blide

Took a road trip in the spec.b from South Carolina to New Hampshire. Spent a week going all over New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. 3800 miles in 9 days and who knows how many tolls (waiting for all of the pay by plate bills to arrive). Went to the top of Mount Washington, Visited Acadia NP and went to the Subaru Motorsport mecca that is VSC. The car did great. Averaged about 26mpg on the highway there and back... not so much in the mountains.

Finally had the opportunity to address the radio in my spec.b. The previous owner installed an amp with the stock radio. Good news is that he had already installed fairly nice new speakers in all of the doors. Bad news is that he took the amp out before he sold it so the speakers were no longer connected. So, I've been riding without tunes for 6 months. Ordered the JDM climate controls with the double DIN setup and a new hazard switch from avojdm.com. Got the wiring harness from Dave at ae64.com (highly recommended BTW). Picked up a Sony XAV-AX7000 head unit and got to installing. Since the previous owner hacked into the factory wiring harness to install the amp, I had to start by splicing it back together. Got the radio installed and fired it up only to find that the head unit was seeing a short at the speakers and would cut power to them. Finally figured out that the new speakers had been installed into the hacked up OEM speaker mounts and the leads to the speakers were grounding against the metal in the door. Fired up Fusion360 and the 3d printer to create some new proper mounts and we were in business. This is supposed to be the OEM Subaru parts but ultimately, I'm pretty disappointed in the fit of the climate controls. The whole unit is offset about 1/8" to the right. This leaves a gap and the shifter trim doesn't quite meet up right. Guess I'll just need to get the JDM console pieces to fix it. I'll also need to address the mismatched faces at some point as well. But at least for now I have Android Auto and music.

I can only speak for myself but I'm almost 50. My boy racer days are long gone. I drive a Legacy because I like the extra comfort and I'd like to keep the safety. I also don't need to make 500hp. I'm tuned to right around 300hp and that's about right for me. I want reliable and safe since this is my daily driver. My family rides in the car as well. The TMIC works fine for my purposes. Everything I've done is to try to keep it as reliable as possible. There's a few other things I'd like to do to make working on the car easier, like redoing the fuel delivery system and getting rid of the stupid under intake setup. Anyway, I don't want to get rid of fog lights or the crash beam. I also don't want to deal with all of the piping for the FMIC. Just my perspective. Bobby

The photos are great. If anyone has photos for the fuel line routing with our setup, especially with the top mount intercooler in place, I'd like to see it. This is on my to do list at some point and having a reference would make the process much easier. Don't have to reinvent the wheel so to speak.

A couple weeks ago, I found that my clutch decided to try to eat the little cover that goes over the access hole at the back of the block. So, I got the Verus Engineering cover and installed it. No way this one is going to drop in. Only issue was that this meant that there were now three brackets on the bottom bolt in the photo. I decided to remove the engine removal bracket so now it's just the Verus cover and the support bracket for my intercooler.

The software isn't as easy to use as the commercial variants but the concepts are all the same. If you can tune a car with Cobb, for example, you can tune it with the Open Source software. You just need the Tactrix cable and you're in business. When I had mine done, I took my cable with me to make it easy. If you are interested in doing an etune remotely, I'm sure Elijah at Redemption Tuning will help you out. He's tuned two of my cars, my daughter's 03 WRX (etune) and my Spec.B (Dyno), and I highly recommend him.

In the US, to legally drive a vehicle on public roads, you must maintain insurance. However, plenty of people drive without insurance. And, yes, if an uninsured vehicle hits you, your insurance will cover it and try to get payment from the accountable driver. Unfortunately, if someone is driving without insurance, they probably don't have the money to pay out of pocket either. And, one way or another, your insurance company is going to get their money back. What usually happens is your rates will go up when your policy renews and/or your policy will be a little more expensive from the beginning to account for the possibility/probability of an accident with an uninsured motorist. And, judging by the condition of the Tahoe that hit me, they wouldn't have been able to pay if they didn't have insurance.

Well, I got to make an insurance claim yesterday. On the way home from the Taylor Swift concert in Atlanta, traffic on I 20 slowed to a crawl. We had been in start and stop traffic for a mile or two and almost to the end of the slow down, when I pulled forward 50 feet and stopped but the Tahoe behind me decided to use me to stop. Got a few scuffs on the rear bumper cover and one nice gash where the tow hook of the Tahoe buried itself in my bumper. It's very frustrating to spend almost a year building a car and for someone to ram in the back of it for no reason. My daughter was with me and said that the lady driving the Tahoe was, of course, on her phone. Anyway, I guess I'm getting a new bumper cover out of it and thank goodness the other vehicle had insurance.

Installed the Koyorad aluminum radiator tonight. Spent some time cleaning the fans and shrouds to try to make them look a little better before installing them on the awesome new radiator. This thing looks fantastic. I'm really impressed. You have to install the nipple for the connection to the turbo reservoir. When you do, the flat sides for the wrench end up being perfectly horizontal. Really nice attention to detail. Install was straight forward and fairly easy. You do have to get things in the right order. I mounted the driver side fan and installed the radiator. Then put the passenger side fan in from underneath. That way I didn't have to take the upper radiator hose off of the crossover pipe. Got all of the hoses connected and ran the car up to operating temp to burp the system. Then went for a drive and enjoyed the non-leaking radiator and the lower operating temps. The radiator really looks good in the engine bay. Almost wish half of it wasn't covered up by the Grimmspeed radiator stays. Just need the alternator cover and the JDM battery and abs covers.

Looks great. My son put the Avalon King ceramic coating on his 21 STI right after he brought it home. Its lasted about a year and half and made washing the car sooooo much easier. I vowed to put a coating on my car, whenever I actually bought me a car. Well, the time has come. We'll see how this one lasts but I'm really looking forward to the quick, easy washes.

I buy most of my detailing products from Detailed Image. You can find the CarPro Cquartz UK 3.0 here.

Installed the Koyorad tonight. Spent some time cleaning the fans and shrouds to try to make them look a little better before installing them on the awesome new radiator. This thing looks fantastic. I'm really impressed. You have to install the nipple for the connection to the turbo reservoir. When you do, the flat sides for the wrench end up being perfectly horizontal. Really nice attention to detail. Install was straight forward and fairly easy. You do have to get things in the right order. I mounted the driver side fan and installed the radiator. Then put the passenger side fan in from underneath. That way I didn't have to take the upper radiator hose off of the crossover pipe. Got all of the hoses connected and ran the car up to operating temp to burp the system. Then went for a drive and enjoyed the non-leaking radiator.

That really wasn't very clear. The factory radiator failed and I ordered a new Koyorad aluminum one to replace it. The old radiator failed at the seam between the plastic top and the aluminum body. Sorry about the confusion.

I finished the paint correction and ceramic coating. Also ordered a new Koyorad aluminum radiator to replace the failed one. It's supposed to be here tomorrow so I can get it installed before I take my daughter to Atlanta Friday for the Taylor Swift concert.

A couple weeks ago, I came back from running errands, pulled into the garage, got out and immediately smelled the lovely aroma of hot coolant. Pop the hood and found small amounts of coolant all over the front of the of the car and engine. Steam was coming out of the radiator as well. After a little investigation, I found the seam between the plastic top of the radiator and the aluminum fins had failed. I was hoping to get a little further down the road before replacing the radiator but here we are. So, I knew it was going to be a couple weeks before I could afford to order the radiator, I figured I'd use the time to start the paint correction and hopefully get it ceramic coated. Started with a good wash and got all of the bugs and tar off the car. Tried the Meguiar's Iron removing spray I picked up at Advance Auto to decontaminate the paint and followed up with clay bar. The car's paint is typical of mid 2000's Subaru paint. Clear coat is failing in places and there's a bunch of small cracks and imperfections. I used my typical Megiars M105 with Lake Country orange pad for the first pass. Then followed up with Meguiar's Ultimate polish with a Lake Country white pad. While the paint looked much better, it also highlighted all of the paint chips all over the car. Especially when the primer coat under the paint is white. I stopped by my local paint and body supply and got some color matched paint mixed up. I touched up a bunch of the larger chips that really stuck out. There's a ton of small chips and scratches that would've taken forever to fill. Ultimately, the car needs to be resprayed but this is a 16 year old, 175K mile car. So, I called it good and moved on. After another quick wash and an IPA wipe down, it was ready for ceramic coating. I went with CarPro Cquartz UK 3.0. It was surprisingly easy to apply. This was the first time I've put a ceramic coat on a car and was expecting it to be a little difficult. It was a little slow going but was difficult as long as you have good lighting wherever you are working. I don't have very good lighting in my garage but I made it work. Honestly, the car looks better in photos than it does up close however it looks worlds better than it did. Overall, I'm really happy with the way it came out.