Finally the clutch replacement! The clutch was slipping so bad on this car, it was one of the first things that would need to be repaired before pushing it hard. I still have yet to feel how fast (or not fast it is) because everytime you mash the gas, nothing really hooks up. My buddy snwcrzy is insane and decided to help out with the replacement since he has done many. We decided to go the “remove the transmission” route to get some good pictures for another project of his. Thanks goes out to at CorruptMotors.com for getting me a great deal on the complete Exedy replacement clutch kit. Drt Suby used his hookups to get me a brand new OEM flywheel as well. Thanks guys!

Here lies the RS… sitting all happy on its jackstands as if to laugh at me in advance. I had no idea the terrors I was about to find underneath when doing the clutch replacement. First on the chopping block, the exhaust. We unbolted it from the headers after the cat and snapped both bolts easily. They were rusted as f-k… this was foreshadowing on the entire day. It doesn’t look so bad in this pic, but just wait… it gets better.

So we worked from 8am till 3am doing a “simple” clutch and flywheel replacement. The amount of obstacles that we overcame was big. Everything on the underside has rust and i counted that we broke at least 13 bolts. Its a good thing that my buddy has lots of spare bolts lying around from his 3 other Imprezas! The two notable big problems were that one of the transmission crossmembers would not thread back into its hole because the thread piece had snapped off inside the chassis! We had to cut a hole to gain access to it. Dave literally caught himself on fire welding a new nut in to hold the beam. It was some pretty sketchy sh*t!

Secondly, the transmission did not want to go back in. First, because it was smashing that small piece of sheet metal that rests right below where the tranny bolts to the engine, it got mashed up in there and took forever to pound back out of the way. Then we discovered that the clutch alignment tool may have done its job initially, but something slipped and we were trying to pound the transmission shaft into misaligned teeth on the clutch plate. This damaged the clutch plate and required tedious and meticulous filing / chiseling to straighten out the teeth so it would fit again.

Once the tranny finally went back in around midnight, we were able to put the tranny supports back in, the driveshaft, axles, etc all back together. It was a race to get done before the overnight storm came in! I think i would have cried if it started raining on us. I ended up throwing my mangled exhaust inside the car, and drove home with just the headers on. Its so effing loud, but i was over it at the time. The poor girl is still smoking from the busted oilpan, and i don’t think jacking up the engine by it helped either.

Fortunately ill be taking a few weeks off from car madness to go enjoy some of the best snow conditions of the season, ill do some minor work on the car from time to time, but there wont be any more major repairs made until march probably. I did shoot a little bit of video during the day, and am going to start a video log of the build from here on out. Stay tuned for that!