LS Progress

25 Oct LS Progress

With some of the big jobs out of the way on the LS1 Subaru swap, now it’s time to take care of some smaller jobs.

First, we finished up riveting the aluminum rear firewall to the rest of the Subaru’s body, with enough room for the battery cable to sneak out in the corner. Sadly, it removes the ability to use the rear seat’s pass-through to the trunk. However, there is still a rather sizable gap between the angle of the new firewall and the angle of the seats, so that rear-seat access has actually become a rather secretive stash spot. Bringing home an anniversary gift, but have to pick up the significant other on the way? No worries; hide it in your secret stash spot!

In other news, with everything in the interior of the vehicle sorted out (such as running the new battery cable and the changing of the e-brake cable location), we’ve finished with our need to access everything underneath the seats, carpets and dashboard. So now it’s time to put this sucker back together!

We’re not too sure how Zak flew at the rate he did, but in what seemed like no time at all, every single piece of the vehicle was back where it should be. Well, except for one; we may still need access to the top of the transmission tunnel by the shifter, so we’ve left that piece off. Otherwise, though, the car is coming back together nicely while we begin to focus our efforts elsewhere on the vehicle.

Moving to the underside of the car, the owner has sent us some replacement trailing arms and brackets for his, um, replacement trailing arms. His parts are now coming powdercoated in a variety of colors, which makes this much easier to explain. The pink trailing arms were a bit shorter and connected to the stock brackets. After talking it over with whomever he talked to, the owner decided it would be best to move to custom brackets and longer trailing arms, as supposedly they will help the vehicle hook better on the drag strip. So a little time passed, and all of a sudden we received new arms and brackets, this time powdercoated green.

Aside from the fact that the underside of this car is beginning to look like a watermelon, we had to trim the brackets a bit before fitting them in, as the side facing the front of the car was shaped in such a way where they wouldn’t bolt on correctly. Now that it’s fixed, though, we have the new trailing arms and brackets in place. If you noticed, these trailing arms also have adjustable haim joints at the ends. With the seventy-five other haim joints in the new suspension components of this car, you can adjust literally every and any suspension parameter you choose.

We’ll now head to the front of the vehicle, where we’re working on a mount for the clutch fluid reservoir. The new Wilwood cluch master cylinder has a spot for the reservoir, but it won’t fit in the constraints of this engine bay; hell, we had to modify the firewall to even get the Wilwood unit to fit. Given the tight nature of the engine bay with a LS1 crammed in there, we went to work creating a mount that will go off the strut tower bar, located inches away from the CMC. We started with the piece of the bracket that would hold the reservoir to the strut bar.

From there, we designed a shovel-looking piece that will bolt to the reservoir’s mounting bracket and also to the strut tower bar bracket, keeping everything right where it needs to be.

With everything painted black and then installed, it looks great. Not only is the CMC reservoir in a very easy-to-reach location, but also it’s out of the way of the billion other things taking place close to the firewall. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

Now this isn’t all, obviously. We’re now getting down to the underhood wiring and the placement + fabrication of the PCV system’s catch can. So, in short, there’s plenty more action to document at Fluid MotorUnion in the coming days and weeks, so keep an eye open for new content hitting your computer screen every weekday!