Adoom

Gear wobbler installed. I can get all gears. The rods needed to be shortened. And a small area of the tunnel needed to be massaged in by 5mm for clearance. The nissan rear rubber was very soft so the gear change was not great. I got some urethane mounts intended for an original mini linkage and have mocked up a bracket. MUCH better now. Made some clearance for the back of the intake plenum. It won't get in the way of the brake and clutch mechanisms. A factory radiator "fits". I think I will cut out the inner wing on this side too, so it fits a bit better. The bottom pipe will need to be in the middle to go between the mounts.

Subframe getting there. Engine moved a bit over to the passenger side for tie rod clearance. I had to rework the gearbox mount because I initially did it without shims and it was WAY TOO tight. I'm trying to find somewhere to add more bracing to the front tierod mounts since I've had to trim them a bit.

You have definitely removed ALL the bolts, right?

Giving the mini project some love. On the car, I made some cardboard templates and marked limits of where tubes could end. Then rough cut the tubes to just longer than the correct length. Then wrestled it out past the engine and bolted it to the jig on my steel table. Once I got the pipes in where I thought they needed to go and welded enough that they would stay in place. I trial fit it in the car again. Now how to get the engine back in there.... I lifted the car up even higher on blocks and wobbly scissor jacks, to slide the engine under front the front. Then 3D tetris for at least an hour to get it up into place. It's tight. I will need to add some clearance to the box section here. My engine mounts are stiff, but probably not that stiff. An engine steady bar may also be required. The right side tie rod mount is the main clearance issue here. This pipe is way out here to clear the front pulley(by 8mm!) but I've realised it will interfere with the lower shock mount. So I'll be adding a bend. That flappy plate will get gussets later so it can't bend. The other side might need the same treatment, but it doesn't stick out nearly as far. I'm hoping, when I'm done, I'll be able to install the subframe on the engine, the lower the car onto it.

As far as I can tell. It's not canbus lighting. And it doesn't sense the current to see if a bulb is blown. I think it was just put there by the towbar installer because he assumed. He also didn't know subaru provided a plug in the loom where the factory optional trailer light loom goes so he just hacked into the wiring behind the light. I has deleted it. Discovered brake light bulbs are both gone. Only the high stop light was working. No warning lights anywhere. Wonder how long she's been driving around like that....

Hmmm, but this doesn't have a separate power wire. But I guess it must serve the same purpose.

The trailer plug isn't working on 2012 Subaru forester. The terminals were rusty, so I replaced the plug. But still no power. This thing is inline in the cable. I'm testing for power on the tail light circuit. Power is not getting through this thing. It wasn't sealed and had some oxidation I cleaned off. Wtf is it? Can I delete it? Car doesn't have LED bulbs if that's what it's for.

I'd just use Epotec 408. But it's a bit of a pain to mix up a tiny batch for small things like this. Any brand names of the aussie stuff? I used some eastwood platinum and thought it was pretty good. But AFAIK it's no longer available in NZ.

The inner arch. This took ages to get the right shape. See how much frilly I had to replace. Fortunately it's not really visible so I'm not going to grind the welds down. POR15 really is shit on new steel and the surface has no 'tooth', just peels off.

I got some last year. From an OS recommendation, possibly from you. Should have got a larger size. Found the drawstrings didn't like to stay tied and some fell off.

So the new shoots of my grape vines keep getting fucked by late frosts. I had no luck at all using frost cloth. It's also super tedious to put on cause I've got 40m of grape.... erm fence. So this spring I made a thing. Frost doesn't like water cause it's warmer than ice so I put sprinklers over them. I put some extra sprayers at low spots to drain the pipe when it's off. I don't want the water freezing in there making it useless. But I'm not gonna manually turn that shit on early in the morning. So I dug up an old arduino board. And bought a relay thingy and a waterproof temp sensor and a 24 volt solenoid valve thingy(not pictured) for the outside tap. And hot glue. Lots of hot glue so stuff stays plugged in. Old laptop power brick is perfect for the solenoid valve. My sketch checks the temperature every 10 seconds. If it drops below 0.5 degrees it turns on the water for 60 seconds. Then turns it off and waits 5 minutes before looping back to checking the temperature again. I had some 'stunt frost' for testing. The brass solenoid valve is screwed directly to the outside tap which is attached to the brick facade of the house. It's pretty loud when it thumps on, I think it might be loud enough to wake me up. Hopefully I'll get some grapes this year, if the birds don't steal them all.

You'd need to go through design approval because changing the lengths of the arms can mess with the geometry. You will need to accurately draw, with measurements, the modified suspension. There is a specific form for custom/modified IRS. It's in the documents section of the LVVTA website. On my Triumph(they are quite narrow), I narrowed a nissan IRS, so the arms and geometry were original, the inner pickups were just closer together. No design approval required. Your cert man just needs to be happy it's constructed "in a workman like manner". It was still a lot of work/measuring/thinking to get the subframe aligned and make new body mounts. And make new diff mounts. In both cases you will need custom length drive shafts made. It'd be WAAAY less fuck around to just use different offset wheels. Possibly cost less than the custom driveshafts alone. EDIT: Not sure if you mean, "make new arms", or "move existing arms inboard". I had assumed the first one.

I hadn't actually thought of that. Referring to one of Allan Staniforth's books, moving the inner pickup points closer together would lower the roll center slightly. That's good, I think. I don't think it would do much else, or at least anything I'd notice.

Just in case someone else needs longer front wheel studs for a 2500 because they have gone from alloys that use shank nuts to alloys that use taper nuts and there is not enough thread engagement. And they also want to go metric because they installed nissan rear suspension. These are the only solution I found. Fuck all wheel studs have a tapered head like that. They are from a Landrover Freelander. I got them from Rimmer Bros in the UK. The OD of the knurl is the same as the originals but as you can see from the photo it's a coarser knurl. They are M12X1.5, a little bigger than the 7/16th original ones. I'll have to change the nissan studs too because they are M12X1.25. They pulled into the hub fine using a spacer, a washer, a shank nut and the impact gun. They are TIGHT.

Epotec 408 epoxy. 2-3 coats. I did most of it with a brush. Took fucking ages, over 4 days. Near the end I remembered I had some small fluffy rollers and discovered they were much faster and also got in little divots that the brush just skipped over.