Finally found a RS/Outback hood and grill today and jumped at the price even though I had no way to get it home. Luckly the owner of the junk yard said he could bring it by on his way home since I lived close. So it just arrived 
Well upon looking on the bottom of the car i discovered a small rats nest of wiring that someone tried to make their own fix which is NOT acceptiable. I took the harness apart tonight and redid it and soldier the connectors, heat shrunk the wiring and then encapsulated it with the black sheathing.
before:
After (Picture from the bottom up)
Now the downside is that while under the car I noticed that the steering rack has a torn boot and leaking along with what looks like the front of the engine has oil leaks coming from the cam seals. The overall goal is to take the motor out and junk it but meanwhile i will probably have to fix it until i can afford to swap it.
Well today i tackled the car a little more and went back to the junk yard and got some more of the lower interior tid bits to go around the foot wells along with a battery box, tie down and a gas cap.
I started today just doing the simple thing to document what i have done to the car that i didn’t get pictures of. So the tail light and front blinker have been replaced and the engine well clean (1st attempt).
Clean Engine Bay:
Now pictures of why the A/C system was dead. Notice the cut in the hose.
AC Box removed (I still need to remove the silver can in the picture but you can see the rest is gone.
AC Compressor removed finally:
Battery Box installed with tiedown
And finally pictures of the aftermath today:
Well when the L does go to the race track the carpet and stuff will come back out and i’ll take out all the padding, etc to lighten the car up some but i just couldn’t deal with the smell and the general nasty feeling of this cars interior so I sourced a new set of interior bits to replace it with. This is my first time removing a dash of any car but found it pretty painless thanks to the people over at rs25.com. I found alot of useful diys there and it helped with all the stuff i did this weekend.
So in the beginning here is what i started with:
So as you can see it is pretty disgusting and what you haven’t seen is all the cig butts in the shifter housing and i found out later under the carpet. There was no hope for the dash, center console or carpet. So first thing I did was remove all of that and ended up with this.
Pretty bare but I was doing some reading on the SRS system in these older cars and decided to remove it (since the car is going to be a race car) and also found that the AC system was dead. When i hooked the gauge to the a/c lines it didn’t register anything so I also removed the box next to the blower and took its guts out and re-installed that.
So now the ending result is the following below (note i still have to clean the carpet but it started raining). I still need to work on getting some different door cards and paint the rest of the tan parts black or replace them with black parts. I also need to source some 02+ WRX seats for this car because the factory seats are shot! What i wanted was a 02+ WRX dash and all the stuff to go with it but I didn’t have the extra time to cut and modify it to fit the car and the door cards don’t work with the newer dashes and a 99-01 RS dash isn’t hard to find but none locally.
Well i got the car with no keys, long story but I managed to source a complete set of locks along with the ignition lock. For some reason the previous owner destroyed the ignition switch but its all fixed now and a single key does everything finally.
Old Ignition lock:
New Ignition lock (note previously used but works great)
Managed to finally find my new project car today, I plan on making it a race car at some point but since it is a front wheel drive model i need to save up my $$ to upgrade it to all wheel drive and maybe a stronger engine (factory engine is a 1.8L 110HP)
And as you can tell she needs a interior removal and start over, I would attempt to clean it but it is way too far gone for my liking….
