Year range when looking for salvage parts

Car: 1992 Subaru Legagy L 2.2L AWD wagon

There is a salvage yard in my area that specializes in foreign cars that are over 10 years old. For yanking parts off old cars, it's a good place to go. Sometimes I find what I want (and usually yank some other parts while I'm there). Depends if I find a match up on my car. They even provide a searchable online inventory of what they have in stock. They include the date of when they got the vehicle (because I often find after a couple weeks that the car has been already ransacked beyond having any parts left that I want). However, instead of looking for my particular year, it would seem that I could search for a range of years (that they don't let you search on, so I have to specify each year).

I have found that going to far away from my year results in slight changes in the parts that make them unusable for my car. One example was a front fender. Instead of having the squarish or trapezoidal cutout for the side lamp (backside of the headlight), it was more teardrop shaped plus the fender was 3/4" shorter. Didn't realize that until I had prepped and painted the fender and then tried to install it. The salvage yard agreed to take back the fender although it was already repainted and the salvage car was no longer in their stock which they definitely did not have to do (a bit of smooth talking to a particular gal there helps with returns). They gave me credit instead of cash that expired in a year so I found other parts to yank to eat up that credit.

For the '92, what year range could I use when looking at what they have in inventory? I don't know how much earlier in years, if any, that I can go. The fender fiasco was with a '94 Subary Legacy (but was probably a sedan instead of a wagon and that might've been the real cause in the difference in the header, or maybe some weird special model that I don't know of that was offered at that time, and they do differentiate between sedan and wagon in their online inventory). Most of what I want to replace is body or trim due to rust or damage and these seem to be most sensitive to the year range of the car.

Reply to
VanguardLH
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Most stuff from the '90 thru '94 Legacys will fit your car. Some trim pieces will differ (but probably will still fit; get the whole package if necessary), and obviously the wagon will differ from the sedan in some respects, tho again nearly all mechanicals are the same. One difference I do know about is ABS vs non-ABS; axles and hubs do not interchange directly. ABS parts will fit non-ABS OK, Non ABS will fit an ABS car, but you will lose the ABS. Hope this helps.

ByeBye! S.

Steve Jernigan KG0MB Laboratory Manager Microelectronics Research University of Colorado (719) 262-3101

Reply to
S

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