BagRidersJohn

Well folks I've got some good news and some bad news.

Good news first: I accomplished my goal of getting my specB off the lift and over to the other side of my shop with the help of my wife (pushing it outside and back in through the snow and double-digit negative temperatures - no easy task!)

Bad news: I didn't take any "finished" photos of the undercarriage before I took it off the lift:spin: CLASSIC.

I did take some photos of the last refinished pieces and hardware, though!

First, the driveshaft. Everyone together now: "ooooo, ahhhhh!"

In front of the driveshaft is all new hardware i.e. 2x new bolts for the carrier and 4x new bolts/washers/nuts for the yolk. Nice. I gave both shafts a fresh coat of matte black paint too. Double nice.

Next, how about these front axles? You can tell they're legit because of the green cups. Oh yeah, that's nice. Similar treatment for these bad larrys: matte black paint on the shafts as well as the outer cup. Upon close inspection, the boots are all in good shape (pretty sure I replaced them somewhat recently, I can't remember). I popped them back in without replacing the inner seals: hopefully I don't regret that decision

So do your best to imagine those parts installed on a nice clean chassis. I promise I'll snag a "done" photo of the undercarriage in the spring time once I put the engine back in there... not trying to do the push out / push back in again. That might strain my marriage

So now my Legacy has joined my WRX on the other side of the shop. I actually pushed my WRX away from the wall a bit so I could have some room to work on that thing too.

The keen observers might notice some parts in front of my WRX, and you'd be right. About a month ago, I backed straight into the front end of my friend and co-worker Rob's Legacy GT. He has the same fender kit as I do, but he had tediously molded his. The force of the impact damaged the bumper, hood, and both fenders. I promised him I'd make it right, so I bought a new front clip and new fender flares and I will be doing the repair. This is why I wanted to get my Legacy off the lift... his car will be coming to my house this week and I'm going to put it up on the lift so I can do the body work standing up or sitting down without hunching over, thus saving my poor lower back

Thanks for reading!

Last night with the help of my wife I reinstalled the front crossmember and transmission. Only a few more things to reinstall before it can come off the lift and go somewhere else in my shop while I rebuild the engine!

Spent last night preparing to reinstall stuff tonight. As I mentioned previously, I refinished the front swaybar and I'm happy with the outcome. I'll install it to the crossmember before installing the crossmmeber on the chassis tonight:

I may have gotten a little ahead of myself and reinstalled the shifter to the transmission when I was reinstalling the miscellaneous brackets and sensors. If this makes reinstallation difficult it's only a couple bolts to remove.

I should have everything back on the car tonight, and hopefully the car will be roll-able by the weekend

I completed rebuilding the rack over the weekend, nice!

With everything apart, of course I removed surface rust from the rack housing and spent some time cleaning up the cast aluminum pinion housing as well

I gave the rack housing a fresh coat of paint. I replaced the rubber strap (referred to as a "spacer" in the parts diagram, weird) as well as both brackets that retain the rack to the crossmember.

And here is the finished product, lookin good! Now all that's left to do is hope she doesn't leak I'll find out if my rebuild was successful when the car gets back on the road in the spring time.

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No photos to show, but last night I cleaned up and painted the shifter assembly components and the front swaybar / anti-rollbar as well as the bushings (the brackets I cleaned up prior). I'm bringing home our (work/Bag RIders') transmission jack tonight in hopes of getting the car back on the ground by the weekend.

I'll try to remember to snap some photos of the remaining parts as well as once everything is back togther!

Cheers!

as always, beautiful work!

Thanks!

Wow, I didn't think seeing those clean radiator brackets would excite me like that. Mine are rotted. That's a nice paint booth you have there. I'm jealous of your garage.

Haha its the little things, right? Thanks for the kind words about my shop. I'm very proud of it and have worked very hard to make it financially possible, including doing all of the interior fit-up myself. One day I hope to build another ~1000 sq/ft expansion but without a second story so that I could have a full-sized overhead lift, and reserve what is my current shop space for long-term projects that would involve a rotisserie, as well as larger stationary equipment. Maybe sometime in the next decade

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No updates for the car, but I did get a shipment notification for the rack rebuild parts and those should be showing up on Saturday. So, I'm hoping I'll be able to knock out the rack rebuild on Sunday and then next week will be reinstallation of the trans/front crossmember. Once that's done I'll be able to get the car off the lift if needed, which is a nice stress reliever for me. Additionally, I'm excited to tear apart the engine for a rebuild, but I wont start that until I've got the trans/front xmember back in there.

Thanks for reading!

I hope everyone had a great New Year and that your 2022 is off to a good start!

I made some headway on cleaning up my drivetrain. Still waiting on the rack rebuild parts to come in, so no progress there unfortunately. I'm hoping once that comes in, I'll have everything else done so all I'll have to do is rebuild the rack & pinion then put everything back together!

I thought this was a satisfying photo: old vs new

As I'm sure anyone who follows this thread will understand, I just couldn't bring myself to reinstall my transmission without giving it any attention. After all, it would look terribly out of place surrounded by beautifully restored parts!

Here's how it started. As you can see, at this point I had removed some brackets, tested out some cleaning methods on the rear housing, and began replacing fasteners.

First up was the brackets. I began restoring them the same way I do with all metal parts, and that is mechanical rust removal. For this I use a variety of tools depending on the part, but generally speaking its a lot of wire wheel and abrasive flap discs and drums on angle grinders, die grinders and for small stuff a dremel tool.

After the crusty stuff is removed, I soaked them for about 36 hours in a rust stripping solution. I've not used this stuff before, but it worked well. It smelled a lot like cleaning vinegar; the high acidity type.

Anyways, what you see here is a few brackets from the transmission, lower radiator brackets, and swaybar/anti-roll bar straps. There was some pitting, but overall these parts cleaned up real nice.

Moments later, I had the parts ready to spray paint. I'm using some chassis paint for these; same stuff I used on the trans crossmember.

I guess I didn't take a photo of all the parts, but here is one of the lower radiator brackets. I'm happy with the finish. It's somewhere between matte and gloss black which is what I was going for. I achieve this finish by spraying a light coat of matte paint over the still wet gloss paint.

In the background of that photo you'll see a brand new transmission mount. The old one was way past its service life. Since I had to replace the part anyhow, I opted for the STI (Group N?) version, which is just a solid rubber mount as opposed to the stock part that has a relief in the middle.

In other (disappointing) news, I scooped a really clean looking, low mileage driveshaft from an eBay auction, but unfortunately the seller listed the wrong part number. Upon receiving the part, it is tagged "08 Legacy GT" so presumably seller was unaware that there are two automatic transmissions offered in the BL/BP Legacy, as the auction listed the part number for the 4AT driveshaft which is the part I need as it is shared with the 6MT specB. Furthermore, the seller is putting up a major stink about it, going so far to claim that Subaru is wrong about the part number, and that they are correct Seems pretty likely I'll have to engage eBay to get a refund on this one.... oh well.

Its sad though, the driveshaft looks good

I've never tried to split one of these driveshafts but I assume it's possible? If anyone has done this please let me know as I'd consider just swapping the front section of my driveshaft onto the one I received, if I'm unable to send the part back (which I of course have offered to do!)

Enough of that, back to the fun (fun? ) stuff! After about 6 hours of cleaning, I called it quits with my progress on the transmission. Honestly, I spent more time on the underside (i.e., what I'll see when I'm under the car) but I'm happy enough with the final product. It doesn't look brand spankin' new but it's an immense improvement from where it started, and that's good enough for me!

So that about does it. I've got a short list of parts left that I'd like to clean up a bit before they go back in the car, namely the shift linkage and steering rack. Otherwise, I'm just waiting on that rebuild kit to come in so I can put this rig back together and move onto my WRX!

Cheers and thanks for reading!

Looking very nice buddy

Thanks man!!

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I finished cleaning up the trans xmember last night. That's about all I have for an update today

Next up is the transmission casing and misc. brackets!

I am so happy I found this thread, I just can't believe I didn't find it sooner! I thought I may very well be the only person silly enough to restore one of these cars, but here we are. Awesome work man. My specB isn't quite as high mileage as yours, but pretty darn close, and also a New England car. Last year I did a full nut-and-bolt restoration of the rear end, along with stripping and re-epoxying the undercarriage. I'm currently underway on the front end and using your rack rebuild guide. I've got the engine on a stand and will be doing that over the winter as well, bouncing between that and more fab-heavy work on my WRX.

Cheers man!

Thanks for this guide Jaylew! I just about finished with my rack teardown last night before it was bedtime for me Rebuild kit is in the mail. Wish me luck!

Bonus - I figured if I was going to have a spiffy "new" rack, I couldn't reinstall it into a crusty front crossmember. Anyone who has followed my build thread was not surprised by this decision

I hope everyone had a great holiday!

I wasted no time digging back into my Legacy when I returned home from visiting family. As expected, I had a slew of new (used) parts waiting for me, so I started cleaning them up!

Firstly, a clean crossmember and rack cover / jacking plate!

While these parts were pretty clean to begin with, I hit 'em with some degreaser and a drill-mounted brush to make them nearly as good as new! I also replaced all the fasteners on these parts with stainless hardware, cause that's how I roll

Ta-daaaa

With the crossmember all prepped and ready, I moved onto disassembling the rack and pinion. I got just about everything apart except for the piston from the rack as I'm lacking the correct sized socket and couldn't find my large adjustable wrench to save my life.

Big thanks to Jaylew for their guide on rebuilding! I ordered a rebuild kit, just waiting for it to show up.

Next, I moved onto the transmission. I stood it upright on a couple of 4x4's in order to remove the crossmember and start cleaning it up. As you can see, it doesn't hide its age or mileage

I'm going to remove everything from the transmission, restore the metal parts and clean up the casing. I may paint the casing, but I haven't decided yet.

Of course, I have a new (used) rust-free crossmember for this thing. I started cleaning it up last night and got about 75% completed. I have new bushings for this, as well as a new transmission mount. The old ones were all well past their service life, cracked to all hell and generally speaking just no longer functional.

I'm at a bit of a pause while I wait for the r&p rebuild parts along with some abrasives to clean up the transmission, but will continue prepping in the meantime.

Thanks for following along!

breathtaking

Thanks!

I laughed at this part. An early Merry Christmas to you and your family!

Ha glad you got a chuckle out of it Thank you and Merry Christmas to you and your family as well!

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I managed to spray the last areas of the chassis before departing on vacation this week (writing this from said vacation! ) I can't express how much easier and faster this was (not to mention, easier on my back ) on the lift... Being able to roll around on a stool and operate the spray gun is amazing!!

I used a cheapo HF spray gun to spray the thick epoxy. The tip was a bit small but ended up working out really good! I got great coverage and more efficient on material for sure.

I decided to leave the front frame rails in the silver epoxy... I think it looks good. I hit the transmission tunnel and the rest of the undercarriage with the same black topcoating and rubberized undercoating.

I've got new parts waiting for me upon my return back home so I'm hoping I can make quick-ish work of reassembly. I think rebuilding the rack & pinion will be the most time consuming part. I intend on getting everything except the engine back into the car, and then getting my WRX onto the lift so I can tear into that one. I'll be bouncing back and forth between working on my WRX and rebuilding the EJ255 out of my Legacy, which to me, sounds like a nice way to spend time in my shop over the winter

A small update

I pulled out the front crossmember so that I can clean everything up.

It's pretty crusty down there despite the steering rack seals trying to help the cause by keeping the crossmember thoroughly soaked in grease and ATF I'll be replacing the crossmember as I think by the time I sandblast and powder coat it, I'd be out more time and money than simply replacing with a clean example from a more dry and salt-free area of the US.

With the aid of the trusty Kano Kroil I removed the rack cover plate and pulled the rack out of the crossmember. I'll be cleaning up and rebuilding this rack, replacing any of the external parts along the way at my discretion.

This stuff is destined for the metal recycling facility.

In preparation of applying new epoxy, I cleaned up the transmission tunnel and remaining areas with W&G remover on a maroon scuff pad. As you can see, this area of the chassis is very clean considering the age and mileage, and really doesn't need much attention.... but if you've followed along this thread at all, you will know that I can't NOT refinish it to match the rest of the undercarriage

I also removed the shift linkage and will evaluate restoring v.s. replacing.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Holiday!

I'm back at it friends!!

It's a regular ol' Subaru party up in here

The keen eyed viewers will notice a few items scattered throughout my shop that are indicative of what I've been up to lately....

GET READY FOR SOME OBLIGATORY SELFIES

First, out came the motor

Then, out came the transmission (so thankful to have a lift for this one!!)

With those hunks of metal out of the way, I'm now prepping the remainder of the undercarriage (namely the transmission tunnel) to finish up the undercarriage restoring that I mostly completed last winter. Again, so thankful to have a lift for this!!

Over the weekend I did a leak-down test to gauge (heh) the condition of the engine before ripping it apart. It has around 190K on it, and to my knowledge has never been resealed and it sure does look the part. While the engine was running fine, it is certainly due for some semi-proactive maintenance.

Overall, the leak down test was better than I thought it would be, especially considering the cold engine, with only one cylinder showing considerable leakage

For all cylinders, the most predominant leakage is from the piston rings as is evident by the air escaping from the turbo oil drain tube. A couple cylinders demonstrated leakage at the exhaust valves as well, to no surprise, this could be very well be lash out of tolerance given the high mileage of the engine and the strenuous heat cycling that exhaust valves are exposed to.

I'll be prioritizing the undercarriage work and meanwhile gathering parts that I know I'll need for the engine rebuild. I don't want to just throw a new shortblock at it, as all signs (as of now) point to this one being a perfectly suitable rebuild candidate. So long as the cylinders aren't out of whack, a hone and new rings should breathe life back into it. Of course while I have it apart I'll fit new bearings as well.

For the heads, I'll have to see how the valve seats look but I'm hoping I can get by with a simply replacing seals, lapping in some new or cleaned up valves, and having the heads decked (as you always should with Subaru heads!!). I'm not particularly interested in paying for new valve seats to be ground unless of course the seats are pitted, in which case I'll see whats out there for used heads before shelling out for a job like that.

Anyways, more updates to come as its winter time now which means I spend pretty much all my free time in my shop

No real car updates since I've not been working on it at all and instead getting the most driving time I can before winter sets in. That said, I have a couple of exciting new tools in my shop that I'll be putting to work over the winter!

After lots of planning and measuring, I pulled the trigger on a BendPak low-ceiling lift. This one is designed for ceilings up to 10' tall. My ceiling is just shy of 10' so I had to get a little creative in order to maximize its lifting capability.

As you can see, the top of the lift sits above the finished ceiling height, but the safety stopper tube sits just below it to mechanically prevent the vehicle from hitting the ceiling.

I chopped out the ceiling between two joists and boxed in a removable, insulated panel:

This sucker is about 12' long by 2' wide and composed of wood and 2" foam board. It is kinda heavy and very awkward to lift, so I devised a handy dandy hoist using a 110v winch from Amazon.

Tadaaaa

This was critical for installing the lift as there are safety cables and hydraulic connections in the top trough. Similarly, should I need to service any connections in the future, the removable panel will prove very important!

Plans for this car over the winter aren't terribly exciting, but important nonetheless. Basically just an engine rebuild and undercoating the transmission tunnel and front clip. While I have the engine out, I may choose to spray the engine bay to match the new body color, but I'm not fully committed to that as of now.

My WRX on the other hand, I have lots of plans for! That car has been somewhat neglected for the last couple years as I've been spending all of my wrenching time on my Legacy. So this winter I plan on giving that car some long-overdue attention ranging from body work, more engine bay shaving, and a major drivetrain overhaul! Fun! I finally picked up a TIG welder and I am really excited to develop that skill and apply it to my cars.

Thanks for reading!

Foliage is here in VT! Hope to get some DSLR shots before its gone!

Hope everyone had a good weekend!

While out and about on Saturday my wife encouraged me to air out by these trains, saying it would be cool pictures. She is usually right about such things

Not today, but this past weekend. Drove my 18+ month long project (glass out respray, full undercarriage strip & refinish, complete suspension restore front and rear down to every nut, bolt and bushing) some 500-600 miles round trip to Wicked Big Meet and back with no issues. Proud of myself for that!

Photo I snapped while setting up our booth during the sunrise Sunday morning

And another in our parking lot at Bag Riders

Full build thread for those interested, from its original intent as a fun and comfortable year-round daily driver to the form you see above: https://legacygt.com/forums/showthread.php/john-halls-2007-specb-daily-driver-build-259345.html

To put into perspective the amount of work I did on this car, here is the undercarriage. This chassis has about 185K miles on it

More shots from Wicked Big Meet courtesy of Phin, our Social Media Manager!

Love these fitment close ups Dialing this in perfectly takes a lot of time and patience!

https://i.imgur.com/KZuPudOh.jpeg' alt='KZuPudOh.jpeg'>

Nice setup at Wbm.

 

I'm sure I read back through, but... where'd you get the flare kit? or is it home made?

Thanks! The JDM front and rear end came from Randy @ HKC Speed, I believe they're a vendor here on the forums.

The fiberglass body kit is from a company called Monster Service. I believe they're out of Russia. https://monsterservice.pro/

I'm very happy with the fit of the kit, especially considering the price point. It took some minor tweaking to fit better, but its fiberglass so that should be expected along with blocking to get a nice flat finish. I've worked with high end body FRP kits that cost literally 20x as much as this one that required similar amounts of tweaking to get to fit better... so, considering the price difference, I'm thrilled with the quality of this one.

We built this E92 335 for SEMA back in 2013 or 2014, I can't quite remember

Car looks great- nice work!

Thank you very much!

Car looks great, but I do not like the flares on the car. To each his own but just makes it look odd/ But great work on the car.

Thanks a lot! Truthfully, I'm not a big fan of fender flares or body kits in general, but if you scroll back in this thread a ways you'll see that some years ago I cut out the rusty quarter panels and slapped on some "universal" (240-style) flares. I wasn't a big fan of that look, but I liked it better than doing two quarter panel replacements So, when I saw this chassis-specific body kit advertised to me, I liked it more than the universal flares I had on there before, it at least felt more "intentional", so decided to go ahead with them. I am happy with the outcome

My 06 WRX wagon has an all-metal wide body conversion using panels from the GD (sedan) of the same generation. There are many parallels to this sort of thing across other makes (e.g., M panels on non-M cars for BMWs, RS panels for Audis, AMG panels in Mercedes, etc.). I much prefer this all-metal, "OEM Plus" approach to widening a car

Here's a couple shots from Wicked Big Meet yesterday. I had a great time meeting people, thanks to everyone who came by the Bag Riders booth and said hello!

Myself and another one of our staff arrived on Saturday to get our RaceDeck snap-together flooring finished, as it takes about an hour and we had only 2 hours to set up on Sunday morning, the day of the show. Our team was up at 4:30 AM on Sunday to get some breakfast and head to the venue. We got there around 5:45 and caught a really nice sunrise as we began constructing our booth. You can see our bagged Model 3 in the background

Here's one of the only shots I took of my car! I was busy at the booth greeting people and talking about air suspension

Later that day, as we were waiting for a dinner table, we took the opportunity to charge our Model 3 and took some photos in the nice sunset lighting. I don't think I fit in with the Tesla...

We hit up a neat little diner for breakfast this morning and I snapped this photo of myself, my coworker Rob and our Tesla.

About 4 hours later I was back at HQ! I'm so happy and proud that after putting in so much work and having the entire car taken apart, I made a solid 8+ hour round trip, about 500 and some odd miles, with absolutely no problems at all. I'm thrilled with the improvements to the sound system, the speakers sound great and having CarPlay really brings the experience of driving the car for a long distance up to the modern age of things. Not to mention, having air conditioning is a nice luxury that I forego whenever I take my WRX to Wicked Big Meet, lol

Thanks for reading!

Yea I have been trying to get a hold of 96svx too. Definitely interested in an i88 harness. And the 14pin one for a new head unit

I tried 3 times over a number of months to get in touch with 96svx to no avail. k00laid83 built and shipped the i88 harness promptly, along with the radio adapter harness! Highly recommend!! Their website is https://tightfitfab.com/

Never thought I'd like those flares as much as I do - but seeing them on your car looks 100%

Thank you! I feel the same way lol. I have said a number of times to local friends that over fenders / flares aren't something I'd typically opt for (my WRX has a metal wide body, for reference!) but this was a fun project for me and I'm really happy with the outcome. The last wide body kit I worked with was back in 2013 for our (Bag Riders) SEMA build which was a BMW E92 that had one of the very first Liberty Walk body kits (link to Speedhunters article). That was a fun project, we were able to fit something ridiculous like a 13.5" wide wheel in the back and we had plenty of room to work with.

The kit on my Legacy is not nearly as crazy as that one, but still allowed me to fit 10.5" wheels all around (a lot for this car!) without "extremely excessive" negative camber. I'm right about -5.0 all around which yes, is a LOT, but not nearly as much as many stanced cars. Given that this car is around stock horsepower, the negative camber has little noticeable consequence for me. My WRX on the other hand (which puts down 430hp), lots of negative camber and stretched tires are more impactful.

Just phenomenal job, that color and quality is amazing.

 

I would love to attend a WBM some day, but it's in CT and in the first month of the semester. I can't take off that much time from teaching to make the drive there and back without getting in trouble

Thank you for the kind words! I hear ya re: show schedule. I'd be hard-pressed to attend if it wasn't to represent our business. We've been vending at WBM for I think 10 years now. The organizer Rob is a great guy and originally local to us here in VT. It has been really cool watching WBM and his other events grow into what they are today!

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Thought I'd include another couple photos from yesterday along with an updated interior shot!

After 18 months of work, I finally got my specB back on the road!

A brief overview of the work I did entirely by myself (well, my wife held a lot of stuff at various points, lol) in my home workshop:

- Full color change to Subaru M1Y "Crimson Red Metallic" (glass out, door jambs, inside doors, under hood/trunk, etc)

- JDM front and rear end (Rev A-C front w/honeycomb grille and JDM HID headlamps)

- Fiberglass wide body kit

- Air Suspension from Bag Riders

- Built custom 3 piece wheels to fit body kit (18x10.5 -12 / +0) - Rotiform LHR (they were on my WRX wagon before)

- Full undercarriage restoration (stripped to bare metal, resprayed epoxy + undercoat)

- Complete overhaul of front and rear suspension, every nut, bolt and bracket replaced, all aluminum parts vapor blasted, all new bushings

- Complete audio overhaul (total rewire w/14awg, JDM double din, two amps)

- Brand new front and rear glass

Exterior:

Interior:

Some time ago I swapped the blue interior to the 08-09 black interior and upholstered all the upper trim myself with black ultrasuede. Black sunvisors are out of a 15+ WRX. Map/Dome lights from a GR STi and I had an upholstery shop make me new shifter and parking brake boots with nappa leather and grey stitching to match the specB seat stitching. I also replaced the very tired steering wheel with a brand new OEM wheel about 6 years ago when I bought the car.

Can't forget an undercarriage shot:

The car is a 2007 model year and has just shy of 200K miles on it. Over the winter I intend to rebuild the engine and refresh the steering rack and front crossmember, along with any other areas in the front clip that would benefit from some TLC.

Build thread: https://legacygt.com/forums/showthread.php/john-halls-2007-specb-daily-driver-build-259345.html

I hope everyone had a good Holiday weekend!

On Friday I had my specB towed to my friend's shop in town for an alignment on their alignment rack. In years past I'd have "sent it" on the eyeball alignment but decided my peace of mind was worth the price of the tow And good thing, it was all out of whack! It lined up nicely and drives nice and straight. I took the highway home and the car felt great!

This morning I drove my specB to work for the first time in well over a year and a half. I got some nice comments from my colleagues here at Bag Riders and Phin, our Social Media Manager (who is also a really talented photographer) came out and snapped some photos in the morning light.

Here's a couple of my favorites:

I'll be at our (Bag Riders) booth at Wicked Big Meet this weekend. I hope to see some of you there!