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Old July 15th 2015, 14:42
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owdlvr owdlvr is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Canada - West Coast
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So it's been a few months, the 1958 beetle is up and running (without a finished interior) and I've been enjoying it as my daily driver. Kinda nice to get in a car, turn the key and drive off without waiting to heat up 10L of oil! Haven't stopped thinking about my Germanlook bug though, though I have realized it's going to be a much slower project then the rally bug. I probably should have built the GL first, and THEN gone self-employed :P

A friend of mine recently rolled his bug-eye Imprezza rally car, which meant buying a donor car for all the panels he mucked up. Once the bodyshop was done with it, there was a small problem of "what to do with the rest?" So, here it is parked in my garage:


Up front is a SOHC EJ25, of which I really know little about. We have service records for the engine, and I'll be doing a full rebuild anyways, but what I mean is I have little specific Subaru knowledge about this particular motor. Part of me is thinking I should have held out for a turbo, part of me is loving the fact that the GL won't end up light-years more powerful than my Rally Bug. One of my big worries about building another fun car is that my Rally Bug just ends up sitting in the garage because the other car is 'so much better'. Regardless, for now I'm just popping the motor, harness and ECU out of this car and sliding them aside in the shop. It will likely end up being my final engine choice, but it's not guaranteed to be the final engine choice. I haven't even begun to search around at the rally shop to see what parts they are no longer using, that might be added to this. I'm also going to be tearing it down to the block and rebuilding it (just to be sure), so I'll look into cams and compression options for some 'light' performance increases.



Presuming, at this stage, that I'm going to continue with the Subaru motor I've started thinking about the transmission. The donor car is an Automatic, which means I'll be on the hunt for a transmission donor. At this stage the most likely option is a Subaru 5spd, and probably using Subagears parts to make it all fit. The guys at the rally shop around the corner have worked out an absolutely awesome sequential gearbox along with Quaife, but unfortunately those things aren't really daily-driver compatible :P With the number of miles I put on a car in a year, I'd be rebuilding the trans weekly! We've been joking around for the last week about building a tube-frame chassis, so that I can build the car mid-engine. I'd say chances of actually going this route are slim-to-nil, but the idea keeps coming up! A good friend recently bought a tube bender for the race truck he's building, so a tube-frame car is a natural progression once that is done.

Lastly, radiator placement. I'm still hung up on getting them in the back of the car and not cutting up the sheet metal up-front. I know how I'll do the visuals in the rear for airflow so that I'm happy...but I'm also aware that everyone who's done it before has eventually moved the radiators up front. In that regard, I'm hoping I have a bit of an upper-hand. For the last couple of years I've been working on the video crew for a racing team, which uses rear-mounted radiators. I've had the opportunity to share my project and issues with one of the engineers, and we've worked out the basic parameters he thinks I need to hit to make it successful. I'm beginning to think I might buy a rust-bucket test car to cut up and test on before I commit to building my GL with the rad in the rear...we'll see.

-Dave
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'71 Type 1 - Rally Project
'58 Type 1 - I bought an early!?!
'73 Type 1 - Proper Germanlook project
'68 Type 1 - Interm German 'look' project
'75 Type 1 - Family Heirloom
'93 Chevy 3500 pickup - Cummins Swap
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