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 decided to make a jig for adding 1.75 deg of camber to the rear swingarms. I had all the parts laying around to do it, and since I don't really plan on doing this many times, I figured I could take a lot of measurements along the way. Good tooling always makes the difference, it ended up being a low stress operation AFTER I made the cut.

I measured the swingarms, knew the car aligned well in the prior configuration, and that I had a reasonable amount of adjustment. So then decided to make the fixture around the existing arms. I calculated the rotation of the pivot end, and then welded the bearing end to the fixture after clamping up the hub.

I made the cut, adjusted the pivot end up and down to effectively only add twist. Setting up the cut plane parallel to the pivot and normal to the wheel axis was the most tedious part, but was straightforward with the levels and laser level.

I then trimmed the plate to be welded in flush to the arms, tacked. then relieved it down below the surface of the swingarm to improve the chances of a nice full penetration weld all around.

The fixture is mirrored, so the top is one side of the car, and the bottom is the other side. If anyone in the Seattle area wants to borrow it, let me know. I don't think I will need very often :).