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I have some new parts. Long travel inverted Bilstein’s were the first item, and the only planned item, but I tend to buy more and more parts while waiting for others to arrive. I was going to stay legal for stock class, but it’s too easy to leave that behind.
As I said, it started with the Bilsteins. The old shocks were a little tired, and Bilsteins are cool. These are inverted, with a LOT of travel. I.E. almost double what my Celica had. Still stock legal though. And so is the rear sway bar that I ordered while waiting for the suspension to arrive. But of course, it hadn’t arrived by the time the suspension did. I changed the suspension, and left the car on jack stands in anticipation of the sway bar swap.
But then, with the car on stands, I just started poking around at things. I pulled the air conditioning out one day on a whim. It wasn’t charged, didn’t blow cold, and I barely drive this car in the summer anyways. It saved 30lbs off the nose of the car, but just like that I wasn’t stock legal anymore. The flood gates opened. Instead of just swapping brake pads like I had planned, I decided to buy 4-pot calipers… and brake lines… and a front lip. All cars with have upgraded brakes must have some kind of front lip of course. I kept myself entertained by de-skirting the kick panels and filling the holes underneath, as well as building a splitter while waiting for those parts to show up.
Then the day came when all my parts had arrived, were installed, and I was ready to go for a drive. Except… no one was around to help me bleed my brakes. The local vendor didn’t have any Speed Bleeders in stock, and my tool shop wanted $300 for a pressure bleeder. Reasonable maybe, but not when friends would be back in town the next week… or when there was a catless up-pipe on Kijiji for $50. I made a phone call, took the wife’s car for a drive, and came home to take my car back apart.
Subaru’s are not easy cars to work on… I had to undo the engine mounts, jack the engine up, remove the intake, pull the down pipe and…
… Hyeh!?
That’s what the stock downpipe looks like? No way in hell I was putting that back on the car. Subaru’s really are glorified tractors. After more parts were ordered, the cycle of waiting continues.
Car life yay! I like my options.
This is on the front of my car now. I found it pretty tiring this winter, constantly ripping the OEM urethane undertray and sideskirts off when blowing through snowbanks and ice chunks. I’m not asking it to protect my oil pan from boulders, but hopefully it will hold up to solid water, and maybe even give me a bit of an aero advantage.
It was fun and easy to make, bolting very easily to existing holes in the lower radiator support and cross-memeber. Total weight is 4.2kg, and it cost me $35 as constructed from 12mm aircraft plywood. Certainly not the most exotic material, but note that it’s lighter than aluminum, stiffer than UHMW, stronger than FRP and like a quarter the cost of all three. Ultimately I would have DIY sandwiched it between some carbon fiber, but it didn’t seem worth the cost and effort.
This is my favorite shift knob. I made it from an old trailer hitch. It’s big. It’s heavy. It looks gnarly. It feels awesome… But it doesn’t match the persona of my Subaru. It worked on the AE86 with raw home-made stuff everywhere, tight buckets, and a fat deep steering wheel. The WRX is stock and normal and plain and my wife can’t discover that I’m tweaking it to be a little bit less so.
So I bought some Plasti-dip and covered it with that. Once again it’s the best shift knob I’ve ever felt. The Plasti-dip is thick enough to fill in little dents and scratches on the bare steel, and gives a bit of a radius on the bends and corners to make it look fairly stockish. To the touch, it is almost soft and supple. Even better, it insulates what can be a very cold cold steel ball on days when the temperature gets below zero. The way the WRX boot is shaped, it even hides the nut I welded onto the bottom.
I got my first care package from Japan. Werd. I had been mildly worried that my Wat’s would end up being fakes. There are so many clones out there… but these are legit with the right stampings and original stickers on the backside. They are also the right weight. 16 8J +35, and 7.2kg on my scale. That’s about 16lbs FWIW, and a very happy weight. Not surprisingly, selling them has crossed my mind as I recently came across some actual WRC 15 6J OZ’s… expensive as hell, but certainly fitting for snow and gravel. As long as I searched for these though, I’d be silly.
