Gambled, and didn't exactly win

The red one is her Rally America Open Light rally car. The blue one was a 2000 RS sedan she sold so we could afford tires and diesel for 100 Acre Wood and Pikes Peak. But she's usually got a couple for sale. Usually Outback wagons.

My $600 coupe.

And another cheap coupe we sold to local hotrodder Paul Magyar to build a nice Street-Mod and Time Trials car out of. He's got a mix of STi and aftermarket components in it now and is sorting out the flares when I saw it last week. There's a sort of build log on it in the Vorshlag forums.

http://www.vorshlag.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6964

It currently looks like this.

pigeon wrote: I keep coming back to this thread trying to figure out where the lack of win is. You will have a running Legacy GT worth $10k for $1k outlay. That seems like all win to me.

Haven't quite pulled it off yet. Little things peculiar to this model cause some stumbling. I don't want to jinx it by explaining just yet. Figure I'll keep quiet until i'm on the road.

In reply to modernbeat:

Ok I'm getting seriously jealous. Is she currently selling any? Within 250 miles of me there is one older Impreza and it's an auto...

I'll ask her. I should see her tomorrow. The only one that I know is for sale is her black '05 STi. She swapped the blue carpet for new (yes, new) black carpet and I think the seats are '07, but everything else is bone stock and it has less than 14k miles on it. She'll want $20k+ for it. It's gorgeous and used to be owned by a neat-freak. She's also planning on selling the Forester. I think it's got around 120k miles and is an automatic. And it's got dents from the previous owner. But we've driven it all over the US faster than the speed limit without a second glance from the police. Probably won't come with the Thule box or the tow hitch and the price will be reasonable.

That year Legacy was the best looking in my opinion. You did a great job on trading son.

Sort of at a weird spot. Put a little extra cash into parts for more uprated stuff, or stay closer to stock. By the time I scrounge all the correct parts, I'm more realistically going to be out $2k. Couple of gotcha's. Looks like the cylinder heads should really be replaced. Along with that, the increased down time and running around sourcing parts driving a 5.9l dodge ram, the gas adds up. Still acceptable. That makes the car approximately $5k in real cost(which was the original asking price).

Nice! My girlfriend can appreciate my small time hoarding and parts collecting, and still has time to jump ship if she doesn't like it, my mom doesn't get it though.

Again good work on the flipping!

Finally got the car home. I've had it for a better part of a week. Pretty happy with it. It is more of a grown up car than I'm use to.....it has luxuries like heated seats, dual climate control. I even took part of the dash apart to get to the cabin air filter, to find that subaru put sound deadening stuff on interior components.....haven't found that in any of my impreza's. It has the automatic, which I'm not super fond of in general principle, but this one isn't bad. It has a manual mode, and a sport mode. What is killing me is that I can't really tromp on it because I'm still breaking the engine in. It does show promise though. I think I lucked out with this car, seems like the owner took pretty good care of it. Absolutely everything works on the car. Only thing that isn't tip top is the driver side rear tire has a slow leak.....which is getting replaced anyway. I ended up with a vf48 turbo which is stock on the sti as well as a sti uppipe. I don't know what sort of gains I'll see with that turbo, as it still has the stock downpipe. I'll tune it later this month after break in. I don't intend to try to turn it into a power house. I think you'll see more of these "basket cases" showing up due to the stock oem turbo and the banjo bolt filters. You could do a lot worse than buying one and doing an engine rebuild. It really is completely different than any of the subaru's I've owned/driven up to this point.

sachilles wrote: However, the ultimate benefit is that the wife is impressed that we got ourselves into a darn nice car without a car payment.....and she concedes that my parts hording might not have been a bad idea after all.

That's two pretty big wins right there.

sachilles wrote:

Good Lord, ain't they a pretty pair?

Yeah, I need to get a family photo with the race car too. Sadly, I think my race car is the slowest subaru I own at the moment.

^Not a bad problem to have. More time on the mountain, if you ask me.