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 have gotten a few questions about the steering column work, and unfortunately I haven’t found pictures of the final welded assembly, but when I am in there again I will take some new ones.

My goal was to use the Subaru steering wheel and controls (and maybe in the future a traction control systems that uses yaw angle and steering angle inputs…)

To do this I needed to meld the 914 column and wrx column. The below pic has them side by side.





The wrx steering shaft is really long, has a collapsible section instead of some u joints. But is does have splined ends, an ignition lock, and bearing surfaces. So this can work. I cut both shafts, ground to a v groove, welded, and sleeved them together. The joint between the two shafts is about where the red line is. This was to get the steering wheel at the distance I wanted it from the dash. The wheel height is adjustable by shimming the mount down with spacers. More on that later. Clocking is important as there are missing splines that ensure positive clocking with the u joints for most consistent final input/output rates, and this needs to line up pretty closely with the ignition lock if you want the steering wheel to lock near centered.



As far as the bearings and column goes I used the outboard (steering wheel side) bearing still in the wrx column assembly.



Then after cutting the column off ( I used 8 inches or so), I had to find a bearing that was a press fit into the inboard end of the column and also fit the inboard piece of the 914 steering shaft.



Unfortunately at the moment I don’t remember what that bearing was. I bought half a dozen 5-10 dollar bearings, and one of them ended up working well. I may have shrink welded the column to fit tight.

For the final assembly fit, I made a flat plate similar to the 914 column mount, using this as a template. I shimmed it down here I the angle and height I wanted and bolted it in (with the column clamped to it and the linkages all assembled to make sure I hadn’t screwed something up) with everything located I added four heavy tacks to attach my new steering shaft and column to the new mount plate. Note I also moved the steering axis toward the centerline of the car slightly as I moved my seats an inch or two closer to centerline to get more clearance from my door bars. It took me a couple days of head scratching before I figured out the steering column is definitely not parallel to the centerline of the car from the factory.

I left it tacked for a bit while I worked other stuff, but eventually came back and fillet welded the column to the mount plate.

As a side note, because I have an obdii car with immobilizer, I wanted to keep the ignition lock/rfid antenna. This requires the ecu, body computer, and dash/controller. So I also disassembled the dash and the board with all the servos/blinky lights/gauges etc. lives in the center tunnel. I could have easily reused the flat assembly and installed in the location of the factory gauges if I wasn’t already committed to my aftermarket gauge plan.





It’s been a while, and apparently this step was poorly documented by me, but happy to try to answer more questions.