The Subaroo is dead, long live the Subaroo! :-)

My old Outback reached its use-by date and got progressively less reliable over the last three months - no huge surprise after 14 years and 215000km - and I decided to get me something slightly new_er_.

After a bit of mental to and fro I ditched the idea of buying a real 4WD toy (I had looked at 2007+ Mitsubishi Triton dual cabs as an option), and bought another Suby, this time a 2006 Forester X. The old car I traded in - for a pittance, but likely just in time before it would have fallen apart.

Me being me the first thing I did after bringing the car home was to search for the workshop manual (3600 pages of pdf), which is as usual pretty precise and really helpful.

The second thing I did was to tear things apart :-) The Forester came with the original factory radio (pretty lousy) and needed to make way for a transplant from the old car.

You know you've got a modern car when you need a spudger (and knowhow of the many hidden catches) more than a screwdriver:

To get to the radio the center bezel/fascia has to come off, which requires the removal of the lower fascia to reach two screws, then some judicious spudger use and gentle pulling - but before you can start pulling, it is necessary to disconnect the HVAC control cables (this being the basic model with manual HVAC controls, which I much prefer over Hal 9000), which requires either a contortionist with tiny fingers or the disassembly of both knee boards, which requires disassembly of the glove box and the driver-side lower panel, which...

Once you have a substantial part of the dashboard in pieces then you can loosen four screws, fiddle the radio frame out of its recess and replace the radio.

Quite a bit later I had mounted the radio (twice, the first time I used the wrong set of mounting holes and the face panel was not flush but
too far in...) and also fabricated a simple phone holder.