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I've been driving Subarus since 1998. Last fall a Subaru dealer in Asheville quoted me seven hundred and seventy-two dollars to swap four spark plugs on my '15 Legacy. If you've ever owned a 2.5-litre boxer past a hundred thousand miles, you already know which procedure they were trying to charge me for and you already know exactly what the service writer is going to tell you about the engine mounts. My name is Mike. I'm forty-nine. I run a one-man documentary video company out of Asheville, North Carolina — Western Carolina, Blue Ridge Mountains, ninety minutes from the Tennessee line. Six days a week from April through November I'm hauling camera gear up the Parkway to shoot regional documentary work — small-batch distilleries in Madison County, fiber farms in Yancey, the old apple orchards above Hendersonville. One-man crew. One vehicle that does everything. My Super Duty stays parked because I don't need to tow more than a small production trailer most weeks. The car is a 2015 Subaru Legacy 2.5i Premium with the FB25 boxer and the CVT. Crystal Black Silica. 142,000 miles on the original engine and the original transmission. I bought her new at Prestige Subaru in Asheville in July of '15 — three months before my dad clocked out for the last time on the Subaru of Indiana Automotive assembly line in Lafayette, Indiana, after thirty-one years on the floor. My dad worked the Outback and Legacy line at SIA from 1989 to 2020. Thirty-one years. He hired on the year before I was born when the Lafayette plant was still ramping up after Subaru and Isuzu opened it as a joint venture in '89. He retired in March of 2020, three months before pancreatic cancer found him. He was sixty-seven. Six months from diagnosis to the wake. His brass SIA 25-year service medallion sits in a velvet box on a peg above my workbench. He earned it in 2014 at the long-service ceremony at the Lafayette plant. He gave it to me on a July morning in 2015, the day I drove the Legacy off the Prestige lot. He flew down from Indianapolis the night before to be there. At lunch at Tupelo Honey on College Street he pulled the velvet box out of his suitcase and slid it across the table. Inside there was a small piece of paper folded against the medallion, in his block printing: Built it. Drive it well. Dad, 2015. Laurie — my wife — asked me a year after Dad died if I wanted to put it in a shadow box frame with the funeral notice from the Lafayette Journal & Courier. I told her no. He didn't build it for a frame. He built it to be driven. She didn't ask again. My shop is a two-car garage behind a 1970s ranch house in West Asheville that Laurie and I bought in '07 with the deposit from her brother. Concrete floor I poured myself in '19 after the original slab cracked through one winter. Saturday mornings I'm out there at six-thirty — half an hour after Laurie heads up the Mountain-to-Sea Trail with Otis, the brown-and-white border collie mix we got from the Buncombe County Humane Society six years ago. Coffee in a Hi-Wire Brewing thermos Laurie bought me at the brewery's summer block party in '21. WNCW 88.7 out of Spindale on the workbench — Appalachian Americana, the morning Old-Time Radio Hour. Laurie produces afternoon news at WCQS, the local NPR affiliate. She doesn't ask when I'll be in. She brings out a blueberry scone from City Bakery around nine after her trail loop. The 2.5-litre boxer is the best four-cylinder Subaru has built since they put the FB25 in the Legacy in 2013. Two hundred thousand miles is normal. Two-fifty isn't unusual. But every long-running boxer eventually faces one job — and there's only one job that every Subaru forum and every YouTube Subie mechanic agrees about. The spark plugs. The spark plugs on a boxer engine sit on top of the heads. The heads sit horizontal on either side of the block, flat against the chassis rails. The two rear plugs — cyl 2 on the passenger side and cyl 4 on the driver — sit between the head and the engine mount brackets that hold the engine to the subframe. You can see them with a flashlight when the hood is up. You cannot get a standard 5/8 spark plug socket on them. The chassis rail is half an inch from the head. The engine mount bracket is over the top. The factory service procedure for spark plug replacement on a 2014+ Legacy 2.5 is documented in technical service bulletin SUBA-2014. It says the engine mounts must be loosened and the engine raised approximately one inch on the passenger side to clear the socket from the chassis rail. Every NASIOC thread on the topic says the same thing. Every YouTube Subaru mechanic says the same thing. The dealer pull, they call it. Last August I'd been hearing a misfire under hard acceleration on the long pull up the Parkway out of Asheville. Codes pointed at cyl 2. I knew exactly what it was. I'd been putting off the plugs since 100,000 miles. I parked the Legacy in the garage on a Friday night and started in on it Saturday morning at six-thirty. I had the airbox out. The intake snorkel out. The engine cover off. I sat staring at cyl 2 for the rest of the morning while WNCW played the Old-Time Radio Hour and Otis lay on the floor watching me. Snap-on three-eighths spark plug socket on a six-inch extension — couldn't clear the engine mount bracket without raising the engine. Wobble extension on a Lisle universal joint with a 5/8 deep socket. Walked off the head of the plug every time I tried to seat. Caught it twice. The third pull it rounded a corner. Mac stubby flex-head ratchet from '14. Couldn't clear the chassis rail. Five degrees of swing on a plug that's been heat-cycled since 2015 is meaningless. A "Subaru spark plug extraction tool" I bought off Amazon at midnight, thirty-two bucks from a third-party seller in Florida. Wobbled like a paper fan. The socket left the plug every time I loaded the extension. A 1/4-drive ratchet with a 5/8 deep socket — recommended on a NASIOC thread by a guy in Michigan who'd done his rear plugs without raising the engine. Too narrow to get the torque needed to crack a plug that hadn't been touched since the factory. In the bottom drawer of my Snap-on chest there's a row of these. A Gearwrench flex. A Cornwell swivel. Two Lisle universals from different years. A Husky stubby I bought at Lowe's because it was on clearance. Combined: maybe two hundred and sixty bucks of tools that all flex when you load them. That's how I rounded the cyl-2 plug. I sat down on the workbench stool with the engine cover on the bench and the airbox on the floor. WNCW went into the noon old-time fiddle hour. There was a tune playing that sounded like one my granddad used to whistle. I sat through the fiddle hour and into the weather, which was eighty-eight degrees and rising on the Parkway above Mount Pisgah. I called Prestige Subaru on Monday. The service writer told me the procedure was the dealer pull — eight hours of book time at $145 plus the rounded plug extraction. Seven hundred and seventy-two dollars and eighteen cents, before tax. He said it like he was telling me the weather. He could fit me in three weeks Tuesday. I told Laurie at supper. She set her wine glass down and said, "Mike. Almost eight hundred bucks to swap four spark plugs. No. The dealer is making it harder than it is." She picked her wine glass back up. The next month was BoxerFest at York Fairgrounds in Pennsylvania. Mid-Atlantic Subaru Owners Association annual event — has been since 2014. I've been going nine years. Some years for the show. Mostly for the back lot they call Subie Service Row, where two hundred Subaru owners park their cars with the hoods up and Saturday afternoon you'll find half the row under each other's engine covers drinking coffee from the cart by the gate. I drove the Legacy up early Saturday morning. Five hundred miles up I-77 through Charlotte and Charlottesville, across the Pennsylvania Turnpike, into York County by sundown Friday. Spent Friday walking the show. Saturday morning I came back to Subie Service Row and three cars down from mine an older guy was wheeling a steel tool chest from the back of a 2010 Outback toward a folding table. The chest's wheels weren't rolling on the gravel and his bad shoulder wasn't cooperating. I walked over and asked if he needed a hand. He said yes please. We pushed the chest the last fifteen feet together and set it next to his folding table. He stuck out a hand. Doug Mercer. From Lafayette, Indiana. Sixty-eight years old. Thirty-three years at Subaru of Indiana Automotive, retired in March of 2020. He'd worked the Legacy 5th-gen Endkontrolle line — the line my car came off in July of '15. He'd been at SIA the same week Dad clocked out for the last time. He knew Dad. Not by name immediately, but when I told him my father's name and the date he retired, Doug's face changed. They'd stood at adjacent stations on the line for the last six months of Dad's tenure. We sat on the back of his Outback eating donuts from the cart by the gate. I told him about my plugs. The rounded cyl-2. The Prestige quote. The note in the velvet box. Doug listened. When I was done he said, "You ever try a chain-drive bar?" I said I didn't know what that was. He went to the steel tool chest we'd just wheeled in and came back with an orange metal bar. About fifteen inches long. Solid steel. Square drives on both ends. He said, "Press on the end." I pressed on the square drive. Inside the bar, something moved. Not flex. Not wobble. A chain. An internal roller chain that transferred torque through the offset angle without deflecting. Doug said, "Two cars down has a '16 Legacy 2.5 with the same problem. Sarah Whitcomb. Out of Portland Oregon. She posted on the BoxerFest forum last week looking for help. Let's go." We walked two cars down. Sarah was at the coffee cart by the gate. Doug had the engine cover off her Legacy in under ten minutes. He slid the BoltHero between the engine mount bracket and the chassis rail. Set the head on the cyl-2 plug. Pulled. The plug came out on the first pull. Ten years of Pacific Northwest moisture on a Subaru boxer plug. First pull. Sarah came back twenty minutes later with a coffee and a Boston cream donut. She watched Doug put the new NGK iridiums in. Sarah said, "I had a quote for eight hundred forty at the Subaru dealer in Beaverton." Doug said, "You won't be paying that." Then Doug looked at me. He said, "Walk to your car." I walked. Doug came with the orange bar. He climbed up on the front fender of my Legacy. "Press on the end of this," he said. I pressed. The chain moved inside. Doug reached between the engine mount and the chassis rail and set the head of the BoltHero on my rounded cyl-2 plug. He pulled. The plug came out on the first pull. The hex caught on the good flats and broke loose. Nine years of Blue Ridge heat and moisture on a Subaru boxer plug. First pull. Cyl 4 came out the same way. The driver-side plugs we did without raising the engine an inch. I ordered one that night sitting in the Legacy in the York Fairgrounds parking lot. getbolthero.com. Sixty-nine dollars. Doug said order direct — there are knockoffs on Amazon that look identical but don't have the chain drive inside. Hollow tubes that flex like the two hundred and sixty bucks of tools in my Snap-on chest. I drove home Sunday. Did the rest of the spark plug job the next Saturday with the new NGK iridiums NASIOC told me to use. All four plugs out clean. The Legacy idled smooth and pulled the Parkway out of Asheville without a stumble on the long climb to Mount Pisgah. I've used the BoltHero thirty-one times since September. The other two plugs on the driver side I did with confidence. Three intake manifold bolts behind the throttle body that I'd been avoiding. Four valve cover bolts on the passenger side that the Subaru forum says are notorious. Two transmission cooler line bolts under the radiator support. The accessory belt tensioner bolt my brother-in-law's '19 Forester had stripped because he'd used the wrong size box-end. Six injector hold-down bolts on Sarah's Forester when she drove down to Asheville in October for a Parkway camping trip. A starter bolt buried behind the down pipe on a friend's '08 Outback in West Asheville. The dealer wanted seven hundred and seventy-two dollars and eighteen cents for four spark plugs. Eight hours of book time. The dealer pull. The wrench cost sixty-nine. The math is simple. The math has always been simple. The hard part was driving five hundred miles up I-77 and across the Pennsylvania Turnpike to BoxerFest at York Fairgrounds to find a guy who'd worked the Lafayette line beside my father — and who knew which bolts they wished they could change. Laurie asked me a couple of Saturdays ago if the Legacy was running clean. I told her listen — no misfire on the Parkway climb. She listened to the engine for a minute when I cranked it at the screen porch. She said, "Your dad would have been proud of how that runs." She went up the trail with Otis. Dad's SIA medallion is still in the velvet box on the peg above the workbench. Four years since he died. The handwritten note is still folded against the brass: Built it. Drive it well. Dad, 2015. Doug and I text now. He sent me a photo last month of an '18 Outback he was helping a kid in Indianapolis put back together. Wrote underneath: "Same plugs. Same trick. Tell Laurie." The orange bar sits on top of the chest. Where I can reach it. If you run a 2.5 boxer in a Legacy, an Outback, a Forester, an Impreza, a Crosstrek, or any FB or EJ 2.5 Subaru built since 2013 — you already know the plugs I'm talking about. The rear plugs on cyl 2 and cyl 4. The intake manifold bolts behind the throttle body. The valve cover bolts on the passenger side. The transmission cooler line bolts under the radiator support. You don't have to pay for the dealer pull about it. Built it. Drive it well. getbolthero.com Sixty-nine dollars. Order direct.