May 2020 Update: Door windows and bodywork

The car isn’t quite as far along as I had hoped it would be at this point considering how much time I’ve had to work on it. Particularly the paperwork part, so it will not be coming with me to Michigan for at least a little while until all that gets processed. It’s also looking like the interior might not get done by the end of this week either, although I plan to try if I am able to. I’ve got no other plans this next week other than working on the car so I should at least be able to get through the bodywork. All the little tasks add up to a lot of time though so we’ll see what I’m able to knock out. I might try to work some kind of plan to get the car up to me later in the Summer.

I have begun, and nearly finished what I hope is the last of the work on the doors for quite a while.
I installed the power windows and while the hardware installation itself wasn’t too bad, I really struggled to get the window alignment right. It’s still not perfect and there’s some inconsistency between the two sides as far as alignment and stuff but they both work fairly well right now and seal fairly well. After several days of messing with it that became good enough for me. The biggest frustrations were cutting the window cutouts in the doors and then getting the window to seal while not hitting things going up and down.
I wired in the power locks thanks to some connectors sent by another 818 builder. I used the oem Subaru door wire rubber grommet thing for my 818 as well to route the door lock and window wires through. It helps it keep a more oem look and be well sealed so it’s a good (and free since I had the parts) solution.
I made an addition to my door panels, I had already planned to waterjet some aluminum inset piece with a design, but since I lost my waterjet access due to covid plan B was to just make a decent piece out of aluminum that will suffice for now. It helped fix my driver door handle mis-cut as well so I went ahead and made the stand in piece. FFR sends one of these with the kit, but its for the 818S which uses the Subaru door handle so it’s useless for the C. Why they couldn’t modify it slightly to work for the 818C I don’t know…

I’ve begun the body work with the doors and door sills. Right now I’ve filled some holes and voids in the sills and started sanding the doors. The good thing is the bodywork definitely isn’t terribly difficult. It’s time consuming, but if I follow all the steps I’ve been getting pretty good results thus far and it’s the first time I’ve done much of this. I’ve finished part of the passenger side sill and polished it out and it looks really good! I think the body part lines shouldn’t be too hard to tackle after this. Next up will be doing the front fenders and part of that will be adding rubberized undercoating and foam mat to the underside to protect from rocks and reduce sound.