Name: Shannon
Age: 23
Car: 2000 Liberty Heritage Wagon
Colour: White
History: 97 Skyline R33, 89 1JZ Soarer, 69 KE11 Corolla + heaps of others.
Purchase date: 5th of September 2010.
So i bought the wagon as an everyday drive car, but mainly because of my window tinting business.
When i first bought it and removed all the old, purple shithouse window tint.
First up was to tint the windows (Obviously...
)
So now once that was done, i took it upto my mates workshop, to attend to some teething issue which the previous owner had neglected to mention in their ad. The car was spontaenously overheating every couple of days, and seemed to have issues with the steering. So we had a look over it, and found that the rookies who had serviced the car prior to me had NFI what they were doing. On the GEN3 Libs, the heater core actually sits higher then the radiator cap, and alot of places don't bleed the coolant system correctly when doing a full flush.
So we dropped the coolant, and replaced / bled properly. Overheating problem solved.
Next, we moved onto the steering. It seemed to have unusually high torque steer for an underpowered car, so we went around the car and had a bit of a look. It turns out that the chump before me had put different sized tyres on the front compared to on the back. Being a AWD, this presents uneven power-to-the-ground bias between the front and rear wheels. Because the rolling diameter is different, apparently this causes cataclysmic gearbox failure, and as such, i purchased my mates Club Spec Evo 4 standard wheels off his WRX immediatley, and 4 new falken tyres. So we put them on the car (Which i thought looked awesomely tuff, nice offset too) and chucked it up on the wheel alignment machine.
Upon further inspection, it would seem that whoever done the previous suspension settings must have been an indirect decendant of a monkey, and that ALL the settings were way out. The camber was maxed on the front left wheel and rear right wheel, with the other 2 being neutral. The toe was ridiculously out of line, so we dialled in some new settings and adjusted the camber, toe and castor.
Needs MOAR offset!!!!
So once this was all sorted out, it ended up looking something like this.
So, where to from here you ask?
Well, currently, the plans are to get it looking nice. Although i'm not 100% sure if what i'm trying to do is going to be like "Putting a GTR badge on a GTST" i'm looking at getting some Legacy GT-B bits and pieces sent over from Japan. So far, i've manged to locate the front bar, with an aftermarket black lip, HID Headlights, JDM Foggies, GT-B Momo Steering Wheel (Complete with Airbag) and a few others bits and pieces. Plan is to make it look more like a Legacy then a Liberty. My car already has rather large brakes on it, some kind of bigger calipers, and a much larger then standard cross drilled and slotted rotors.
I'm currently weighing up which route to go down in terms of power.
Few options include;
1) Complete B4 engine/box transplant
2) Turbo current engine, run low boost (More of a "In The Meantime" mod)
3) 97-99 WRX 2.0LT, with Haltech piggyback.
I've got to do a bit more research into whats legal vs most power, so this may take some time.
I've got a stock turbo, cooler, manifold, dump pipe of my mates WRX, so i might just get the welder out, add a fuel pressure reg, and run low boost just to give it a bit more Oomph while i figure out which route to go down.
Thats it for now, but stay tuned. I have my eyes on some nice parts which hopefully should be in my possesion shortly
Cheers,
Shannon
