2002 WRX Wagon

[lowlancer]

[yoeddynz]

Great read! Have you been keeping a record of $ spent. Will be interesting. I've been tempted a few times by cheap wrxs and have always wondered how spendy they can get. 

[~Slideways~]

On 20/05/2026 at 17:56, lowlancer said:

*Ludacris pic*

Ohhhh I get it lol.

I've never partaken in his music but that's funny lol

[~Slideways~]

1 hour ago, yoeddynz said:

Great read! Have you been keeping a record of $ spent. Will be interesting. I've been tempted a few times by cheap wrxs and have always wondered how spendy they can get. 

Thanks man, and no I've not specifically kept track but wouldn't take too much to work out. 

I have tried to keep the cost down on some things, one mistake I made was paying the local Subaru prices at first with the aim of getting in on the road asap. Mainly because I ended up needing a lot more parts and waiting for an Amayama order anyway. But I couldn't have known that until I'd taken the engine out.

Few examples of saving:

Flywheel: About $1k for new genuine and $420 for locally available chromoly light weight aftermarket (bit of a discount since I'd already bought the clutch kit)

Clutch kit: $465 from Drews Automotive, this is 'stage one' uprated and about $300 cheaper than standard kits from other suppliers. Have used Drew's stuff before and its good. Have one in my 200sx and he used to work for the local place that did modified clutches for me before but has since retired.

Hoes: one 30-40cm bendy breather hose was $170ish locally and about $20 from Amayama, so I ordered most from there. Will have saved many $100's doing it all at once.

So there is at least $1000 savings there.

Clutch fork: weirdly this was cheaper locally than Amayama.

 

Labour: do it yourself and suffer for the savings.

I'm not keeping track but there's easily few $1000 in labour so far (engine out, CV boot job, gearbox linkage, door/window disassembly, fix drivers seat rail, interior properly cleaned and even a few hours of de-greasing and cleaning etc.

 

So doing it myself and getting decent prices I'd guesstimate $3-4k saved so far?

A decent one of these is around $10-12k and I'm around half that with all the new bits and some upgrades, but still high km's.

 

If I really like the car I'd think about finding a ej207 short block to put all this stuff on.

 

 

 

I think the main surprise expense with old Subaru's is engine rebuilds (touch wood).

All of this stuff I've done is mostly maintenance like any car, I've actually found it pretty easy to work on despite people saying they are hard. 

 

Talking of engine rebuilds I used to think Subaru's were grenades, the common rod knock and head gasket stories. But it really seems like mistreated cars, too much boost or not keeping oil in them must be a lot of the causes.

 

Fingers crossed it'll give me a good amount of life, but I reckon a short block refresh isn't the end of the world.

[yoeddynz]

Oh yeah - we never ever count the time we spend on our cars here! We do that for the love.

Hoses and things like that could/are probably fucked on every scooby out there of a certain age unless they've already been replaced so I'd not count them either. Same goes for oil/filters/plugs/clutch - all stuff you should factor into any car purchase.

I think you've done well going by the condition of those cams etc plus you're entertaining us all.

 

[~Slideways~]

Noooooo I got it started up and can hear an exhaust leak. Couldn't see anything obvious and tried tightening some bolts which didn't fix it. 

Ended up shoving the shop vac up the exhaust in reverse then sprayed some soapy water on it and the leak is coming from the uppipe around the flexi.

Well balls. That's not easy to get out.

You can kind of see big bubbles on the left about half way down.

 

That sucks. Least I got to use this water pistol.

 

I also made a replacement for the cut section of intake hose from the airbox.

Random piece of bendrel pipe worked well with the right bend.

 

3" so will flow a bit better than the original which is quite a bit smaller due to the accordion flexi bit.

I only had a blue joiner so it will do, as out of place as it looks.

 

New air filter installed before I found the up pipe to be leaking.

[yoeddynz]

I know clean filters are a good thing but that filter will flow better if you remove the bag.

[~Slideways~]

On 30/05/2026 at 19:59, yoeddynz said:

I know clean filters are a good thing but that filter will flow better if you remove the bag.

Wtf would you know? Bet you've never even put a bike engine into an imp. Fuck sake, if Subaru used a bag, it's meant to have a bag. 

[tortron]

He will be telling you to put Lego in it next

[yoeddynz]

Its just in time to ride the instagram mando wave

 

[Bearded Baldy]

When it comes time to add doof doof, the speakers will be queer 3 screw in a moulding units.

The boy at work found that out lol.

I found some 3d printable pods someone had drawn up, printed them off and they worked mint for him, can send you the link or print them for you if you want.

 

Can't have a rex without doof doof!

[~Slideways~]

On 07/06/2026 at 13:46, Bearded Baldy said:

When it comes time to add doof doof, the speakers will be queer 3 screw in a moulding units.

The boy at work found that out lol.

I found some 3d printable pods someone had drawn up, printed them off and they worked mint for him, can send you the link or print them for you if you want.

 

Can't have a rex without doof doof!

Which speaker location? The drivers door had some aftermarket ones just mounted straight to the door with some self tapers.

 

[~Slideways~]

OK so the planned solution to the up pipe leaking was to cut out the flexi and weld in a new one, so I loosened the engine and gbox mounts etc again and jacked the engine up enough to get the aftermarket leaking up pipe out again.

I bought a nice flexi from Max Fab.

This is when I discovered I did not look at the after market (Redline Performance) up pipe close enough, I had originally only measured the ID on the flange that the turbo mounts to (at the top). But it actually has a taper welded in before this that I didn't see. So now that I had the up pipe off again I realised the ID is fucking massive at 63mm or about 2.5".

From what I can find, even the STI type uppipe of this generation has an internal ID of 41mm which is tiny. General consensus is that going too big of an ID in the up pipe causes slower turbo response. 

This also meant the nice flexi I bought was too small to use on this Redline one.

So I decided to cut off all of the heat shielding of the factory cat'd up pipe and see whats in there. Turns out there is also a flexi at the 'bottom' end, there was a lot of controversy over the last 25 years of forums as to whether these up pipes and the STI ones have flexi's or not (I did finally find a photo of an STI one with the heat shielding cut off (its welded on) and it also has a flexi but in the different place.

Flexi at the lower flange:

 

Turns out the weld has cracked all the way around and the only thing keeping it there was the welded on heat shields. 

 

I wonder how many subaru's are driving around with flexi's like this? I could not hear it at all, most likely due to being wrapped in heat shield material and then another metal layer.

 

The next interesting thing is that the design of this flexi is that it has two layers of tube starting from inside the lower flange. The inner tube goes all the way through the flexi and is seals with some kind of steel wool looking stuff around a tapered section.

Having 2 tubes there shrinks the ID down to 38mm-ish. I think it shrank down even more at that tapered steel wool sealed part as well. Crazy that you can make 250hp through this!?

I then also realised that the factory metal gaskets inner ring has no surface to mount to on the aftermarket redline up pipe's lower flange.

This is the double tubed section and the factory inner ring from the multilayer gasket.

It didn't actually leak here, but it's not ideal.

This pretty much seal my decision to not use the big diameter up pipe with the leaky flexi. It would more suit something with a big turbo, not this.

 

 

[~Slideways~]

So I welded the whole up-pipe to a big bit of square section to keep the flanges in the same place.

Then cut out the cat.

 

This must really slow gas flow before the turbo:

I wanted it done so I found some tube in the right size and welded it in. 

 

I welded the flexi's cracked section too. But this kept leaking in random places (air and bubble test) so I gave up and cut that out too.

New flexi:

Tested for leaks, all sealed.

Wrapped again:

New gaskets:

 

 

[~Slideways~]

Installed it, lowered engine, reconnected everything and it started up nicely and non-exhaust leaky.

Filled with water and antifreeze.

Took it off the hoist and tested the clutch install actually worked. It moves under it's own power again.

Moved it outside. 

Old wheels vs new wheels:

[~Slideways~]

So during this I tried to source a Tactrix cable but genuine ones are not sold anymore, so I tried a clone from China. Risky I guess.

These have been around for almost 20 years and used to tune factory ECU's on Subaru's and Mitsi's etc.

This is where I found that even with genuine Tactrix cables (version 2.0), heaps of people have trouble connecting to early 2000's wrx ecu's. Yay... apparently I would have better luck with a version 1.3 but these are hard to find too.

So it currently is in limp mode because I violated it's Tumble Generating Valves.

This was expected, but the cable not working was not expected.

There are hoops to jump through and internet rumours to decipher. But it should just be a case of connecting the green 'test' plugs under the steering column and also shorting the white 4 pin plug next to it (some have 2 pin white plugs).

With that cable connected to the ECU it should be as easy as disabling the code(s) for a TGV fault. But it won't read the ecu. 

So the plan is to try another cable and in the mean time I found someone selling unmodified tgv's from an '06.

So I'm going lengthen the wiring and connect these 'dummy' tgv's and see if it comes out of limp mode. All it should really want is a signal from the TPS's on both of them to say open/closed.

 

 

I did try everything to get the clone Tactrix to work. I even set up a Windows 7 laptop as well as a Windows 10 one. Found someone had save lots of different versions of ECUFlash, none made any difference.

 

[Bearded Baldy]

1 hour ago, ~Slideways~ said:

Which speaker location? The drivers door had some aftermarket ones just mounted straight to the door with some self tapers.

 

Front and rear doors. Apparently the window guide is behind the speaker so they can't just be screwed on, but yours pretty much proves that point wrong so i don't know anymore.

That is the ones i printed for the boy anyway.

Nice work on the exhaust too. The fibres off the wrap work their way through everuthing don't they?

[~Slideways~]

29 minutes ago, Bearded Baldy said:

Front and rear doors. Apparently the window guide is behind the speaker so they can't just be screwed on, but yours pretty much proves that point wrong so i don't know anymore.

 

That is the ones i printed for the boy anyway.

Nice work on the exhaust too. The fibres off the wrap work their way through everuthing don't they?

Maybe the speakers in mine are lower profile? 

Yeah those fibres, I did once try wetting it but it was a pain. Rubber gloves and long sleeves, then when you take off the long sleeve top it all gets on you anyway.

[~Slideways~]

I figured out that the Clone Tactrix 2.0 cable is able to work with Romraider for diagnostics, logging and reading check engine codes. So it's still pretty useful, even if it can't read/write to the ecu through ECUFlash.

I've bought some non-molested TGV's to be able to manually wire them in and test it since I can't edit the ecu codes.

It was in limp mode before wiring them, in limp mode it rev cuts at around 5k. After I wired them in (just sitting in the engine bay) it then rev'd fine but still showed check engine light.

So I drove it down the road and it then when into limp mode.

That's when I tried Romraider and found the cable works for that.

RomRaider codes says:

P0031 Front sensor low input

P0340 Camshaft Pos sensor A malfunction

P1507 Idle control malfunction

 

 

P0031: is oxygen sensor, these are bloody expensive. Almost $500 through Amayama for Subaru, it's actually Denso, so cheapest denso version I can find is through Rockauto for around $350. Not sure if GST is added later.

But from what I've read, the o2 sensor shouldn't cause limp mode. Whether that's true or not I'm not sure, so I will try Cam Sensor first.

There are cheaper options but everything I've read says it's a waste to use anything but genuine subaru/denso. 

 

P0340: Pretty sure this will cause limp mode. The sensor is near the turbo on the drivers side and there is another on the passenger side. Tricky to get to but I'll take it out, clean and check wiring. If that doesn't work I'll have to order a replacement sensor. But I'm hoping that maybe it's just the wiring since it's close to the turbo heat and maybe when I removed it with the intake manifold it's cracked/split a connection.
 

P1507: This is probably caused by the cam position sensor issue.

 

 

So my assumption that the check engine was just the TGV removal was wrong. It DOES cause limp mode and it did show in the codes if I unplug the temp ones. But it seems a couple more issues have happened due to the engine removal?

 

[~Slideways~]

 

RomRaider codes:

 

Tempory wiring for TGV's, air box is mounted retardedly in order to get to the wiring: