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:

[mgarrison]

Amazing Suby build! Incredible fab skills... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/pray.gif)

Any additional details & pics you can share on radiator plumbing & pump. Any details on the Tilton pedal cluster install would be appreciated too. I'm early in the process of my Suby conversion. Looking to use a WRX engine & trans as well.

[waltonsm]

Amazing Suby build! Incredible fab skills... :worship:

Any additional details & pics you can share on radiator plumbing & pump. Any details on the Tilton pedal cluster install would be appreciated too. I'm early in the process of my Suby conversion. Looking to use a WRX engine & trans as well.

Radiator plumbing was a pain, and was the primary reason I decided to build the center tunnel, that and to hide a bunch of other stuff.

My solution was enables by some crazy flexible green stripe gates hose. This stuff is nuts.

I used an aftermarket 240sx race radiator, with two fans running of the WRX oem controller and current 185 and 205 (I think set points)



You can see where the upper and lower hoses, and the heater core hose penetrate the fuel tank bulkhead. This is a test fit before I installed the edge protection/grommets to the sheet metal.







I welded in 1.5" steel heater tube bends through the front and rear firewall to attach the hoses on both sides. Worked great, but this is a huge pain to work on. I hope I never have to see this again.



I used 1.5" reinforced silicon in the tunnel, with nice bandclamps (concerned iIwill have to see this again..) I then wrapped all the hot lines with nice armaflex insulation to reduce the heat load into the tunnel. I don't have any pics of this at the moment.





In the front firewall I used 45 deg bends, in the rear firewall I used 90 deg bends. It was a tight fit in the tunnel and I had to do some weird orientation to make it installable. But you don't see any of that on the outside.

You can see the tubes running horizontal and parallel to the firewall. I did this so I could get the degrees of freedom I needed for installation and engine movement using long leg reinforced silicone elbows. These attach to the stock WRX water pump and upper hose location.






Now the real fun part doesn't have any pictures here, but is very important..

I added a highpoint bleed off of the upper coolant line off the block, this bleeds back to an oem style upper reservoir that feeds the post shutdown turbo convection loop per oem config. I also have the expansion tank off the upper reservoir.

I have had zero issues bleeding this system since assembled, and it runs at the nominal setpoints between 185 and 205. I was concerned about it, but found some good resources in the 818 forums.