AussieDan

Heading in the right direction

Took the first step towards getting the car back together; putting the engine crossmember back into the car. Next up will most likely be the transmission. It’s not much but it feels good to finally be putting things back on the car.

I also made some progress on the cluster swap, actually got the WRX cluster mated up with the legacy faceplate and everything fitted into the dash.

In the last pic you can see where I had to cut away part of the dash to clear the top plug on the WRX cluster, you can see more pics of the mods to the cluster itself here.

It will look a lot better once the new face is done. This will be either carbon fiber or brushed aluminium (anodized black would be nice…), and will fill the gaps at the sides and cover the silver trim rings so that the gauges themselves will ‘fit’ better in the Legacy. Once that’s done I just need to secure everything together, make a couple of shims for the lower mounting tabs and screw it in.

On the mechanical side of things after dropping the rest of the rear end I’ve made some progress removing the old bushings and started to clean up the crossmember, ‘outrigger’ bar & suspension arms in preparation for a coat of POR-15 before they get the new bushings and get reinstalled. I tracked down an 05 WRX fuel tank and all the EVAP stuff I need to make that work, just have to pick it up from Connecticut next weekend along with a couple other goodies. Still need to find rear ABS sensors…

Also took the opportunity tonight to take pics of some more of the shiny new stuff awaiting installation (including some genuine STi engrish!):

STi Floor Mats, Whiteline Roll Center Adjustment Kit, STi Grp-N rear crossmember bushings, STi Grp-N lateral link bushings, STi Grp-N trailing link bushings, STi Grp-N front lower control arm bushings, SuperPro ALK-effect lower control arm bushings, SuperPro rear diff mount bushings & Whiteline outrigger bushings. Between this lot, the Grp-N trans & motor mounts and the Kartboy shift bushings, every bushing on the car will be replaced with upgraded pieces.

Finally, dropped the flywheel off for resurfacing this afternoon. Should be able to pick that up tomorrow, and hopefully also try my hand at removing the sound deadening tomorrow night if I can find time to pick up the dry ice.