the corporate office. Since I was stuck on hold with the telco during the data line switchover, I ran a backup of the server. The next morning, the replacement drive had not arrived. I left instructions to just swap the drive out when it did show up, and started on my drive back up to Michigan, with the backup tape in my laptop case.

A few hours later, my phone rings. “Jim, I switched out the drive, and now everyone says all their files are missing.” I walk through a couple of checks, and come to the conclusion that this is pretty much the worst case scenario – one of the other RAID drives failed during the array rebuild, and took the entire array down. Worse yet, I have the only full backup tape, and I’m on the road almost halfway between Michigan and Kentucky. A long weekend was in store for me.

Fortunately, the server that went down was ‘only’ their file & print server, and not the Exchange server or only DC for that domain. Another plus was that the server was down over a (relatively slow) weekend, as opposed to the middle of the week. To work around some of the issues, DHCP services were moved to the primary router at the Kentucky site, and DNS was repointed to Michigan. Users could still access email and the terminal system. Corporate IT began building a new server in Michigan, so I could start restoring data as soon as I got back.

After 6 hours of restoring the tape, the replacement server was mostly back up and running, with users losing less than 12 hours of saved work, and no email. Printing was an issue on the new server, as it was loaded with newer drivers that caused problems for some of the older PCs.

Lesson learned: RAID is not backup. As drive capacities become larger, the likelyhood of having additional drives fail during the rebuild increases. To help work around this, build your RAID arrays with at least 1, preferably 2 hotspare drives for automatic failover, and configure your server to send email or text alerts when it detects hardware issues.

UNetbootin – Create Linux & Utility Bootable Flash Drives

Out of blank CDs? Is your burner giving you nothing but coasters?

With UNetbootin, you can download almost any of the common Linux distros or various utilities such as NTPasswd or SystemRescueCD, all from within one small program, and create a bootable USB flash drive. It also works with any GRUB or isolinux based CD image.

Not only does it automatically download the distro of your choice, but it also provides version history, and builds for x86 or x64.