New old car musings.

[thewalrus]

[Swerve]

Congrats Ry. Is that the Hawkeye model? If so it is prpbably the nicest Impreza to look at overall, taking into account the interior and exterior.

[ryguy79]

[ryguy79]

[ryguy79]

And I'm just glad we didn't have to dump money into the forester, because it was going to need head gaskets, timing belt, and water pump very soon. And this one doesn't have leaky gaskets and the timing belt/water pump was just done.

[ryguy79]

Fun enough, and will probably be much less likely to get me pulled over. Happy with my decision.

[Arthur Dent]

Looks quite nice. Not a colour often seen on a Subaru. Most seem to be silver here.

[thewalrus]

[ryguy79]

Yeah. I like it. I'm going to do some small things to it right off the bat. Have a used WRX rear sway bar and a set of cross bars for kayaks in transit. Going to install a hitch for my bike rack next weekend. After that some better pads and maybe rotors. What's on there is perfectly serviceable, but good pads make such a difference. After that maybe a slightly louder exhaust. Nothing ricer/fartcan, but just to make it a bit more audible. I don't ever expect power gains from what I've read and that's fine, would have ponied up the $ for a WRX if that was as important to me as I thought it was earlier, but a little noise is fun, as is better handling and braking.

[ryguy79]

Also, after the FJ and two weeks driving Ginger's Forester, this thing feels low!

[Arthur Dent]

[thewalrus]

[Talon]

How many miles?

I just did the front rotors and pads on mine a few weeks ago and am going to do the rears tomorrow. This is the second set of rear pads it's gone through (figured I'd just do new rotors while I'm at it) and mine's only at ~51k. Odd...

[ryguy79]

Just over 100k. Wasn't too worried with the service history and it was cheap. I rarely seem to keep cars very long so why worry about mileage unless its ridiculous?

Definitely need to do some brake upgrades. The roads to where I went mountain biking this morning are awesome and I cooked them pretty good coming down one of the mountains. But I was getting up to 70+mph in a twisty 30mph zone and working the brakes pretty hard.

[ryguy79]

WRX rear sway bar showed up today, hope to make some time to install it this weekend.

[ryguy79]

I stuck the gopro chest mount over the seat just to get it out of the way and not scratched when I was tossing helmet/shoes/camelback etc in the car and realized 'hey, this might work!'

Close but not quite. The elastic straps let it jiggle enough that all the audio is it jiggling against the seat and its too low to see the road. But might have to make something that attaches to the headrest bars and moves it between the front seats a bit.

https://youtu.be/4NlZQti3N3k

[ryguy79]

Painted the WRX bar with some rustoleum that was already in the garage. RICE! Of course it the got scratched up wiggling it into place. The difference was very noticeable during hard cornering. Overall grip seems improved, less roll, less tendency to understeer.

[ryguy79]

Next up brakes, then finding a used STi axle back exhaust.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJBtVFYI76U

[Talon]

The guys at Pure Tuning (they've done the tunings on my Eclipse, Evo, and RSX), who have extensive time with Subarus told me an STi exhaust and a tune will net very nice gains out of the n/a 2.5. You can probably find used STi exhausts for next to nothing.

I did the rear rotors and pads on mine on Saturday. Was surprised how easy it went. I hit the bolts holding the caliper brackets with Liquid Wrench and let it sit for a little bit. Everything came out easy... was done in less than 90 mins including clean up and bedding. Much easier than the fronts.

Is yours like mine where the 2.5 shakes the whole car at 4.5k+?

[ryguy79]

I wouldn't say it shakes, but there's a fair bit of vibration above 4k.