So Postimage shat it. I'll fix that slowly in the future but we're moving over to flickr for hosting. I've been posting there for ever anyway. Should've made the switch earlier.
May 2018: So, since day one of me owning this car, almost 3 years now, 4th gear has always been a bit iffy. If I'd been driving the car for awhile and did a high rpm change from 3rd to 4th it would be very hard to get in. Similarly, going from 5th to 4th without the perfect heal-toe would give me a very small crunch. I've always managed it though so its never been a big problem.
Since the MCM track-day, that's where things started to go down hill. It was the first time the car was driven properly hard for a real amount of time. After a few hotish laps it was crunching hard both up and down despite perfect rev matching. Not to mention when I finished the session the centre diff was binding like I have never felt before. The car had about 4 hours of cool down and it seemed like nothing was wrong. After popping it up the next day I saw the bottom was covered in oil. I then took the car to ADS to be looked at and while its fine for normal driving if I want to drive it the way I want to drive it something needs to be done. In fairness its done bloody well for 355,000km of driving.
There were so many options I had to choose from, originally it was to have ADS rebuilt the box with new synchros and 4th gear at the absolute minimum, but then at that cost I could go for a DCCD setup, so I looked into that. Then after realising that would cost me around $8-9K I decided it would just be better off to part out and start again with another car. I was feeling terrible about this cause I just love the car so much. So I stopped looking, and as usual a bargain presented itself.
So, I managed to acquire a full driveline from a 2007 Subaru Liberty 2.5GT Spec-B, with less then half the km's. The best part about it, I've driven the car hard a bunch of times so I know its all solid. Only reason it came out of his car was he also got a deal he couldn't pass on a really low km box, win win for both of us.
Picked everything up from Ichiban, I do love wagons.
It came with other bits like starter, shifter assembly ect.
R180 should be a nice upgrade too. It's FILTHY, a good chance for it and the box to get a proper clean, maybe even some paint.
To conclude, it'll be a good 4-5 months of saving and parts hoarding cause considering the effort to put this in there is going to be a LOT upgraded in the process.
Also I found a nice new place for photos, after a wash of course.