Damn you, Whiteline!

Sway Bar installations are one of the easiest and quickest modifications to do on any Subaru - So why did it take me longer to "attempt" to install one than the entire rear end? Oh let me tell you.

Start off with breaking the rear bolt on the drivers side sway bar bracket. Ok, whatever, I'll have to drill it out... So I throw a ton of PB Baster on the others and wait a bit. During this time the snow off Jamie's car is melting into a pool of water right under the back end of the Track Car... Grreaattt...

Move to the passenger side, break that one too - Damn it. Go get the drill, center punch, some bits and a tap. Start to go to town on the bolts - All but one of the bits I brought with me - Dull as a rock. Get more, finally drill them out and the corrosion is so bad the bolts are totally frozen in the frame. So I grab the tap and cut new threads hoping to clean up the existing ones. That works wonders.

Bolt the new brackets up and then I go and grab the sway bar. Now for all those who are already saying "well Mike, an STI bar doesn't fit an RS" - Ya, I know. But the lateral links I'm using are from an STI to move the track out and I've fit up STI bars in that way before on a few swaps. Only problem is that Whiteline must of revised their bar - they only have a small (2 inch) section of strait pipe where the bushing fits. Since the RS is a bit more narrow than the STI, it wont mount to the brackets properly, ug.

The solution here is to check on a few other brands of bars, I know I've used a Cusco in the past so maybe I'll try to source one of those. I guess I should've known things were moving along too smoothly, haha.

Front Installed

Installed the main group of front end components with Doug last night. I need to have a rolling chassis that steers to get it on the trailer and to the cage shop. I'm going to use a STI turbo cross member for a few reasons. One being I wont have to replace it down the road when I do the swap, two it uses additional factory bracing and three, it allows me to use the stock 20mm STI Front Sway Bar (mind you is installed backwards in the picture, haha).

For those of you who told me the RS steering rack will not fit in the GD STI cross member - it does. I'll be using a GD rack after the steering column quickener comes back, but for the time being I'll use this one to steer the car.

I also found out that the problem with the transmission lies in the transfer case bearings. So even though I pulled the whole damn thing apart to replace the TRANSMISSION bearings - those are fine. Ah well, at least I'll have bearings for when they decided to leave me.

Rear End Installed

So Doug came over again - and oddly enough, I was doing the exact same job as the last time he came over - only in reverse.

We cleaned out the rear differential and bolted it to the new Diff Mount. We then inserted that into the rear cross member upside down and slid on the T-Brace. Torqued everything to spec - then started to assemble the lateral links. I ended up picking up some adjustable Perrin lateral links (which are mostly spherical links) and installed those prior to bolting up the cross member to the car. We also added grease fittings to all the poly bushings to lube the inner diameter of the metal sleeve.


So here's the moment of truth - The one thing about solid bushings is that if you didn't get the spot on and the frame isn't 100% true, they don't work. We jack up the rear end place all the bolts in the cross member (few threads) then lift up the T-Brace and slide in the bolts. IT FITS - perfectly. I may have to consider shimming the T-Brace if the diff isn't sitting perfectly level, but that's for a later date. I think McLovin said it best, "It's In!"

Knuckles and Final Bushing

I finished turning up the aluminum bushings and steel sleeves to go into the T-Brace. They seem to fit perfectly, but the T-Brace looks a little bent now that I have perfectly measured/straight mounts, haha. Hopefully it's not too tweaked and I can mount it later. The only way to fix it will be to just cut the welds and re-weld it strait which wont be a huge problem. Annoying, yes, but fairly easy.

So now that the sub frame and T-Brace are finished I moved to the knuckles. The sandblasting never worked out, so I just defaulted to the old school wire brush and painted them up. High Temp Black should do the job just fine.
I also pressed in the new bearings - although not heat treated like I wanted, they should do the trick for a few track sessions until I can source bearings with steel cages to treat.

MIG, TIG, and Plasma!

I finally got around to buying some replacement consumables for my 110v plasma cutter. My mom picked it up for my Dad awhile back and I kind of... well... "adopted" it for body work use, haha. It never really worked correctly and frankly, I never had much use for it until now.

I figured since I was still waiting for parts for the suspension, brakes, and transmission - as well as waiting to turn up new T-Brace bushings I might as well start welding up some unnecessary firewall holes.

Kris let me borrow is TIG (thank you Kris) to replace my crappy 110v MIG. The MIG is nice for slapping two pieces of metal together like the transmission jig I made. However, when it comes down to really thin sheet metal, I just can't get my MIG to not burn through.

The TIG is a bit harder and welding upside down and on a vertical surface pose their own challenges but I think I managed. The welds look good where I had the proper gap between panels, but where it was more than 1/16th of an inch, it just looks like boogers.

Ground down the welds never the less to make a (relatively) smooth surface. Still rough from weld aftermath, but whatever, it's a race car right? Threw some primer on and went to bed.

Subaru 1, Mike 0

Subaru wins this battle - bastards. I was trying to press out the T-Brace bushing last night. Ended up firing a metal slug into my leg while trying, haha. Anyway - those who want to remove the T-Brace bushings - be warned: There is a lip that the bushing presses up against which you can't really see due to the deformation of the urethane. I got it out, but only after I cut the lip off.

After I filled the garage with black smoke and soot from cutting the rubber I just went inside and designed up some new solid bushings in Google SketchUp. (neat program by the way...)

So the odd height of the drawing is related to what I had to subtract out of the total height of the bushing to accommodate for when I raised the rear cross member up. I need to make sure the diff sits as level as possible to avoid drive train tweaks.

Painting

In between waiting for the parts and waiting for the specialty tools to get here (to finish the trans) I figured I'd clean up some extra parts. The rear cross member and T-Brace are rusty as I mentioned before... Couldn't come by a sand blaster soon enough to meet my demands so I just cleaned them up best I could and slapped some primer/paint on them.

I also cleaned up the front body work a bit and put a few coats of white paint on it. I was told white might not be the best choice for the track car as it may get really crappy - but whatever. If someone has a better suggestion - please let me know!