Impreza Group-N project.

[Aram]

Small update:

The loom isn't finished yet, but I had some progress this week.

First up was the fusebox, I had the old fixation points from the previous car but one of the round relais on the side was in the way of the cage.
When removing the ABS wiring from the loom one of those relais was gone so now it did fit.

Here it sits after retaping the wires again:



Meanwhile the tank and some other stuff was removed from the old car, it's getting very empty now:





Then the engine loom had to find it's way into the cabin, but there was a cage in it's way now.
So I had to open up one of the holes:

As it was:



After some cutting:



And viola, enter ye, enter ye....:



I found some airbag cables in the loom while removing ABS so of course it was exit --->:



First steps in the retaping of the loom, some small wires:



3 major connectors needed a fixed place somewhere, in the other car they were hanging loose, I didn't like that so it had to be fixed in this car.
This is the best place for them but nothing to fix them to:



So we made a rather large bracket for them, after a afternoon of measuring grinding and welding this came out:



And this is how it is in the car:





I'm pretty happy with the resluts actually.

The loom is nearing completion now, and not a minute to soon, I'm getting fed up with it.

[banpei]

How many rolls of tape have you already used for the loom?

[Aram]

About 4 by now.

[Aram]

It's been a while since my last update, and with good reason, I didn't feel like it, in the last few postst you will see why.

I found out the history of my chassis, which is not as good as I was told.
It seems that the small damage in front and rear was actually more something like a megacrash.
It has been rolled etc. in 2000 somewhere.

I now know the whole route it has been on since 2000 untill it came in my possesion, which is nice to know, although the guy has not been very honest about it as it seems.
Ohh well....

I have found 2 pictures of the car when it was still in anger on the stages in europe:





A friend of mine who owns his own wheel shop was going to drop by with some stuff to determine the offset that is best for my new wide fenders, the official S5 WRC car uses +12 which I think is best for mine aswel.

So I wanted to mount all fenders, lights and bumpers to see the endresult, a 15 minute job normaly, it took me 2 weeks....

To cut thing short, the right front inner wing is 5mm to short, the last 2 holes on top of the fender are not in line, the ones near the headlights I mean.

And the 2 innerwings are 10mm to close to each other, which means the hood won't close etc.

I know this by cross measurig the chassis with my old red chassis.

So I decided to do some panelwork on my car, which is a first for me.
The headlight panel was to high and to far back so that was going to be replaced, solving 2 problems.
First the panel was welded a bit to high on the inner wing and I could weld the panel 5mm forward so the fender would fit.
The 10mm sortage in the width I'd solve by makes sleeveholes for the fenders, moving them outwards, noone would see it afterwards.

Here I fixed the panels and headlight, the fender is not attached to the innerwing here:



Let's do it:





Drilling the welds:



Face off:





Same with the GL:





Old and even older but in better shape:



Fitting:



Fitting all parts for positioning the panel before welding it:

[Aram]

Stitchwelded and panels removed for some more welding:



Then made the sleeveholes in the fenders so the bonnet would fit, this is the result:








Then fitted the rearwings and WRC style front bumper, my preference tends towards the standard bumper though:












Then I noticed that my right front wheel was leaning too far back.
Err....??... so I pushed it onto the carlift.
Spend an afternoon measuring the whole bottom of the car and found a few things which did not make me happy, my enthusiasm was fading even more after it already had been dampened by finding out the not so glorious past of the car.

Measured everything and compared it with my red chassis which never had any damage.
I found that cross measured eveything was ok, max 2mm from front to rear, but the width was wrong.
It turned out that the whole front of the car was 10mm too narrow.

Aaarggggggggggggghhh....

Car on the carlift, front wheel on the other side was to far back:





I was afraid the right chassisbeam was leaning in 10mm which would f**k up my suspension geometry so I feared it would have to end up on the straightening bench for the 3rd time.
I spoke to the guy who had repaired the chassis and he told me he had used the original templates when restoring it, so at least the suspesion points were 100% correct, well it turned out not to be so.
Then when I had bought it I had it checked again to make really sure it was ok, and again they said it was ok, but again, not!.

Luckily a friend of mine works in a repair shop where they have lasertool to measure everything which I could use.

So yesterday it went to the garage once again:






It would only be measured but the guy doing the measuring was very helpfull and soon he was using his 10ton press on the car.
It turne out the front was 3mm to narrow on both sides and the rear 2mm on both sides, so I had a gap of 6 and 4mm.

After using his press the figures wre 0 and 0, it was square and straight as could be!!

So the car had the color of a banana but not the shape thank god.

The only thing we could not fix was the 5mm shortness which was actually far more than only the front inner wing.
It goes bak through the whole leg, so the rear mounting points of the front right suspension arm is 5mm back also.

Luckily Mr. Subaru has made some sleeve holes in the subframe and mounting points so that 5mm gap should be overcome quite easily making the suspesion 100% ok!

The 10mm narrower inner wings we left as they were the sleeve holes in the fenders fix it well enough, pushing them apart would only tear things up.

After a lousy 2 weeks I can now work again with full confidence on my Chiquita!

Car on the straightening bench:

[banpei]

Wow! Some harsh treatment for the car!
Good thing you found out before assembling the whole car.

[Roku_trueno]

Holy shit! That is what I call a huge dissapointment, and that's why you should't trust everyone...Thank god it turned out well!

[mc68]

thats a shame

take the good with the bad i spose...you can never expect a rally car to be 100% straight, but the guy who sold it shouldnt have lied like that

well done on getting it fixed so quick though!

[Aram]

Another update.

Last work on the loom on the driver side, 2 more boxes had to have a place to sit.
Of course it had to be out of the way of everything and the cable had to run to the boxes without stress.

In the end I put them on the dash bar.

Bracket to fit the boxes on:



Welded in place:



And they are on!:





After that everything could be taped in.

Driverside finished:





After that I went on with the passenger side.

A mess:



I pulled 2 obsolete connectors from the enginebay, this because I use an Apexi AVC-R boostcontroller:



AVC-R cables into the enginebay through the original rubber:



All cables had to be routed with the heater in place.

The result:







I put the ECU casing in, but I still need to fabricate the fixation points:




A few weeks ago I had cut a hole in the bottom part of the dash on the drivers side to make it fit around the cage:



So now the passenger side had to be done, to prevent cutting it up wrong I made a mould:





And with the hole cut in:



Result:



I found some missing bottom parts of the centre console on the scrapyard, of course it had to go on.



That was it for a bit.

[robokill]

well good going that all worked out ok. You still owe me a ride in it