Making quite good progress actually. Looks great, most people won’t notice or care for off color match.
Some stuff happened.
The wiring harness in the car was an absolute mess, intermittent opens all up in that shit. If you jiggled under the dash some stuff would start working again… for 5 minutes. So anyways rather than try and polish a turd I took the whole dash back out and put a new wiring harness in it. Now everything works great, like even things that were broken (the horn for example) when I bought the car 2 years ago are fixed thanks to the new harness.
Just finished that maybe 2 weeks ago, and I got a new hood to replace the primer black one that was bent from when it flew open going 40mph. It’s a Seibon carbon fiber one, and strangely enough it looks alot like the one in these pictures of my car.
So anyways after about a year and a half of being either unfinished or broken it is now neither. I had wanted to sell this thing for a quite a while but now that its back together I don’t really plan to. With the amount of time I have spent working on this I don’t think I could ever part with it, every bolt on the whole car was tightened by me and I built everything in it myself except the transmission. I mean that literally too, the car was stripped to a bare shell for a while. It came soooo close to just being hauled away for scrap and I almost just broke down and parted it out a few times. I definitely cant sell it now. Ever.
I’m having it tuned this coming week, I’m about 150 miles short of the 1000 to finish the break in. There is a local guy who seems to really know his stuff and he does road tunes. Once that is all set I don’t know what I’ll do yet, it feels weird not having this car sitting in pieces in my garage. Maybe I’ll get some new wheels and tires in the spring, thinking gold RPF-1’s and some summer shit on them.
Probably time to wash it though, hasn’t been washed since March of 2011.
And I updated the modlist at the top.
sick, and holy fuck a comanche.
Yeah thats the daily driver.
sweet dude. best of luck with it, i like the way it’s turned out
congrats and good read . Nice work . makes you feel proud i bet . nice ride .
Nice work…seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and seeing a completed project is an awesome feeling.
Thanks guys. Been driving it all week and it runs awesome, getting tuned this afternoon. After that I get to enjoy it for like 3 weeks before I stick it in the garage for winter.
Looking awesome Ian, I love the V1-4 front bumper. The only thing I’d change is the hood. The 04-05 hood scoop just doesn’t look right on there.
Yeah I was going to buy the VIS one which has the stock look but I got 20% off the Seibon. The scoop is really big but its growing on me I guess (not literally luckily).
And I had it tuned, pulls like a freight train. From a roll it will spin all through 1st and even into second if you shift fast enough. Good work on Ray’s part too, it drives butter smooth around town still and unless you want to spool it up you can putter around and it feels just like a little N/A car. This size turbo seems to be a good compromise, still makes full boost by 3500 and starts to spool decent if you get into it around 2800.
And now its winter time.
Weighed the car. With me and about 1/3rd tank it weighs 2610, like 150 less than stock curb weight, not bad for having pretty much a full interior. And used the Accessport dyno to “dyno” it, reads 305whp, seems about what I expected. Power to weight ratio is awesome, same as a stock weight 04 STi with like 390 to the wheels.
And as soon as there is salt on the roads i’m gonna stick the car in the garage and swap out that head, that’s really all I need for when I start auto-x and stuff come spring. I’d like new wheels/tires with something meaty on them, like 245’s and 07 WRX 4/2 pots by then but w/e, not really a necessity for now.
And I talked to a few shops about repainting that front bumper and fender. My paint came out good except its about 4 shades too light, I could do it again myself but I’d rather just pay someone a couple hundred bucks and not have to worry about it. Probably going to get it painted to match over the winter also.
Once those couple things are done though the car will be done, this will be the first automotive project that I’ve really completely finished to my satisfaction.
I found this pic of the car today, brought back good memories. Dec-2010 like the same day I got the car first registered we had a huge snow storm, like midnight at the Colonie Center parking lot.
235’s are all you need for tires man. Fitting anything bigger without rubbing would be a pain in the ass.
Seeing these pictures reminds me of how much fun my Subie was in the snow…I’m acutally starting to miss it a little.
This thing really enjoys fucking me.
I was indeed correct, there is a crack in the intake port which now with the head off I can actually see and not just feel. That wasn’t a big issue because I am replacing the head. The issue is that the piston is also fucking cracked on #3. The bore is scored so badly it isn’t going to be possible to be rebored, its already .020 over and this is really deep.
It probably pinged one too many times from burning oil.
Well that was only a $1000 waste. I found a beadblasted set of case halves on ebay and ordered another set of .020 over pistons, everything else can be re-used. I’m not giving up on this, this car will be finished whether it wants to be or not.
Ok, some thing happened:
The original diagnosis wasn’t really correct at all. The head did actually have a little crack there but that had nothing to do why it was burning oil. What actually happened is we must have been stupid or distracted when we were building the engine and forgot to put in one of the wrist pin locks. When you do that the wrist pin seems to have a funny way of walking out of its slot and rubbing deep groove into your cylinder walls.
So anyways I got to keep the crank and rods and I bought otherwise a whole new engine, new block halves and some low miles heads. I rebuilt the engine with a much higher attention to detail, not that I was half assing it last time, but it was hard to concentrate on what I was doing when there were tons of people asking questions and floating around when you are trying to work. Such as was the case when I was putting it together the last couple days of engines lab at HVCC.
Now with a whole new engine under the hood it seems to be doing better, i’m at a bit over 250 miles and all is well. Just in time to have the car back for summer.
And I went around and washed and clayed and put sealant on it today. I was expecting it to look like shit, it hant been washed in over a year and the paint on the front fender and bumper is a hair too light. Cleaning it up makes all that way less noticeable and with the CF hood shined up and everything I think it looks pretty damn good actually. Even the 13yr old original paint looks really good after a little bit of work.
Im planning to bring to LVD maybe next week or the week after and I want to try autocrossing it finally. I have owned this car for 2 and a half years now and never brought it to the drag strip or got to autocross it.
that blows
Interested to see how this would compare to my set up on a mustang dyno. Why did you choose the vf30 out of curiousity? Car looks sweet.
I found one with pretty low miles and a Grimmspeed porting job on it for only like 400. I was going to go with a 16G or HTA68 originally but I thought that was a good deal so I just went with it.
Yeah i’ve never had it dynoed, it was road tuned. I’d guess around 300 wheel maybe, I run 22psi.
Glad to see it finally coming together for you in time to enjoy it. This is my favorite body style Impreza haha. 300 wheel prolly would make it just about perfect as well.
Yeah what it has now for power is pretty much perfect. Not too much, not too little.
And now with 500 trouble free miles I can start to work on a couple smaller issues. It leaks a tiny tiny bit of oil when you shut it off, I have been parking it in my garage and when I leave in the morning there is a spot like the size of a quarter. It looks like the oil pan seal leaks a little in the back, this can wait till winter to get fixed though, it isnt that bad.
The car also squats a bit too much when you launch it. The rear tires rub for a second or so on the inside of the fenders. I’m surprised because it has pretty stiff Ground Control springs and is only like a half inch under stock height. There are no bumpstops though so maybe that would be a good solution, I dont want to buy stiffer springs all round just because of that. Also not a super big deal though, it only does it for a second or so through first gear.
More importantly the car doesn’t like going over 100, not that I normally drive this fast but I kind of will need to at LVD or if I take it to a track. I did a couple pulls up to just over 100 and and the rear end starts to shake a bit more than I feel comfortable with and there is a grinding noise. I’m thinking it might be due to the driveshaft not being perfectly balanced and starting to rub on shit in the trans tunnel at high speed, the fact that there is a black rubbery line around one spot on the ds seems to confirm this. Otherwise I cant think of anything else that would cause that, def doesn’t feel like a tire balance issue.