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:

[waltonsm]

I was pretty certain the issue was with the final drive from the beginning, but wanted to methodically evaluate starting with scoping the intake, exhaust, turbo, cylinders, leak down test, compression test, then move on to transmission assessment.

I spent the entire next day going through the engine.. all looked great.



and then the transmission.. not so great. Open the drain plug to find some nice large teeth.




And further disassembly and inspection shows some fun crack growth to failure. And now I know what the bang was.




In hindsight, there were a couple indicators of a damaged pinion when I bought the used transmission out of a wrecked car... At zero backlash, I could feel a more binding during part of the revolution when setting backlash and checking pinion depth when I installed the torsen lsd. The donor car had a front right collision that could have damaged the pinion, or maybe it was just a manufacturing defect, or maybe I set it up wrong. It lasted about 10000 miles in this configuration after the roughly 50K in the original WRX.

Now I obviously had a new task prior to the offroad conversion. But the COVID impacts on the workforce, logistics, supply chain, stretched this out. It also seems that manufacturers used this as an opportunity to obsolete a lot of spare parts I was interested in, so it took some digging.