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| The mustache bar bushings in place. |
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| The Motorsports front diff carrier bushings in place. |
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| These are the toe adjuster locks. They eliminate the stock toe adjusters which are not needed with the adjustable lateral links. The toe locks won’t slip as the large washers take up the space where the stock eccentrics used to be. |
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| Here are the toe locks in place. Note how the washer fills the holder where the eccentric used to be. This cannot slip out of place. |
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| These are the stock camber adjusting bolts. They do not have a very large range of motion. |
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| The Whiteline bolts have bigger cams and a larger range of motion. Normally we don’t like camber bolts as they tend to slip but the Subaru bolt is a 10mm part, bigger than the 8mm bolts that typically give problems. The Whiteline bolts give another 1.2 degrees of camber adjustment when used with the stock adjuster bolts. |
We have now completely replaced all of the wear points of our STI’s suspension. The clunking and banging noises from the back of our car are now completely gone and frankly even though we opted for the hard durometer Motorsports bushings, we feel that they have hardly made any impact on ride comfort, noise or vibration. We evaluated the NVH on some really broken up pavement which are nearly dirty roads in an industrial area near our office and found that the ride and vibration levels were still pretty acceptable. Perhaps our teflon tape trick reduces friction and improves ride.
Our steering and overall handling is markedly better with the car now feeling crisp, tight and new. With more positive caster, there is less understeer and the car has better on center feel as well. Our car is now wanting for some high performance coilovers and more rubber which we will address a little later.
Stay tuned, in future editions of Project GD STI we will be making further improvements to the chassis and brakes as well as getting more power, all without reducing driveability and friendly daily use. We think we can get performance levels out of our used STI that can embarrass cars costing many times more.
Sources
2 comments
I have a 2004 STi. Can the hubs and steering rack be just direct replaced with an 05 sti?
I was looking into following your project fairly closely with my car but wanted to make sure I address any issues native to the 04 to make the path easier.
Are the engine management quirks mostly addressed once the car is tuned with something like a COBB accessport?
The hubs can be but the rack cannot. However, Whiteline makes rack bushings that work well for these cars. The Access port has been pretty dialed back but is fine for OTS tunes and for strictly following Cobbs Green Initiative upgrade paths. For maintaining smog legality this is really the best way to go. For more advanced stuff ECUtek is the way to go.