The AUSubaru.com.au Forums

Hi all,

I left Adelaide very early this morning and headed to Ballarat and everything was fine. Got to Ballarat and notice the gearbox whinging in nuetral while rolling. I also found the rear diff felt like it was locked as there was a shuddering/ hopping turning corners slowly especially in reverse.
I took the car the local Subaru dealership and a mechanic took it for a test drive. The viscous coupling in the rear of the gearbox has gone and the car has only done 130,000km and never thrashed mainly highway km's. The mechanic said its not un-common for them to have this problem in Outbacks or Foresters.
It's not going to be cheap as a new coupling is $1345 plus labour.

Anyone else had this problem with later model DR AWD 5-speed gearboxes?

Cheers,

Sadly we have done one. Not too hard to do.
Steve

No worries Steve they said it will only take about 2hrs to do.

Cheers,

My MY02 Outback had done the same thing just before I purcahsed it with 175,000km's on it, the dealer agreed to fix the gearbox if I buy a new tyre.

Realising I'd obviously done more research than he had I agreed to the deal, he was out of pocket for the best part of $1,500.

Touch wood mine is now up to 250,000km's with out any issues.

Jordan.

I don't know.... it might be the bearing has collapsed?

(i've heard of that they can fail - no one really knows why -> talking about the coupling/centre diff)
You can remove the centre diff while the gearbox is still attached to the car, the gearbox has 3 sections, all you need is to remove the last section of the box to remove the centre diff.
I don't know about Gen 3 gearbox but i believe it would be same as gen 1 & 2 boxes, the centre diff is the same, so all you need to do is to find 2nd hand centre diff from any AWD gearboxes and put it in...
Cheers
AP

not sure about it being a viscous coupling as the viscous coupling are in the manual gearboxes there is a cluchpack the takes it place in the automatic gearboxes and there was quite a lot of them doing the same thing and was caused by the clutch plate fingers wearing groves in the housing and jamming causing shutter they did do a fix for the problem in 2001 were they changed the hard facing on the housing but unsure if they had any more problems after that make sure that you use the japanese spec dextron 3 oil or high grade ATF as this used to cause these problems in the past when people changed the trans fluid at 50 000 services and put cheap oil in the clutch packs didn't like it