well, i realized today i never did my diligence with wrapping up this thread. back in August 2017 the RS got rear ended at a light by a careless kid who was late to class. his jeep hit me about 4" above the bumper beam so the unibody just caved in. neither of us was hurt, it was probably a 15mph collision. despite the parts and care i put into it, the hard truth is that it was a base model, 12 year old economy car that was worth nothing, so its in a junkyard somewhere now. i'd like to think it saw a better life than it deserved though, for an otherwise forgotten base model E36 M3box.
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to paraphrase from a hastily written Facebook post:
bye old friend. 10 fun years.
some cars add up to more than a pile of parts, and this one did. it was quirky and had moods but i trusted it...didn't matter where or when. i drove it from the worst Atlanta traffic to the tightest mountain roads i could find in Appalachia, sometimes in the same day. i asked for everything it could give me on the track and it even clawed its way to a rallycross season win in 2013. it carried my newborn son and one time even carried 6 huge tree trunks. i even drove it through a Cat2 hurricane. i could go on....it taught me so much about cars.
take a well earned rest little subaru...may your parts help your brethren burble on down the road for years to come
hope this was an entertaining thread and thanks everyone for the help with figuring stuff out when the odd problem arose. i have some decent parts still left over that I never got to install, so those will be going in the classifieds section of the forum soon.
rally on :beer:
