carpediemracing 

Also, from the hoods or the drops?

big john

If you curl your finger and push the shifter with your fingertip (instead of pushing sideways) that might help.
I never had those issues when I used down-tube shifters, but I did stick a finger into the front tire a couple times.

I also had bikes with bar-end shifters. I always liked those.

I have pain in the base of the thumb, mostly on the left hand. Something to do with holding handlebars for almost 40 years.

Ygduf

use your middle finger? wear lobster gloves and use your pinky/ring finger.

ridethecliche

Oh cool whatchu got?

Yes, sort of. I have an 02 impreza 2.5 TS hatch. Love it.

A 03 WRX wagon just popped onto the market locally for 4800. I'm wondering what I should be wary of it. Guy says it was his daily driver so wasn't modified at all. I love my TS, but I want something a bit more fun to drive. It needs to be reliable though and I'm not planning on modifying mine.

Mileage on both is pretty similar with mine at 138k and his at like 132k. I know these cars get 200k pretty easily with routine maintenance, so I'd want whichever car I have to atleast last me through med school, aka the next 3.5 years. The WRX is a manual though and I've never driven stick. My motorcycle is a manual though, so I know how it works and would just need to get the muscle memory down. A few friends here have sticks and could teach me too if it came to that.

gsteinb

had an outback. my son drives and impreza, and my wife has a forester.

ridethecliche

Cool cool. How long are they usually good for if they're taken care of? My impreza's seems pretty solid right now but needed all the 100k maintenance done to it when I got it which is why it was as cheap as it was.

gsteinb

my real estate agent in the daks had an outback with 300,000 miles on it.

change the oil regularly, take care of them, and they'll go forever.

ridethecliche

Yeah, I wonder if the turbo complicates things or if it makes the car drive like a tank at city speeds.

spdntrxi

I have the turbo forester XT.. I think Subaru is smart enough not to oversize the turbo for city driving. My XT has the 2.0L T which should be very similar to the boxer engines in the WRX's.. its totally city drivable .

ridethecliche

I think the 02/03 were the first wrx's. They have some pretty solid turbo lag from what I've been reading. Reliability is a more important factor for me right now though. Just trying to figure if this stuff would be:
a) worth it
b) how much I'd get for my current 2.5 TS.

Honestly I'd probably be better off driving this till it explodes and then getting a 05ish wrx sti or something like that later. People really abuse those cars though so it's hard to find one that hasn't been modded poorly by some dude with a wrench that thinks he's the best mechanic on the planet.

It'd be nice to have a more fun car for the next 4 years but I guess it shouldn't really be that high of a priority. I have my motorcycle for when i want to take a 'fun' ride, though that's totally different and it's not that crazy of a bike to begin with haha.

spdntrxi

the motor will not go first... on modded cars on that vintage the tranny will be the first to go... even on the non-turbo models.

grolby

I definitely use a two-finger press for the downshift. And for upshifting on the left. Hadn't really thought about it before. I do overall prefer Shimano for the lighter touch, even though both my bikes have SRAM. Basically, for reasons.

ridethecliche

Yeah, cars still on the stock clutch/tranny. I'll have to look for a shop in that area to see if they can take a look at the car and see what work it needs and if there's other stuff that might be an issue as well.

big john

I would say avoid the turbo on a higher mileage used car. Subarus are good but nobody can predict how long any car is going to go before something fails and a turbo is not something you need. Friend had a turbo Outback and spent many thousands on repeat turbo and engine failures, finally sold it at a big loss.
If the car you have has just been maintenanced and is in good shape, why **** around?
You can buy a new car when you become a surgeon.

ridethecliche

Yeah, that's certainly true. The reliability aspect is probably the most important one right now.

And a lot of these cars were abused. Thought I'd found a half decent one from the sound of it though.

Link: 2003 Subaru WRX Wagon

carpediemracing 

hm with snows. That's worth something right there. Not in the fact that you get the snows, but that someone with an AWD car is smart enough to know that snows will help immensely. I bet if you ask why they're selling it you'll get a 90% answer, maybe a 100% answer.

big john

Might be a great car, might not. Might need a clutch in 2 months, especially if a newbie is hammering on it.
Turbocharger doesn't necessarily make it less reliable, but if the turbo fails it would be very expensive and it could take out the engine. Turbo engines are stressed more than normally aspirated ones, especially if they are piloted by a lead foot.

TheKillerPenguin

It was a lot worse when I was on SRAM (not saying sram sucks). Shimano does seem to help because of how much less force is required to shift.

ridethecliche

I'd asked.

He said:
I want to sell the car, ready to move on. I can sell without being ready to buy the next one. I have owned it since 2005. Time for some change.


Asked about dumping the clutch to boost a start and maintenance:
I don't live a quarter mile at a time. The worst thing to do on a car like this is drop the clutch and abuse the drive line. Original stock clutch and it is strong. Absolutely no mechanical issues.I have done all regular maintenance myself including oil changes, tranny+dif fluid changes, timing belt, etc my self. Very few things like rear wheel bearing were done by others. I have receipts for some of the parts over the last 10 years


The only thing is that it was stolen in montreal a few years ago but seller says that it was found without being messed with and the ignition was switched out and that was that.

himespau 

Does it make me a nerd that figuring out how to use VLOOKUP (after having used excel for probably 2 decades without knowing how to use it) totally made my day? Simple pleasures.

carpediemracing 

Other than it being stolen it sounds pretty legit. I could easily see one of my friends saying the exact same thing. Stolen, you don't know what happened, but if he kept the cars for a few years it is a reasonably good sign.

Also "ready to move on" is, well, isn't that what you want to do?

That 02 WRX that my buddy had did have some serious lag. When he sold it it had massive miles on it, maybe 200k. I drove it a few times, including most of the way to/from the Worlds in Hamilton, ON (so, what, like 15 hours for that trip alone?). It was pretty new at that point, but that's when I learned about the lag first hand. I drove it some other times, don't remember that much, I think I drove us to some races past NYC (Nutley? Liberty Crit off 287? Maybe Somerville? Philly RR to watch?). I did bring my GTech RR on many of the trips (like a power meter for a car, measures G-forces, etc) and was very disappointed in myself that I wasn't comfortable pushing more than about 0.7 Gs on exit ramps, probably because it wasn't my car and my buddy was sitting next to me.

carpediemracing 

I think that's great.

VLOOKUP is the secret to my registration spreadsheet. I so don't know Excel for someone that's used it for forever, but the little things I've learned are truly precious.

Someone else started my registration spreadsheet, I "reverse-engineered" it to see how it worked, then expanded it to do all sorts of USCF/USAC-necessary stuff. Makes end of day a breeze, unless formulas got screwed up because someone tried to "edit" a looked up value (like a team name) in a prior race without me noticing it. Upload results, if I had uninterrupted time, in a minute or so after the results are final. Etc.

Flatballer

VLOOKUP is pretty good. There's a lot of power in Excel, if you're willing to work a bit to learn. So many people waste so much time instead of automating things.

Ygduf

Index Match is next level vlookup and probably contributes to half of my salary.

himespau 

Finally figured out how to automate a bunch of steps into one so that now instead of a bunch of copy/pasting and several steps of sorting, my gradebook is much faster to insert/calculate students' grades. Only a little time/effort for each thing, but over the course of a semester (or multiple semesters as I can save this as a template), it'll save a couple hours of tedium. Definitely not what you'd call a power user, but each little trick I learn (logic statements don't often quite work the way I think they should, but also help once I get them figured out), makes life easier.