914 WRX Build Options

[waltonsm]

After seeing some recent posts, I decided it was finally time to thank everybody on this forum for years of encouragement and scope creep on my long term project. As with every real project, this will never be done, and there are certainly many things I would do differently a second time around. But I am 80% of the way there, and I am enjoying driving it as much as I am working on it for the last year or so.

I plan to add more photos of my build process over the next few weeks. You may see some of the advice you gave me realized, and probably some bad or good ideas in metal, fiberglass, and wood.

Hopefully I can help someone else out too.

-Steve


Here are some recent photos:





And a few from about 4 years ago:

[Thunderchief]

What kind of heated seats are you running? Do they sit higher than stock?

[waltonsm]

What kind of heated seats are you running? Do they sit higher than stock?

The seats are leather/alcantara out of a BRZ. I got them for $500 on ebay after selling my 914 seats that had been recovered for a bit more.

So far I have changed the mount points for the seat (although the way they showed up would have probably been better for me in the end), I removed the airbags, and have used some clamps and vicegrips to widen the bolstering frames on the driver seat. I have aftermarket lumbar adjust bags that I haven't installed yet.

4 hr roadtrips are not a problem for us, but seats are pretty personal things.

My wife is pretty happy with the passenger seat width.

Note that I redid the entire rear floor and this enabled me to get the rear mount points basically on the floor skin. In the end he height might be 1/2" or so higher. The biggest impact is the thickness of the seatback. This results in the total legroom being decreased by at least 2-3 inches. This works for us at 5'8"/5'6". My 6'4" friend fits* and enjoys it, but we aren't going anywere with the top on, or for more than an hour or so.

Heated seats are necessary... i drive it down below 50 deg with a little down throw blanket :) Plan to finish the heater core install this summer, along with the planning for the AC core. The tunnel has the fittings for the AC hoses, and I plan to mount the core near the oil cooler on subframe, but I realized I need to have this system such that I can easily remove the AC pump and hoses from the engine when i drop it without the need to recharge the system.

Steve