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Thought I would post an article on the work Ihave carried out on my impreza (may be of interest to someone?.. although mygirlfriend would disagree J)The car started its life as a standard impreza sport in very good condition:
Unfortunately in December 2006,. Slowly edgingout of my driveway with limited vision, some idiot speeding down the road hit the brakes in the wet and skidded, clipping my front end!
[font="Times New Roman"](hard to see in the pic, but I measured13metre skid marks!.. and ironically if he hadn’t skidded there was enough roomto get a bus past me – does it show that I am still annoyed, even 5 years laterJ[font="Times New Roman"] ) anyway the damage was done..[IMG][/IMG]
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and since I was pulling out it was down to myinsurance to pay. Fully comp the insurance assessor came to value the damage tomy car. Requiring a new bumper + support bar, indicator, headlight washer,number plate, grill and bonnet,. With labour and paint the assessor said itsborderline cat d uneconomical repair. Since the front end was going to bereplaced I pushed my luck and asked if they would put the wrx bumper with thespotlights, but they wouldn’t do it (not even if there was some cash put infrom me ;-) )… they offered me a full payout, or £1700 partial - £500 excessand I get to keep the car,. So I jumped on ebay (with the assessor stillstanding there) and priced up the repair with the front end I wanted,. And tookthe payout. So the project began,..
Last edited by paulhills; 05 February 2012 at 01:50.
some of the pics arnt working mate and that looks like a GL to me not a sport and i9m sure on here one of the breakers will hve a facelift bumper that you could buy to make it look like a sport
the first thing I did was pick up a facelift wrxfront bumper with crystal fogs. Managed to find one in 792 silver (which do notcome up often) in good condition, so I fitted it straight away, whilst I lookedfor the other parts I wanted
Since I was going to replace the bonnet I decided I wasgoing to do a facelift wrx lookalike (externally, but keeping the interior andengine standard), including honeycomb grill, side skirts, rear spats & stisplitter. I liked the silver with black detailing look, so decided I was goingto keep the skirts etc black.
Months went by, as they do, until I finally had allthe parts and the time to do the work (in fact according to the dates on thepics it was july 2008!). so on went the new bonnet,. And off it went to thebody shop
Being a perfectionist I opted for a full resprayincluding the roof (even though the guy spraying it tried to talk me out ofdoing the roof).. after viewing and rejecting the car 3 times (I kept findingminor blemishes in the paintwork and was not taking it back until it wasperfect),. And agreeing not to have the ‘subaru’ letters on the boot since theyseemed incapable of sticking them on straight and with equal spaces,. The carreturned..[IMG]http://i1155.photobucket.com/albums/p549/paulhills/subaru/subarusport0006.jpg[/IMG
Last edited by paulhills; 05 February 2012 at 03:13.
next I rubbed down and sprayed the fog light surroundswith hammerite and primed the orange wedges (tried them on the car in silverprimer, but later decided to paint them black)
Then I added the sti splitter (bought on ebay –think it was htauto’s splitter I decided on in the end) and smoked siderepeaters
Since I was going to all this effort, I decidedto thoroughly rust proof the car at the same time. So next I moved onto therear of the car. I removed the rear bumper
Degreased, Rubbed down and painted behind thebumper with silver hammerite. Then I coated it with waxoyl
With the bumper off, I removed the support bar,number plate light mounts and number plate screw plate,. Rubbed down andpainted with hammerite
This will start into a turbo vs sport thread again lol.
Don't worry I used to own a sport and had the conversion on it. They are really cool cars. There are quite a few sport owners current and past so we have your back if anything kicks off in this thread lol.
Last edited by NOSSY_89; 05 February 2012 at 10:16.
This will start into a turo vs sport thread again lol.
Don't worry I used to own a sport and had the conversion on it. They are really cool cars. There are quite a few sport owners current and past so we have you back if anything kicks off in this thread lol.
Lol.
Out of interest OP,
How much did your insurance go up by when you told them its now a turbo look-a-like.
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400+ in a classic...fast enough
great cars are sports, heres mine today in the snow..a full wrx lookalike' sounds the dogs too...as for insurance all my mods added £35 for the year...
hi guys, thanks for all the comments :-) .. hopefully this wont turn into a non turbo / turbo debate! Personally the reason I have a sport/gl is because I really like the way the facelift impreza looks, but I am not really bothered about performance ( I will probably get stick for saying this!). My brother is a real petrol head (currently building a camero with the aim of breaking 500bhp) whereas I have always been more of a restorer, keeping the engines standard, but trying to get them looking showroom and as rustproofed as possible (although I also went through an ice stage, kitting out my first car with 12 speakers, 2 x 12 inch subs, 4 amps, mask headunit with 10 disc changer – all kenwood, ofc cabling, gold fuses etc etc and a competition alarm with remote everything! remote start, individual window open / close, lights control, stereo on, boot pop etc – which is all common place now, but quite advanced in 1997!) .. that said it would have made more sense just to buy a sport (with the fog lights, skirts etc already there) but I kinda fell into the gl, when I leant my brother my car whilst I went on holiday for 2 weeks and came back to find he had written the car off! (apparently something snapped or came loose on the axle whilst driving on the motorway! Since he had it towed straight to the scrapyard, I don’t think I will ever know hat really happened) which meant I had 2 days to find a car before returning back to work,. Which is when I found this car. I had no plans to modify it at first, but when I needed to repair the front end and recieved the money from the insurance company, I figured I might as well have the look I really wanted (although in the end I spent all the insurance money just on the respray! – but isn’t that the way all these projects go! ;-) )
matty b -
regarding the insurance. The accident caused the biggest increase,.. it went from just under £500 fully comp to about £950 third party. Surprisingly, declaring all the body mods only increased the insurance by about £80 / year
Impreza Sport Project
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