I got my car back on Saturday–I was pretty surprised when the mechanic called to tell me it was ready. I figured they’d use some heli-coils on the bolt holes, which meant they’d have to order in the parts, ’cause that’s not something a parts store around here would keep in stock. But luckily for me, the mechanic knows a thing or two about Subarus (he owns one himself), and he simply cut off the exhaust flanges, turned them 90 degrees, and bolted them into the other existing bolt holes around each exhaust port. Then he just welded the exhaust pipes back onto the flanges. I don’t know why Subaru left two unused bolt holes on each exhaust port, but I assume they knew the threads would strip out eventually. I had considered getting this done instead of heli-coils, but I thought it would be much more expensive, considering that I’d have to take it to a muffler shop instead of doing it myself.
What’s funny, though, is that I ended up paying for this myself anyway–$50, not too bad for the amount of work that went into it. When my father-in-law made the deal with the repair shop to exchange his car parts for credit, he told the owner of the shop that the credit would be used towards rebuilding the transmission in my white Subaru. The problem is that he didn’t even ask me if that was ok, seeing as how I had no intention of rebuilding the automatic transmisison in that car–I had planned on swapping it out for a used manual transmission myself and saving a shitload of money. When I picked up my car on Saturday, the mechanic told me that the only reason the owner had agreed to the swap was because he would still make money on the transmission rebuild. But with doing such a small job on my other Subaru, he would actually end up losing money. So now my father-in-law has to figure out what to do about it. He gave away $100 worth of parts and didn’t get anything in return. But that’s how my wife’s family works–they base their entire lives upon assumptions, and when things don’t turn out as expected, they end up quibbling with each other in a never ending cycle.