Welcome to the jungle

We've got diffs and more diffs and then another diff in the middle just to fuck with you.



The Legacy is still off the road, but will be back up and running once the motor is stripped down. Although it being off the road has its perks such as getting to drive the car on the left, another G1S1 Legacy. Michael South built motor, cage, big brakes, diffs out the wazoo etc.

Stay tuned, new car coming up soon. Teaser below.

Why cant we be friends

Street 2 "what dreams are made of" from Shawn Browne on Vimeo.

Car is still broken. Covered in welts from paintball. Still drunk. That is all.

1 2 3, what are we fighting for?

Well tomorrow the car goes pretty much around the corner to where the hoist and Subaru graveyard is. Hopefully it shouldn't take too long to rebuild the motor, but we'll see. I have an inkling that my issue may be related to timing. I never quite got around to checking to see if the timing was being retarded on boost, which would indicate an over sensitive or broken knock sensor. Will be testing this when the motor is back together.



Since then I've been driving round in a fucking hektik stock auto lancer as pictured above. It is kind of relaxing driving an auto that is quiet, doesn't get me pulled over, that doesn't explode or give me any grief. It even has a matching best of the 60s and 70s soundtrack featuring Country Joe McDonald and everybody else who is great. Most of it like The Doors, The Beatles, Beach Boys etc are the same tracks I remember from my childhood. Long drives with the old man to various places in the heap of shit Jag, was great times.



70s series two XJ6, leaks oil from the factory and has a wiring loom that was built by an apprentice every time. My old man used to have another one, poo brown, with a 350 chev conversion. It went well, sounded great, and looked the part. I think that a lot of my randomness with cars came from him. This is mainly due to the fact that when he decided to work on roofs, he strapped some roof racks to it and a couple ladders. Everybody around town knew the car and my old man, it was infamous. With the new white one, it got a 383 stroker, custom injection, haltech, massive cam etc. Went like a bat out of hell until the distributor gear grinded out and it sat in the driveway rusting away. There are a lot of great memories from that car, such as being driven to my formal. Which was fun in itself as I went in a kilt. The best memory other then that was me taking the keys one wonderful summer afternoon and taking it for a spin around the block while he was away. I almost shat myself and never drove it again. I think it is a right of passage for most young kids, but good lord it was good fun.



While the Legacy is in the shop I have a lot to think about. The smart thing to do would be to buy a Gen4 with a H6, extactors, intake, exhaust and chip it and switch into old man mode. Unfortunately being a random thanks to my old man, I really want to go RWD, 2 way and turn it into another drift car. It has been done a few times, but not very often. With Subarus, I'm often inspired by the Americans who surprisingly do them right very often.



It isn't so hard to do, and I miss a lot of the shit I used to do in the S13. The list would extend to a few simple points;

* RWD Center diff
* Remove front drive shafts
* Tie rod spacers (read: washers)
* 2 way Diff
* R180 rear end with Brembos and good diff casing / mounts

The other major consideration is the way I want the fucker to look. I've always been a fan of Bombex and Trust kits, which is why I ran a Bombex lip on the S13 and then a Trust front bar. It seems that it is fairly easy to mod either GC8 (First gen WRX) or R32 Skyline bars are fairly easy to to modify to fit, so a R32 GTR front and GC8 skirts and rear seems to be a good option.



Above is my inspiration, which is surprisingly enough an American car. We'll see what happens hey kiddos.

Twice a year

Hunker down with your popcorn and over priced sweets, its story time kiddos.

Last weekend made for some good times, with the new intercooler and VF24 it was time to take the bitch off the leash. This involved a good drive out and some rallying, with the obligatory bbq. While the car was feeling great, I still wasn't making any boost. Unfortunately being with a few sooks and a few idiots like myself I got stuck in the middle of the pack. The guys behind me got a good view of me getting it airbourne along Corin road to their credit though.



While I got a good run in and we had some fun on the dirt, like with all cursed Subarus something went wrong. I'm not sure if my car was assembled in the depths of hell or on an aircraft carrier in the Bermuda Triangle, but the fucker is cursed like a little girl in a horror movie. Somewhere in the "red ring" the water hose to the IACV decided that it was a good time to split and belch coolant slowly along the road. Of course as the temp guage didnt go too far up with the flogging I didn't notice it until it had enough time to dump all its coolant and pump air through the whole thing.

With some hero work I got the hose back cut and back on, and got the system refilled. Here is where it gets better, while out rallying, as always, I did a nice little job on the rear quarter including the tail light. While this kinda thing normally doesn't bother me, just up the main road was my old friends.


This of course meant the most direct and not up hills route was blocked. With a broken tail light, filthy car and a rather noticeable bright red racing harness and pearl white steering wheel I didn't want to tempt fate. So a five minute trip home turned into twenty, inculding all the breaks to let the car cool down. While I imagined it was something like the Great Escape, I'm sure everybody just though I was retarded. It was obviously the head gasket as it would heat up quick, and cool down quick once the car was off. Thank you Subaru for giving the world only three and a half poofteenths between the water jacket and cylinder on your open deck blocks. Good move.


So all in all, body work is mainly finished and another "JDM AS FUCK" tail light is en route, along with another fucking headgasket. Will be checking out the headers and up pipe while its out just in case that was the cause of the low boost issue, and maybe a V3 STI head if I can find the dosh.

In happier news, I've rediscovered the joys of cooking pizza and drinking beer. No actually I never forgot about that. And to take us home here is a happy picture of me leaving an UP-GARAGE with some sweet loot while in WAPAN.

Like a fat kid needs cake, a turbocharged car needs boost.

After spending much of this weekend working on the Subaru, I've come to the solid conclusion that this car was built by the devil. I actually found a book about it.

While that may or may not be true, it is beginning to live up to the Subaru curse. After installing a new motor and various other items such as a new TD-05H turbo the car wouldn't make anymore then 0.5 BAR. Which is really, really not enough. This weekend we installed a twist mounted VF24 off an STI, along with a front mount intercooler. This actually all went well, much like Germany invading Poland. But all was not well when it came to the test drive.



THE CAR STILL ONLY MAKES 0.5 BAR. HALF A FUCKING BAR? WHO WANTS HALF A BAR OF ANYTHING? HALF A MARS BAR? HALF A BAR OF SOAP? NO! NONONONO! NO!

I had initially assumed that the TD-05H was baloney and that was that. But the new VF24 was doing the exact same thing, no boost at all. After running the wastegate actuator to atmosphere I was out of ideas as everything else was as it should be. On the upside, the intercooler looks like it was supposed to be there and it does its job very well.


From here the only two things that I think it could be are;

1. Blocked exhaust
2. AFM on the fritz(l)

It is more then likely number one, so sometime this week I will try to bash it out the motivator (crowbar). After that I will actually get some boost and all should be well in the world, as long as that boost gets me somewhere near a cake.

We had a BBQ today for my birthday the other day which was pretty good. It surprises me that not many people wanted or liked prawns? I thought it was incredibly "UNAUSTRALIAN" just like punching a Koala or feeding your baby to the local wildlife. Might just be me. I got quite a few good little bits and pieces, and I'll leave you with this.