[Orbit Rims any good?]

130 bucks to buy a nut you can take off with an oversized socket and a hammer? Probably not.

[Orbit Rims any good?]

So there's replicas which are just... extremely close stylistically, but branded as what they are. See Rota Grid vs Rays TE37. While completely unoriginal, at least they're honest about where they're made.

Then you have what I will call "fakes" where the rim actually claims to be something like Rays and has that brand cast into the rim etc, but is not made by them. The issue you have here is that if a manufacturer is prepared to blatantly infringe on a trademark, they probably don't give a damn about things like metallurgy and various safety standards, so the rim might just be a complete turd.

 

Replicas like Rota, where they aren't claiming to be the rim they're copying.... are largely fine from a mechanical/safety perspective, just people with genuine wheels will turn their nose up at you, and you're kinda perpetuating a s****y business practice by giving them your money.

 

EDIT: As long as you don't drive like an idiot, street driving is way easier on your rims than track.

[Anyone know of a good deal on car battery]

Crazy as it sounds, see if the Warehouse has one that fits. They do (did?) Exide and their prices were better than anyone I could find.

[Advice for suspension/wheel setup]

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.

[Advice for suspension/wheel setup]

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

[Advice for suspension/wheel setup]

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.

[Daily Driver Bucket Seats]

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.

[EZ30 Fuel To Use (Low IAM?)]

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?

[Sway bar mount broken]

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

[Warrant of fitness failed due to being loud?]

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.

[Japanese Double Din CD/MD Replacement and good ICE installers]

Slap on Torrens Terrace.

[S-GT - strange ringing/metallic noise when accelerating?]

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.

[Dropped my car onto the jackstands incorrectly?]

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?

[Do I need a Wideband A/F Gauge?]

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.

 

[Do I need a Wideband A/F Gauge?]

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.

[Do I need a Wideband A/F Gauge?]

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.

[Aftermarket wastegate actuators]

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.

[Aftermarket wastegate actuators]

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.

[Tinted Tail light Laws]

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.

[Post Your Impreza/WRX/STI Photos Here!]

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

[Tinted Tail light Laws]

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.

 

[Aftermarket wastegate actuators]

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

[Tinted Tail light Laws]

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).

 

[Wanting to do an engine swap for my BH 01 Legacy]

On 25/01/2022 at 12:20 PM, Raiden said:

Hey team,

 

Just putting out a message to our canterbury contingent. Im wanting to do an engine swap for my subaru legacy BH '01.

I'm hoping to get some info on going about this, any personel that people know would be good for this in Christchurch etc. 

 

 

 

 

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.

[Alternative steering wheel options for GC8 (with air bag)]

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.