boon

Most commonly from taking cheap "adjustable" suspension and turning the adjustment way up. Or fitting wildly inappropriate struts. Bump travel is how far the wheel is able to move upward when you hit a bump. You need to have enough bump travel to handle most bumps you can expect to hit without running into the bump stops. When that happens you effectively don't have suspension on that wheel any more and your car can get very unsettled. The reason this all goes together is because often what people do is they lower the s*** out of the car by just putting short springs in which leaves the car with very little useful suspension travel. Then because they get sick of bottoming out the car they put in extremely firm springs and wind the compression damping all the way up, then they think it's racecar as cos it twitches and bobbles about. Yes racecars are all twitchy at low speed but it's because they have to be sprung and valved to handle bumps at high speed which accordingly have far more energy, they don't behave like that at high speed. Something like a KYB AGX is going to be valved/damped appropriately for the car for "spirited" use, and if you don't sack it on its arse you'll have plenty of travel. Generally speaking you don't use the coil springs to prevent body roll. That's literally the sway bar's job - sometimes they're known as an "anti-roll bar". Appropriate spring rates is pretty complex topic but the nuts and bolts of it is that for a street car you should really be running a fairly soft spring for maximum comfort and the best handling.

Bouncy is primarily too much compression damping or not enough rebound damping, followed by excessive spring rate, followed by no bump travel.

22 or 23mm rear swaybar, do the swaybar bushes and links as well as there's not much point increasing the bar rate if it's just squishing around in 20 year old flogged out bushings. Then... I think the "not going crazy" option is KYB AGX struts and the STI pink springs? Slight lowering, increase in spring rate, without being heinously bouncy. 18x8 with presumably around a 235 will need a decent pull on your arches. I put 235/45R17 on 17x8 on my STI (which is wider? I think? Yours is a wagon right?) and I had to roll the rear guards to not rub. Honestly I'd run the stock front swaybar and see how it feels. I have an incredibly w**ked suspension setup but still run the stock front swaybar with a 23mm rear and I like the balance.

Basically anything more supportive is going to be a downgrade comfort-wise. It's just the nature of the beast. I've planted my arse in quite a few aftermarket bucket seats (I was shopping for one a few years ago and Tokyo car tuning shops have lots and lots of them because reasons) so I have a decent sampling. The only ones that I thought were both more supportive and more comfortable than the stock WRX/STI bucket seats were some insanely expensive Recaros. Cheaper Recaro, any of your "JDM" brands like Bride, and any fixed-back bucket seat is less comfortable, they're narrower and have less padding so that's unsurprising. The closest I got to "woah this is really really supportive but the comfort is acceptable" in a fixed back was the Racetech RT4009XW, which they don't even make any more. The RT4100 probably gets close, I just wish they did it in a wide-but-not-tall because Racetech's not-wide is very snug for anything but dedicated track work if you occasionally eat a pie or two.

My old man ran a NZ-spec BPE Outback for years on 95. I ran my jap-spec BPE Legacy on it as well. Always ran well enough. If you're pushing it hard 98 is probably the way to go, but I always thought the NZ-spec-tune ones were happier on 95 than the jap ones, or maybe that was an urban myth?

Walk away. Swaybar mounts don't get broken from cars being gently driven and cared for.

No. Take it elsewhere. It's probably technically too loud, and you just got lucky last time. Challenging "your car is illegal" with "but you missed it last time" is not a winning strategy.

Slap on Torrens Terrace.

When mine did something very similar it was a cracked weld in the downpipe heatshield. Go round knocking everything with the handle of a screwdriver and see if anything sounds different.

Probably a write-off, I'll give you $500 for it. EDIT: Next time don't just dump your jack, sheesh, for someone who is so particular about looking after their car dropping the body 10cm+ onto jack stands seems like a strange idea, why didn't you let the jack down slowly?

As above - by the time you look at your gauge and go "oooh that's not right" you'll have the audible alert of your big ends going NOGGA NOGGA to confirm your low oil pressure. The oil pressure plummets because the engine has died, not the other way around, most of the time. Very very very rarely the oil pump dies and you go OH NO and turn the motor off but usually your crank oversizes your rod bearings and then the oil pressure plummets cos it's all pissing out the sides of the bottom end journals.

I'm gonna say you might get change from $5k? Edit edit edit edit: What do you actually want the gauges for? If its to protect your car then don't bother with gauges, your ECU will do a better job than you ever can. If you want some shiny things with blue LEDS buy some $30 ones from Aliexpress.

Believe it or not, Subaru built your car with a wideband, narrowband, oil pressure, oil temp (I think?) sensor and wired them all into your factory ECU. As above, gauges are eye candy at best. Why bother? You can't use CANBUS gauges because you don't have a CANBUS. If you have an aftermarket ECU with CANBUS you can get some - CANBUS is like a data network for cars. Then the gauges are just a display for some network data; they don't have to be connected directly to the sensors or anything.

Standard configuration with 2-port external is that you plumb boost to both sides of the actuator. When you want to build boost, you put equal pressure on both sides of the diaphragm, so the spring closes the wastegate because there is no pressure difference across it. When you want to control boost, you remove the boost from the "close" side, so the boost on the open side acts against the spring to open the gate, at somewhere around the pressure of the spring. Again, all things being equal and working correctly, you should be able to get as much boost as you want with a pretty boring spring rate, because when you want the gate shut there is no pressure difference across it - once more, other than exhaust pressure acting on the gate's valve and trying to push it open. EDIT: With a 3-port solenoid you usually have "Normally Open", "Normally Closed", and "Common". When you have no power applied to the solenoid the path is open between NO and COM. You plumb the gate's "close" port to COM and NO goes to atmosphere or your intake pre-turbo; when you want to build boost you cycle the solenoid so that NC, plumbed to a boost source, is open to COM, which fills the "close" side of the diaphragm and cancels out the boost pressure on the "open" side. You can have 20psi, 40psi, whatever, it effectively disappears because the pressure is equal on both sides of the diaphragm. When the solenoid turns off, the "close" side dumps boost to the atmosphere/intake.

When you cycle/power the solenoid, you bleed boost away from the actuator's diaphragm, allowing it to pull the gate closed. A higher pressure spring just gives you a higher base boost pressure if your solenoid fails or something. The only time they're useful is if you have such a high pressure differential across the turbo that the gate starts to blow open from exhaust pressure on the gate, in which case your turbine wheel and/or housing is too small anyway and you're putting a bandaid on the problem. The spring rate in the gate makes no difference to anything practical with a correctly setup electronic boost controller (such as the factory one) because it should have essentially atmospheric pressure only when the solenoid is powered on (essentially creating a boost leak in the intake, hence the restrictor pill in the factory setup) and when the solenoid is off you want it to push the gate open anyway, right? The only way you'll get the gate creeping open from the actuator is if you have so much boost pressure that you can generate >7psi through a restrictor pill into a hose that has a vacuum (assuming you're still running AFM and have the boost solenoid plumbed back to the turbo intake) on the other end. Big gate springs are a relic of the days of rising rate fuel pressure regulators, boost taps, and janky EFR controllers that did bad things to your AFM signal, not modern cars with modern ECUs and 3-port solenoids.

LVVTA flip-flop between being excellent and f***ing useless. Examples include the driveshaft hoop rules when re-shelling (now fixed), and their deeply stupid Facebook post about needing to cert brake rotors. A lot of LVVTA grew from old dudes with epic beards building ropey kit cars and hotrods in their sheds, not bolt-on modification of modern imports, and it showed. A lot.

Looking great. Makes me really want to get mine sorted out

1. A class MA vehicle first registered or manufactured on or after 1 January 1990 is not fitted with one high-mounted stop lamp. If you remove a wing that has a high-stop in it, you have to add another one - usually on the parcel tray or stuck to the rear windscreen.

Feels like putting lipstick on a pig, is there something wrong with the stock actuator?

Strict interpretation? It's illegal, the end. Real world, depending how you do it and where you get your WoFs they might not notice/care. People who think there is wiggle room in the VIRM are wrong: 19. An overlay has been applied that reduces or distorts the light emitted from the lamp (eg a tinted cover).

What swap? Just stock for stock or something radical? Stock engine out for stock engine in, assuming identical motors, is not a huge job - a solid weekend, fairly basic tools and an engine crane.

The V7 wheel is super clunky. I never really worked out the exact answer to this. I think the easiest way is to get a V8 wheel with clockspring and inflator. I still intend to do this to mine.

How on earth would ECU ever get picked up?

Is your Link even using the O2 sensors any more? V7 has two, one at the bottom of the headers and one after the turbo, nominally to monitor the cat is working properly. I can't remember which one is also used for narrow band AFR adjustment by the ECU, funny feeling it's the bottom one. Reasonable chance your Link has them disabled, and if it doesn't you can just go turn off the bottom one and delete it if your tune isn't running closed loop.

Sadly no more info about the car. It was just a pic from some car show, I was searching on the number plate. The bottom half of the bumper seems super familiar but I can't quite work out what from. Keep in mind that a large part of the look of that car comes from the widebody, which is a massively expensive undertaking even if you do it the cheapest way you can. I'd probably just hunt out a nice JDM or Prodrive bumper and call it good... you can't see it when you're sitting inside it anyway, and $4k would go a long way in terms of making it drive better.