Postcards from the Pleiades.
Irregular, not necessarily chronological.
Results of work or notes related to places and times, rather than strict knowledge about cars.
Primarily a record of what’s happening, but also a nod to Subaru and the wider Subie family.
The first little thing that made me happy was the set of Speedline decals. I bought them so long ago that I’d actually managed to forget all about them.
I won’t say it out loud how many times I test-fitted them or how long it took to get all the stickers into exactly the same position. Let’s just say I started with a ruler and ended up making a precise template for one of the spokes…
I was driving home, enjoying the Type R and its new/old suspension, when suddenly the battery charging and the brake system warning light lit up in bright crimson. My first thought was: “alternator.” Just to confirm, I turned on the air conditioning and the windshield defroster, then got out to check the headlights. Bingo, they had that dim yellowish, amber glow. Without wasting any time, I switched off every electrical accessory I could and gently limped the car home, as if I were competing in a rally where every drop of petrol counted.
When I bought the Hawk, I planned three things to do:
The first two are long behind me, and now it’s time for the third. The car had some kind of incident to the right rear side, something fairly minor, more of a dent than a crash. But it was repaired poorly. Under the paint, there were bumps.
It’s easier to see when the angle of the light changes:
The Type R came to me on a set of Tanabe Sustec Pro coilovers, and honestly, after the very first kilometre, I already knew we’d have to part ways. Maybe they’re good for strictly track-focused use, hard to say, but at its somewhat advanced age, the Type R deserves something a bit more dignified.
I was considering only two options:
I just couldn’t make up my mind. On one hand, there was the thicker strut shaft; on the other, adjustability. Then there was the question of springs, apparently WRX springs are the best match, but where was I supposed to find those?
There’s a postscript to the radiator replacement. Less than two weeks after that saga, I was just driving the Forester like nothing had ever happened when suddenly huge clouds of smoke started pouring out from under the hood. This is what I found when I pulled over:
The hose for the turbocharger coolant expansion tank had split open along a 3 cm section. Everything was covered with coolant. It’s a shame nobody noticed it during the radiator replacement, especially since the hose was obviously badly swollen. Naturally, the cooling system immediately got air trapped in it, and the engine started overheating quickly. I drove back home. Even though I only had a few kilometers to cover, a lot of coolant was lost - 2.5 liters. As luck would have it, I had a spare hose that I bought together with a new expansion tank for the Type-R:
Today I found a bit of time to do a conversion of JDM headlights to bi-xenon. The original headlights aren’t suitable for use on our side of the road, so the conversion seems like a good idea. I ordered a kit from HIDRetrofit, which includes:
The new wiring harness is made quite neatly, (almost) all connectors are waterproof Superseal types. However, the layout itself is poorly thought out and doesn’t make for a tidy routing in the engine bay. Number 1 in the photo below is the power supply from the car harness, 2 is the bulb connector, and 3 is the high-beam solenoid connector. No matter how hard you try to arrange and fit it, 2 and 3 end up almost at opposite ends of the loom. The solenoid connector is of particularly poor quality, to the point that the pins in the left projector completely fell apart and I had to solder those wires permanently.
Act I - Introduction
A detective and his partner: an aging veteran and his alter ego, twenty years
younger. They make a perfect duo. One night, he watches her onstage in a local
pub, playing with a band, radiant with life and joy. It’s the moment we
understand she won’t survive the next scene.
Act II - Confrontation
A murder with no witnesses, no clear motive, only a symbol left at the crime
scene, connected to a series of unsolved cases. The detective falls into an
obsessive state, trying to solve the mystery of his partner’s death.
This is a story similar to 90871FE040 – NLA. Unfortunately, the GC8 has reached the point where certain parts have simply become impossible to obtain. That’s exactly the case with 83082FA110OE and 83082FA090OE - the window switch housings for LHD facelift coupes.
Admittedly, having the switches the wrong way around is a small thing, but it’s one of those details that separates an OK car from one that’s truly worth remembering (or so I’d like to think).
For years I’ve had a keen eye for licence plates. Back in the UK I’d find myself, almost subconsciously, checking them all the time. You get so many good ones. Pure vanity aside, plates like “B16 BOB”, “BO55 MRK”, there are matching his-and-hers sets, initials, business references. Some can get super creative as well. I remember when we had windows fitted and two vans showed up with something along the lines of “S4 SSH” on one and “CA5E WIN” on the other.
64983 km
