I put a rebuilt engine in the car a few years ago, not realizing the car was a "Cali spec" chassis. In 05 this means that the car was pretty substantially different to adhere to Cali emissions specs.
This means it has different:
-Single port "Z25 cylinder heads" vs standard dual port non AVCS Q25 heads on federal emissions cars
-3 stage intake manifold w different engine harness and extra BS
-5 02 sensors vs 2 on federal cars
-Totally different two bank exhaust with 3 catalysts
-Different ECU
I got the car running with cali spec ancillaries and the federal spec motor a few years ago but it never ran right and had a perma CEL which drove me nuts because that disables cruise control on a Subaru.
I looked into converting the car from cali to federal emissions when I discovered all of this but it was a gray area on whether or not it could be done.
I spent last week diving into wiring diagrams and ecu pinouts for federal vs cali emissions 05 outbacks and found inconclusive data regarding ECU/chassis harness pinouts being the same between both cars.
I bought a $500 federal 05 and decided to put all of the federal stuff on our car sans exhaust to see what codes I got.
I installed the federal intake, engine harness, ecu, and 02 sensors, and the only code I got was a front AF 02 sensor low voltage since the cali AF 02s ran through the engine harness and federal does not. So, without the cali engine harness, there was no 02 sensor plug.
Then I found the motherload, deep in a searchable factory manual, which was an I/O signal chart for both cali and federal ecus.
Much to my surprise, Right Hand Front AF Cali 02 perfectly matched the pins for the Front AF Federal 02, and the 5th Cali Rear 02 perfectly matched the pins for the Rear Federal 02.

This meant that all I had to do was find these wires in the chassis harness behind the engine harness connector, chop them and make my own front AF 02 sensor harness.
Got all of that done today and have no codes for the first time in two years after installing a new engine and am STOKED, considering I was swimming in mostly uncharted waters.
<1% will care about any of this, but I was excited enough to post it here.
Before I cleaned it all up.

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