[kristifer.szabo]

Hello everyone, this is my first post on your forums. I have been browsing through these forums for the last couple of days as I am now a proud first-time owner of a Subaru Outback. A little backstory; I bought this car with a friend, we are both students living in Montreal and we just wanted some additional mobility to go camping and whatever. The car is a 1998 ob, it is fully loaded so I guess its just the fanciest one they made at the time. It has 373,000km! I bought it 5 days ago off a used car lot. The guy told me it had been sitting for about 3 months.

Ok so the technical stuff.
-The (a-t oil) light flashes while the car is turning on but turns off when the car is driving
-the Check Engine light is always on
We put about 100km on it in the 5 days since purchasing. Today we checked the oil and couldn't get a reading off the dipstick, this was alarming, we topped it up with 3 litres of 5w30. We then started smelling burning oil whenever stopped in traffic, also alarming. I think it is leaking out of the oil-pan plug and getting splashed onto the exhaust.

A little later, during the same drive, two dashboard lights came on at the same time. The (!) indicator and the (Battery) indicator. We didn't notice any change in performance so we kept going and were able to turn the car off and then on again but when I finally got home I parked and turned the car off and then tried to turn it on again

HERE IS THE PECULIAR PART

So the car would not turn back on, the starter didn't even try. No clicking sound. All the lights still worked as with the power locks and windows but the radio wouldn't turn on. I tried again 4 hours later and this time the engine cranked several times but wouldn't start. The power accessories became very sluggish and the lights became dimmer.
This is where I am now.
fyi, I am pretty sure the battery is good because it still had the right time on the clock after sitting on the car lot for 3 months and needed a boost to get started the first time.

Any thoughts?

 

[kristifer.szabo]

Additional info
-The alternator belt is in rough shape but its still there

 

[kristifer.szabo]

Thanks plain OM,

I took the battery to a parts store and they said the negative cell was dead and the battery needed to be replaced. I hope this means that the alternator is ok though I know that a bad alternator can be the cause for a bad battery.
I couldn't see any oil on the dipstick today which leads me to believe that my dipstick is not getting an accurate reading. Another thing to troubleshoot..

 

[kristifer.szabo]

Yeah you guys are right, I am researching now for a mechanic who can at least give it a thorough inspection so that at least I have a list of things that I can choose to do myself or let the mechanic do. For a Quebec car is has an amazingly small amount of rust and it was very cheap so we took the risk without getting an inspection. Now I am going to have it inspected anyway so its a bit of a lesson to me, get it inspected first! I am pretty handy with fixing things but yeah, as for diagnosing I find that I am scratching my head more then anything.