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5 minute(s) of a 99 minute read
11-4-2010
today I put all the struts and rear seats back in, painted the wheel wells and fit all the plastic back onto the car . Here are a couple of pictures from the day
here is the tooling I made and the drawings to press all the bearings seals and hub into the rear upright
rear wheel arch/strut installed
I have time to do it right now I was on contract at KV racing for the season on the Lotus car but now the season is over. With nearly 50,000 miles my Subaru needed some work and I discovered some things that I have fixed during this project, specially how bad the bearing bores were rusting, I have powder coated the uprights and the paint is much further into the bearing bore now, also noticed the cv joint grease is very fluid like and the grease was no longer on the joints so I have repacked all the cv joints. I also had a strut clunk in the rear and read a lot on forums about it and came up with my own solutions and amount of grease and what type based on what I read on forums. It is very obvious the inverted strut does bind on the strut housing and has caused the hard chroming to mark so I will let everyone know how it works out with what I have done as I had a very bad case with mine.I Also learnt that those struts were originally designed to have a heavier spring which might contribute to the problem. I was also given a little piece of advice while I was trying to figure out what the noise I had was and that is to run the GM limited slip additive to the diff, it apparantly fixes some of the diff related noises and that additive was given to me at the subaru dealership, and obviously used to help with chatter from the diff the guy at the dealership was very helpful and handed me the bottle and said here put this in your diff, it will help if there are any noises!
you are welcome, I really hope that I can share some interesting things. Here are a couple of other things I found out, the caliper bolts often sieze and break off in the caliper, the bolt is not so good ( the bolts are a little undersize) as well as going in without any lube they are prone to breaking off in the caliper and it happened to me during this project. The Torque spec for the front caliper with Brembo brakes is 80 ftlbs not 114.3 ftlbs which is common in the factory Subaru Manuals ( I even checked an 02 03 japan STI manual which said the same thing) my bolt broke while removing it and I found this out while looking into what the bolts were torqed to. The strut clunk is very common to 04 to 07 STI's and it is easily mistaken for a problem with the differential it normally happens at very low speed and often pulling into driveways etc, it sounds like the diff and having pulled the struts apart the problem was very obvious. Torque spec on the bolt holding the insert in is 30 ftlbs! I will let you know what I figure out about the unusual flat spot that developed on the rear tire, it occoured on my trip from Indy to Vegas and sounded just like a bad wheel bearing,I am not sure at all what caused this as I had the wheels balanced and rotated from front to rear the day before the trip and there were no vibrations during the trip it just developed the noise in the last five hours!
I have big plans in the future for this car, I am going to change all the rear lateral links and the trailing arms to the spec c rar parts and add the chassis braces ( that were developed with yamaha) that the s204 has as well as the tuned by Arai strut and spring set up with group N strut mounts the struts are adjustable and I also plan on changing the front and rear rollbars to the same that the spec c and s204 have. I also found a sti differential cover that I would like to fit. I am thinking about the floating rotor setup that the spec c type rar has, I would really like to have those on this car. I basically want to have a car that has the spec c rar and S204 suspension and brakes although probably not going to change the caliper. I will post pictures of it when I get into that project, for now I am working on getting the car fixed up and cleaned up for that project.
Before and after shot of rear wheel
all the parts to go back onto the car!
