The car after purchase

Once the car was home after several weeks of nail biting waiting on the shipping company. The car was dropped off by the car hauler, and I drove it home (3 blocks).

The motor ran and the transmission shifted, but both were going to need some significant work.

The engine acted like the timing was off, and the centrifical advance for the distributor wasnt working.

The transmision was the A-typical sloppy, worn out VW shifter where there was no actual shift pattern.

The wiring was at best poor, but the body was solid, and the VW pan was freshly restored.

This combination of factors led me to head into the direction of a subaru swap. Better reliablility, power, and even mileage was worth the effort.

At first I nabbed a 1990 subaru legacy wagon for 60 dollars. The engine had a blown head gasket, but it was a donor. Later I was able to acquire a 2005 WRX EJ20 turbo engine for the price of a PSP. So with that in hand the journey began.

While on deployment I was able to acquire a wrecked 2003 WRX rally car for a small sum. This enabled me to get an uncut and complete wiring system. The fuel system, and braking system were bonuses. The WRX had the same engine as I already had so this simplified the wiring that I would be facing.

With the car in hand, I was able to start getting this car project under way. I started by modifying the fender lines, and headlights. Later, with some more design work ironed out the tail of the car started to come together. New headlights were carved out of 2008 Honda pilot headlight assemblies. The resulting new head lights really brought an aura of menace to the nose of the car.

This was the first step in seeing first hand that this was the right thing to do. The look of the car just popped all of a sudden.

The rear of the car to me looked like the tail of a sail boat. This was a must, it had to get an upgrade. The rear louvers were pulled off, and the tail light panel was removed.

The new design was inspired by a combination of several exotic sports cars. Vehicle design was my major, so I knew where this car needed to go.

The blue stuff is a 3/16" thick plastic I used to spray foam behind.

Finally a 3D model was developed on the car. The source files used were not accurate. This led to a lot of wasted work in CAD/CAM. However it was insightful to the overall direction I was going.