802Projects
This is my girlfriends car. Shannon has owned it for about 5 years now. She searched daily trying to find this exact year and color. Finally she found the perfect one out in Colorado w/ 22k miles on it. It had just been traded in to a BMW dealer and online for a few hours. She called immediately and put a deposit on it. We flew out to Colorado and drove it home the following weekend. On the way back we hit heavy snow around the Great Lakes. The car went right through it with no problems. Here are some photos from the ride home:
Initially she did a few things to it. She lowered it with Swift Springs, installed some 06-07 WRX calipers, and put on some BBS 18" wheels. The wheels were off some kind of VW but they fit the forester perfectly. She bought an Access Port, Maddad exhaust, downpipe, and some AEMgauges.The car stayed like this for a while.
Later on we started gathering parts for it. Fortunately we live about an hour from Montreal where there are a lot of JDM import shops. We were able to track down a full set of JDM Forester STI seats with rails. The seats are awesome. They are so comfy and and completely change the look of the interior. I made a blog post about the installation that can be viewed here. The only downside about these seats is that our Volvo was rear ended on the way to get them. There was zero damage to the VOlvo because it's a Volvo... but the Mitsubishi that hit us was totaled.
Eventually we had a pretty big pile of parts waiting to be installed. She wanted Brembos so we found a good deal on a set, and had them rebuilt/powdercoated. She got some Rota Gravelsport rims, stainless lines, new struts, JDM scoop etc...
I tinted her windows when she first bought the car, but it was a cheap tint. After about 4 years it didn't look like the windows were tinted at all. I redid it using some quality stuff this time. She spent a lot of time working on the interior.
She had been using the stage 2 Cobb AP tune. However she would get some part throttle surging where the rpms and AFR would dance up/down. It was annoying. We brought it to VEMS (which we are fortunate to have so close to home!) Nick gave her a pro-tune. If you haven't heard of NIck yet, I'm sure it's just a matter of time. He's really good at what he does especially for being so young. She's at 17psi now and the car pulls harder than the Cobb tune, but most importantly the surge is gone. She upgraded to a Grimmspeed BCS at the same time. VEMS uses a hub dyno too which is very safe and allows for a better tune.
Here are some pics of it all cleaned up. We drove it to Wicked Big Meet this year towing her camper. The car had no hiccups the whole way.
Here is her mod list incase anyone is curious.