Hey guys welcome back to legit street cars and welcome to the free turbo subaru reveal video. Now before i get to the inspection footage and we find everything that's broken on this car, it is so much and i have to fix it all. It's ridiculous. I got ta give you guys the back story a little bit of context.

So all of this makes sense about three months ago a subscriber emailed me saying that his 2005 subaru outback xt that he bought brand new was on its way to the junkyard it'd been sitting for over a year with a bad turbo. No one in his family wanted it. He couldn't sell it for much and didn't want to spend any more money on it, but it was a very well maintained car and this is the stack of receipts, mostly from the dealer that came with it. So he hated the idea of letting his baby rot away at the junkyard.

I could tell he truly loved this car and he offered it to me for free, so i promised to fix everything and then donate it to a family in need. As a christmas present and he was thrilled, so we had the car towed over to legit street quarters and i thought this thing is looking good wow free, subaru, 2005 outback first year of the turbo, all right, so first things. First, we have to get this thing running, it hasn't ran in about a year and it's missing a battery and supposedly it's gon na smoke a lot from the bad turbo. So, let's see what happens all right, here's our makeshift battery and we have power.

So it's got a really bad turbo 128 000 miles. Let's go ahead and put this in park, see what happens fired right up, and here we go here - is the oil burning from this leaking turbo? So let's get this in the back of the shop real, quick. All right taking this jumper off all right here we go first drive in the subaru e-brake down and this thing hasn't moved in about a year i got ta say right off the bat. This is a really nice car.

It's got leather, it's got heated seats, one owner 128 000 miles and wait till you see the stack of receipts. It's the biggest stack of receipts. I think i've gotten in any car, oh and check it out. This is a brand new dash pad.

There was a recall on the dash pad and they replaced it just a few thousand miles ago. He said last year. This is great. So after getting the outback started, i parked it back here and finished up a few other channel projects, and so i didn't inspect the subaru before promising the original owner that i'd fix everything and promising a charity that i'd have the car ready to give away.

As a christmas present, which is a month away - and i bring this up because i've had the car here for about three months, but i waited until last week to inspect the car and i was truly shocked at what i found. So here is the footage of happy alex starting to work on the subaru and then quickly discovering what i got myself into it's so crazy that this car was gon na end up at the junkyard. So the previous owner, the original owner, removed the battery in preparation for sending it off because the junkyards always take the batteries out and sell them anyway. But that's no problem.

I got a new battery for it and just take a look at the condition. Totally rust. Free straight as an arrow, it's got good tires and this is the loaded xt model, so heated leather seats, a really big sunroof and it even has weathertech mats. I mean it needs a detail, but it was free.

I don't know if anyone's ever sat in the back seat, it's perfect and he gave me a bag full of parts. So i got ta check out what he left me in there, but for now let's just go ahead and install our new battery. Hopefully i can find the hold down somewhere all right. Little negative action going on here.

Uh just dropped the 10. that always happens with sockets, not with wrenches it's cold out here and i used to working with gloves and we'll tighten these up and the negative all right battery installed. And aside from the fact that i know it has a bad turbo, or at least that's what he told me, this might be pretty close to all we're doing the tires are in good shape. Maybe we have to do some breaks, they're kind of rusted, but anyway, let's go fire it up and listen to the engine.

He also gave me, i think, four sets of keys, which is phenomenal. So let's go ahead and fire it up. Huh. It's got kind of a long crank there.

We go okay, all right. Let's move this up in front of the shop here and i just want to hear the engine. I don't want to smoke out the shop so we'll leave it outside. It doesn't sound too good.

Sounds a little clanky, a little rattly could be, the exhaust could be the turbo, that's eating itself alive, maybe or it could be the bottom end of the engine. You guys hear that, hopefully, that's just the exhaust, which is a little rusty by the way that doesn't sound good, doesn't sound good at all all right, so the subaru sounds absolutely horrible. Unlike my cove commuter 2 wireless bluetooth speaker check this out all right. Let's go over some specs.

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So a big thanks to cove audio for continuing to support automotive content creators like myself. Now, let's lift up the subaru and see what i've gotten myself into. Please don't need a lot. Please don't need a lot.

Please don't need a lot rise up. Outback rise up well right off the bat the brakes are rusted. This is to be expected. This car sat for over a year, i think about 18 months or so um, so we might end up just doing new pads and rotors.

Hopefully, the calipers aren't frozen too, but yeah for being a chicago car. This thing is in excellent condition. So a lot of these things will rot out over here, but this thing is perfect: there's really no dents or anything it's an excellent shape. Uh the tires are pretty good, not bad, not brand new either.

Maybe about 60 65 tread life on the tires and let's just go ahead and start at the rear, so this differential isn't leaking that's nice that boot looks to be in good shape. So does this one? This is not in good shape, but it's just a sway. Bar link no big deal and more of the same over here, so the axle boots are good. The shocks don't seem to be leaking, i've looked the springs up and down in the rear, and they look fine too.

Nothing is cracked or broken uh. This does not look factory to me. It may have had some exhaust work and the whole thing is kind of rattling. So this exhaust yeah - okay, it's not in the best of condition.

Look at this - oh they just gooped it up here. So this was leaking right here and they added a muffler mend or a jb weld type of product. That's just all flaking away to nothing. The shield is still there, that's good and moving along.

We do have some oil leaking uh yeah we're gon na have to clean this up. It's probably gon na be very difficult to pinpoint this at the moment, but we got some oil. There could be the oil filter, housing possibly leaking. I'm gon na venture to say that this is a lot of the noise that we're hearing, and that makes me feel good.

That makes me feel like there's not really an engine issue going on right now, at least i hope there isn't yeah. This is going to be rattling as well, and the previous owner told me that about 20 000 miles ago, but about three years ago, or so he had a timing belt service done, so they may have done the water pump at the same time, and we have A broken ground strap right here. It's literally disintegrating in front of our eyes. Right now.

Look at this! It's it's just gone! Look how you get to the spark plugs on this engine, pretty crazy. Okay! This is not good. Look at the u-joint in the rear totally destroyed wow. This is bad, so i'm gon na venture to say that is our squeaking noise.

We might have a little bit of seepage from the thermostat housing here. No big deal all right. So, after a quick inspection, it doesn't look too bad. I mean there's, there's a little bit more work than i thought the car would need.

I was kind of expecting it to be like perfect under here, especially with all the receipts, and how often do you get a bad japanese car that has a clean title and the owner passes along a bunch of magazines and articles and stacks of dealer receipts? It looks like this thing was loved. He even had the original window sticker in the car. 33 000 brand new, fully loaded, and this is a card that has all of the maintenance records saved electronically as well. He gave me factory blue touch-up paint and it came with like four or five keys and remotes.

Every indication is that this car would be really nice. But honestly, what we've found thus far really isn't that big of a deal. I can definitely handle all of these repairs here at the legit street quarters and, quite honestly, it seems like a fun project. So far we're going to be doing a u-joint.

Some exhaust work. Some brake work, possibly a new turbo charger, but before i get to spending any money on this outback, i do want to verify 100 that the engine is in tip-top condition. It is smoking out of the tailpipe after all, and i do suspect it's just a bad turbo charger and i think the previous owner had this diagnosed at the subaru dealer as a bad turbo. But you can never be sure, and luckily i have one of the largest subaru performance and repair shops in the entire country, local to me here in the chicagoland area.

So we're going to bring the outback over there and they're going to perform one of their major inspections, including diving, deep into this boxer engine. So let's drive this thing: it's not that far, but hopefully hopefully this makes it all right. Here we go. Let's see if we have that long crank again, not too bad, that's pretty normal might be a fuel issue there, a bad fuel pump leaking fuel injector or something like that that u-joint is brutal, definitely got to take it easy on this drive.

This thing is seriously sweet, though heated seat on and let's see what this looks like neat. This is awesome. It's like a little panoramic sunroof and let's see, what's in here, oh pens and a little notepad cool. Maybe i can make a list of everything it needs with this.

Is that why it's here all right, let's see how this guy drives, will it shift? Oh, it's got like no power, it does probably have a bad turbo, but it's got nothing all right. It's in second gear that was a pretty nice shift right there. Oh man, look at that. That is not good.

This thing is really smoking bad. Oh man, it's too cold for mosquitoes right now, but i'd be killing all of them if they were still out brutal. Okay, so i know we probably have a bad turbo and we oh no, oh no. I was gon na give it a little hole shot there and it just died.

Oh no! Okay! All right! I really got ta get going, no more messing around don't die. I just wanted to show you guys that it has no acceleration. Okay, i'm two foot in now all right. That's all the way down.

That's floored all the way. It's got nothing. Obviously it could just be the bad turbo um, but you'd think it'd have a little bit more power than that. That was wide open throttle and it just died out.

Oh man, all right, we got smoke coming from underneath the hood here guys. I've never really worked on subaru before, but it's a japanese car. It's super well maintained. Why do i get the feeling that i'm going to replace obvious smoking gun parts like a bad turbo charger, but i'm still going to have a ton of issues? This thing is shifting really weird long crank: it dies out.

There is a lot. This is all kind of starting to tumble weed and we haven't even made it to six star for the inspection. So is it too early for me to get nervous? Oh a little. Smoky there bud.

What do you think mark? Oh looks like a subaru all right, so we're here at six star motorsports in schaumburg illinois for our big inspection and i'm not gon na lie. I'm getting pretty scared right about now, all right, so we have the outback racked over here at six star motorsports and chris has already started the advanced inspection by checking over all the lights, making sure the wipers work and things of that nature. Yes, but mark is gon na get down and dirty with this one, we have a whole list yeah, we have a full multi-point inspection um. This is our advanced service, so it does come with a compression test, a leak down test, um, a smoke test, uh intake exhaust ceiling and evap.

So we go over the entire car. So we're going right after the coolant reservoir here to see if there's any head. Gasket material all right, so the guys noticed the membrane, the little rubber there on the crank pulley starting to come apart, which could be an issue because eventually it'll look like this and then it'll go like that. Okay, yeah! Then we don't need that.

No so it'll come apart and also you'll start getting a little belt. Squeaks motor will do its little souby shimmy and then also no just stop running and there you go. That is a bad u-joint there, sir holy smokes. Look at that yeah! Look at it pretty bad, it could be part of the squeak yeah.

I haven't seen one that bad. This is the second one i've seen so yeah. It's got a little squeak when we're cruising down the street yeah and uh. I was immediately thinking.

It's got to be something like this yeah i mean you were also saying the brakes on. These will make that kind of noise being locked up, and then you kind of have all four of them. It's definitely gon na be a little a little noisy, but all right i mean it looks pretty typical. It's you know, sitting in the bottom of the ocean for a minute it was free exactly exactly all of the uh, the grease and stuff that is sitting here.

Embedded in this rust is actually from the hydraulic mount on this side. Oh they're hydraulic on the diff mount yeah wow. This dog bone is leaking okay, it's her comfort. You know, you know legacy right, gt, cruiser all right, we'll add that to the list too.

This list is getting quite long, so the guys are finding everything right now. So we know we have the rack boot is leaking. We also figured out the inner tie. Rod is shot over here, so i'm probably gon na need an entire new rack.

Uh motor mounts are definitely collapsed and yeah yeah, i'm gon na, say it once again. People you think getting a free car is so awesome. This is a free car. This is what you get when someone literally tows the car to you hands you, the keys in the title and says goodbye.

You get a basket case like this, but that's okay, because we're gon na fix all of this stuff up it'll probably greatly exceed the value of the car. But that's what we do something else mark pointed out is that there is a technical service bulletin on replacing these lower control, arms and our bushings are basically escaping the control arm. Right now, so i'll, probably just order up new lower control arms call it a day. The rack, the mounts - we just found a little leak here from the thermostat housing, so it's adding up all right.

So next up chris is going to smoke out this entire engine. We are looking for any leaks because the intercoolers are actually prone to leaking. Among many many other things, so this is a really cool piece. It expands to fit whatever pipe you're going into and we're just going to go ahead and start filling it with smoke.

So this car has an extremely long start, which i would assume would be fuel related mark had mentioned. It actually could be a vacuum leak, any kind of air coming in bypassing the mass air flow sensor. On these, i guess it's pretty sensitive, see the smoke starting to fill up right out of here - oh yeah, so all right, so we actually had to lift the car to find this leak. There's a little bit of smoke coming up from the bottom here, and it's actually coming out of this up pipe right here that feeds the turbo.

So they do the leak test to see if there's any vacuum leaks or any intake leaks. These intercoolers are prone to leaking, but everything seems to be sealed. Just fine. We just found that one leak down there, so we're gon na have to figure that out.

But it's good to know. We don't have any leak from vacuum lines and tubes and intake stuff. All right, so next up is the most important test we're gon na be doing, and that is the compression and leak down test. So right now, chris has removed the battery and he's going to remove these coils, so we can get to the spark plugs and then the battery actually goes right back in for the actual test.

We got one of the spark plugs out and yeah. These plugs are pretty nasty. Looking all right, it's compression tester time not gon na lie, i'm a little scared all right, so he's connected a little push button to the starter, which is right over there and uh whenever you're ready chris. Let's do this is about 130 ish, normal 130 inches above normal, okay, cool cool, not bad for cylinder, one all right! So we're on cylinder! Three, yes about the same yeah, so right at about 135! On that one as well all right.

We got cylinder two next keep going, keep going: okay, uh, 125. yeah about 125., okay, percentage-wise, that's within spec, i'd, say all right! Last one cylinder number four: here we go, keep going another 125.. This battery is getting a little weak, so i'd say that's pretty good. So, typically, when you do a compression test, you don't want to see a difference of more than about 20 between cylinders, so we have 135 and about 125, depending on which cylinder, which is under 10 percent, so that past this compression test we are golden.

This is the part i was kind of most nervous about because it's blowing smoke out of the exhaust. I think that's the turbo um. It's got a long crank. You never know with these subaru engines, but we're not out of the woods just yet, because we're gon na do a leak down test now and sometimes you can have a compression test that passes and a leak down test that fails so right now, chris is actually Going to be turning the engine over because we need to make sure that all the valves are closed on that cylinder before testing it for a leak down, and apparently it's pretty easy on the subarus to hit that right, yeah.

So basically, on the tester right here. You see the little gauge right here, you'll crank it until you see it start jumping that's! When he's gon na be pulling a vacuum, and you're gon na see these four dots on the crank. It's normally gon na sit right around there when it starts pulling the vacuum. We're gon na turn it until you hit top dead center with one of the dots straight up so right now, chris is making sure that the valves are closed on the cylinder he wants to test.

So he is turning the crank by hand and right there. So as it's jumping on the gauge, you can look on the crank and look for one of those four dots and make sure that one of those four dots is straight up cool. So now we found top dead center on cylinder number one that we'll be testing. First and there's no guesswork, which is really nice, they have these markings on the crank.

You can see a couple of the holes there there's four total when you're doing a compression test, there's a one-way valve with the gauge that you're using. So it's testing the most amount of compression that cylinder can produce, but it's not testing to see if that pressure is leaking away. So we're going to be doing right now is we're going to introduce air pressure into that cylinder with the valves closed and it shouldn't in theory, leak at all. There's always a little bit of leakage even on a good engine, but we want that to be very, very low, so he's opening up the valve right now to start sending that air into the cylinder green is good and there we go right about a hundred psi Of air in the cylinder sorry about ten thirteen percent leakage, which is totally normal, you're gon na have some leakage past the piston rings and whatnot um, but that's good.

Okay, yeah! We have a little bit coming out of the crankcase. Again, it's going past the rings. You know pressurizing the crankcase just a little bit. If it starts blowing out little mists of oil and stuff, then yeah we're doing an engine all right, cylinder number three is next: hey look at that this one's even better wow! That's really good that's making about, i want to say seven or six yeah, seven or six percent, not bad.

Let's go cylinder. Two looks like we're. Gon na have another good one, nice, that's about nine nine percent right there we're testing the blow by by hand here too, every time popping this cap off. Nothing really can't feel anything at all.

All right last one go go, go, go, go we're in the grain! We're good perfect all right, we're good to go on this engine. I know this car needs a lot of work, but this is something i was nervous about and i'm glad that we know it's in good shape before i sink any money into this thing at all. So we have a really good foundation. Overall, the car is not rusted out, it's got a clean interior, it's got a good engine.

I haven't really driven it all that much, but it shifts in the few blocks that i've driven it. So i think we have a good platform to start with and next up we are going to borescope the turbo inlet and see what we can see in there. I'm pretty sure it's got a bad turbo, i'm hoping that's all. It needs 128 000 miles.

It's pretty normal all right, so the guys were telling me i'm gon na have to replace this turbo inlet pipe regardless. So once i start replacing the turbo or messing with any of this, it's going to break into a million pieces, but instead of breaking it off here, because it's not at my shop just yet we're going to bore scope this. So we can get a really good. Look yeah right now it doesn't look too bad outside of the oil that's in there.

Obviously, so i think i'll have to remove the downpipe to see if we have any shaft play and to officially condemn this turbo a little hard to determine at the moment. But there is a lot of oil there. This thing could have a lot of shaft play and the seal is just wobbling around and it's just about to eat itself alive and there you have it my free, subaru, outback, xt, and if this video isn't a good case to get a pre-purchase inspection, i don't Know what is if you bought a car like this sight, unseen, maybe on ebay, and you saw one owner and a stack of receipts you'd, probably pull the trigger not expecting to find what i found so get a pre-purchase inspection. It's very important.

I've covered this many times on this channel because i buy a lot of cars that are very, very broken, so i know it seems like this car needs a lot and it definitely does, but i'm really excited about the project. I think after i'm done with it. This is going to make a great family wagon for someone out there, i'm a huge fan of station wagons, as you can see here, and i can't wait to get this one all wrapped up. So i have made a list of all of the parts that i know i have to replace.

To this point, i use the guy's notepad that was in the dash, but i did leave quite a few lines open because there is no doubt that we're going to find a lot more wrong with this car. I still have to diagnose the long crank, so it could be something related to the fuel system uh. We still have to take apart the turbo and the downpipe and verify that that's what the issue is, although i'm going to go ahead and order the turbo now and a bunch of other parts. So it's waiting because i'm pretty sure it's the turbo so comment down below how many more items do you think the subaru will need.

I ended the list at 30, so i'm gon na guess 30. But let me know in the comments section how many individual parts will this thing need before it is done and before i'm giving it away to someone as a christmas present. So with that, if you enjoyed this video, give it a big thumbs up share the video subscribe if you're new, i can't wait to get started on this car, so join us for part two of the free subaru and, most importantly, have an awesome day i'll catch. All of you in the next video you.