TEN's formal introduction

823 Views 11 Replies 2 Participants Last post by TEN, Jul 30, 2012

TEN

Discussion Starter · Jan 6, 2012 (Edited)

I've been on this site for awhile now and have sold a lot of parts + plus gained a ton of knowledge from fellow subie owners. But I haven't actually introduced myself and I figured now is as good a time as ever.

My family has owned subarus for years, my dad being the one who introduced us to them. He's had 3 or 4 over the years... a few with over 300K from new. So I'm not new to these cars in fact we have 5 subarus in my family now. I remember sitting in an '01 Impreza RS BRP Coupe when it was new in the showroom while my dad was shopping for his '01 legacy outback. I knew even at 12 years old I needed to own one. So flash forward a few years and I finally bought a '00 BRP RS coupe off a member on this site in maryland and I experienced about 6 months of bliss. The car needed nothing and was lightly modded by an ex-subaru tech who added a few go-fast goodies.

Since I spent a good amount of time looking for a stockish RS to buy I was pretty sad when it ended up getting totaled. It was hit by a stolen car while parked in philly and the insurance company said it was a loss. So as hard as it was I had to move on.

The day I got her:

The day she died

Her Corpse:

With the insurance money I found a 1-owner bone stock RS Sedan 5-speed on CL with about 86K on the clock. I drove it all this past summer until the car began leaking oil like a sieve. Out went the engine and in went the heart of my old car.

Le engine swap

(To anyone whose read my other threads I have to be fair and note that I pulled the motor 2-3 times more after this initial install because well lets call it stupidity on my part. Now she purrs like a kitten)

...A rebuilt EJ25 with less than 5K on it, ported & polished, with the delta mild cams + an exedy stage 1 clutch kit and chromoly lightened flywheel. Needless to say she now hauls ass.

As she sits today:

Yeah she looks fairly stock, but I always liked the sleeper look. When I was a bit younger I used to drive flashier cars but a few speeding tickets and a couple police run-ins taught me to drive slow.

I've always had an appreciation for low & slow...

My other boxer-powered vehicle:

I don't generally mod the hell out of my cars (I'm a big fan of OEM+ looking cars) so I'll probably update this thread periodically, but if nothing else hope it let people get to know me better.

--------------------------THE MOD LIST-------------------------

Engine:
-Delta Mild Cam
-Intake and Head Port Matched
-Chromoly Lightweight Flywheel
-Exedy Stage 1 Clutch Kit
-Tsudeo UEL Headers + High Flow Cat
-Cobb CAI
-Group N Mounts

Exterior:
-JDM Clear Turn Signals
-JDM Clear Side Marker lights

Suspension/Brakes:
-Rear strut tower bar
-21 mm rear anti sway bar & end links
-Poly front end links
-Group N front Strut Mounts
-Stainless Braided Lines

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TEN

Discussion Starter · #2 · Jan 11, 2012

Well today I got a little bored and decided I needed to upgrade the whimpy stock rear swaybar and endlinks. My old subie had some after market swaybar but I never knew the manufacturer, it was a powder blue at one point but it got so rusty that you couldn't even tell. It definitely needed some more protection from the elements because it had gotten pretty pitted.

...so I got creative with some leftover spraypaint from another project.

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TEN

Discussion Starter · #3 · Jan 11, 2012

Today I decided I too wanted to be one of the cool kids with the pink stars emblem. Unfortunately I'm poor.

...So I did the next best thing and made my own. My old car had a fugly yellow stars emblem that I always hated but I kept anyway. Today I finally dug into it. I used a flathead screwdriver to get the paint off and a bit of denatured alcohol to wipe the surface clean. It worked like a charm. A little model paint and it was good to go!

And finally it mounted

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TEN

Discussion Starter · #4 · Jan 12, 2012

Today I decided I needed to remove the pinstripping that in my opinion kills the look of many cars. This was particularly bad because the pinstripping was thick and definitely not dealer installed. Always suspect.

What I expected to be an hour job turned into a 4 hour job because of how tedious it turned out to be. I used a heat gun and a plastic scrapper to remove the tape. Then I used this stuff "goof-off" which is an awesome product to remove adhesive but turned the glue into a gooey mess.

This was not a fun project at all but I think it definitely improves the look of the car. Interesting note: I found out that the car must've been in a side impact accident at one point because there's two different shades of paint above and below where the pinstripping was on the passenger side. :curse: Removing the pinstripping took off some of the paint leaving a few primer spots behind. It looks like crap but hopefully a trip to maaco and they can make the paint blend.

Oh well it's a driver... pics

Shades of grey, or silver whatever

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SWRT

· #5 · Jan 12, 2012 (Edited)

Car looks good, man. I like the look of the coupe's
more, but I used my friend's sedan for a week and
I ended up wishing I had a sedan by that point.
Sweet car dude

Sucks about the striping.

You ought to pull those side skirts off and paint
them. Find a silver that's close and go for it. Your
sway bar turned out pretty clean. Besides, it's a
total of maybe 10 bolts and 10 clips if I remember
right. I took that time to re-align the seal on mine
when I did it. Just super-glued it back on. I guess
at that point you'd have to paint the front and rear
bumpers too though :/

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TEN

Discussion Starter · #6 · Jan 13, 2012

SWRT said:
Car looks good, man. I like the look of the coupe's
more, but I used my friend's sedan for a week and
I ended up wishing I had a sedan by that point.
Sweet car dude Sucks about the striping.

You ought to pull those side skirts off and paint
them. Find a silver that's close and go for it. Your
sway bar turned out pretty clean. Besides, it's a
total of maybe 10 bolts and 10 clips if I remember
right. I took that time to re-align the seal on mine
when I did it. Just super-glued it back on. I guess
at that point you'd have to paint the front and rear
bumpers too though :/

Thanks dude. Yeah I like the look of coupes more too but this car was a deal I couldn't pass up at the time. The sedans I'm finding are waay more convenient though.

I'm definitely considering painting the skirts and bumpers, the shitty respray the previous owner did on certain parts is starting to flake off which you can see in the pics. I think over the summer I'm going to have some paint work done to clean the car up. Just picked up a coupe spoiler cheap so that'll probably go on pretty soon.

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SWRT

· #7 · Jan 13, 2012

TEN said:
Thanks dude. Yeah I like the look of coupes more too but this car was a deal I couldn't pass up at the time. The sedans I'm finding are waay more convenient though.

I'm definitely considering painting the skirts and bumpers, the shitty respray the previous owner did on certain parts is starting to flake off which you can see in the pics. I think over the summer I'm going to have some paint work done to clean the car up. Just picked up a coupe spoiler cheap so that'll probably go on pretty soon.

Right? I never had anyone in the back of my coupe.
Well, it was pretty rare. And the doors are so freakin
wide that it's a pain in small parking lots.

Yeah. I think it'd tie everything in together nicely
and clean it up a bit. You could always try painting
some of that stuff yourself. The clearcoat's the only
difficult part. Sounds like they either didnt use good
materials, had bad prep work or just sucked at painting lol
Also, the coupe spoiler looks a lot more rally inspired.
Just makes these cars look meaner.

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TEN

Discussion Starter · #8 · Jan 13, 2012

True, I'm definitely going to do some more cosmetic stuff. I really want to do the v5/v6 grill and fog covers. I think in the meantime I'm going to practice my paint skills on the spoiler and those rear arch protector things the sedans have. I'm debating what I should leave black and what I should try and color-match. The problem with silver cars is that they need some contrast to look good. Funny I always said I'd never buy a silver car because of how boring they are!

I still have a few performance mods in mind though. I really want to do headers, the fleabay ones I hear are borla knockoffs and they're cheap. The exhaust system on this car is kinda raspy and at higher rpms makes a sound like a turbo spooling so it's gotta go. I figure I'll replacing the whole system eventually.

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SWRT

· #9 · Jan 17, 2012

Man...I probably would have kept my RS if it was
silver instead of black. Would have just gotten rid
of the Legacy instead. I love silver on these cars.
And painting's not super hard, but the good part
about doing it yourself is that it only takes a few
times to really get the hang of it. And if you mess
it up it's only a few bucks worth of paint and some
sandpaper and you can try it again. I messed up my
hood vents painting them when it was too humid out
and it was a 5 minute process of sanding them when
they dried and they turned out awesome next time.

As long as you find headers that dont crack. I've heard
of that being an issue with some of the ebay ones.
Ooooooh...turbo spool

haha Yeah. Sucks cause you
guys have inspections, right?

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TEN

Discussion Starter · #10 · Jan 18, 2012

SWRT said:
Man...I probably would have kept my RS if it was
silver instead of black. Would have just gotten rid
of the Legacy instead. I love silver on these cars.
And painting's not super hard, but the good part
about doing it yourself is that it only takes a few
times to really get the hang of it. And if you mess
it up it's only a few bucks worth of paint and some
sandpaper and you can try it again. I messed up my
hood vents painting them when it was too humid out
and it was a 5 minute process of sanding them when
they dried and they turned out awesome next time.

As long as you find headers that dont crack. I've heard
of that being an issue with some of the ebay ones.
Ooooooh...turbo spool haha Yeah. Sucks cause you
guys have inspections, right?

Yeah I've heard good and bad things about the ebay headers for these cars. I used to have an ebay header on an old bmw I had and they sounded great but the "stainless steel" they used turned brown within a month. I guess the chinese used some really shitty quality materials but hey at least the fitment wasn't bad from what I recall. NJ used to be more strict on inspections but now they only do emissions testing on cars.

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SWRT

· #11 · Jan 18, 2012

Ah, gotcha. I have a few friends up in Jersey, but the only one
I recall talking about inspections with was James and he had
a Florida tag at the time.

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TEN

Discussion Starter · #12 · Jul 30, 2012

Respray and Auto X!

Well it's been a little while since I updated this thread...

I've been working a lame job this summer and decided to put the money to good use. My paint job has gotten dramatically worse in a short amount of time. Some jerk in philly side swiped my car and took off a good amount of paint on the rear bumper. Needless to say the car's been looking like crap.

So I decided to "maaco" my car. I've had a couple cars painted at this place and they do a good job of working with you to make it look decent. Only paid $500. Threw on the coupe spoiler I had and debadged the rear...here are the results.

I've been wanting to go to auto-x for a long time now so I decided to bite the bullet and go to the one at the wells fargo center in philly. My dad and I ran the car in the novice class. It wasn't a huge turn out so we were able to get a good amount of runs in per heat. I kicked my dad's ass, so even though neither of us were that competitive (because I'm sadly still running winter tires :banana

it was still a victory for me. My first few runs with the instructor were in the 90 second range. By the end of the day my best time 64.8 seconds. I was thrilled.

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