The donor I purchased was a 2004 Subaru WRX sedan. It was a poorly maintained project car, with a rough “hybrid” swap engine build. To sum up the donor, even at $2300, I should have avoided it. It was a hunk of junk. Literally everything as I dug through it had some form of issue, poor repair, or was missing entirely. Thankfully, some of the items were not too bad and I was able to sell parts off the car for $1000. That however was much less than the cost of engine and transmission replacements not even counting the labor involved in both of those.
I quickly began disassembling the car and figuring out what I had gotten myself into.
Before I received my kit, I worked on stripping all the parts of the donor. Selling what I didn’t need for the 818. Keeping and labeling/organizing what I did need.
In May 2018, I took the road trip over to Factory Five. I started the journey in Michigan which is where I had been doing all the donor work on weekends at my brother’s house. I was a co-op student with General Motors so I spent a 4 month spring rotation doing all the donor teardown items. My 818 build however, would be happening in Georgia. So this total road trip was 1800 miles Michigan-Massachusetts-Georgia and required some planning even before that to get my dad’s truck and trailer from Georgia to Michigan. I paid for a 1 way ticket for a friend to accompany me as a co-driver for the trip. I fit the entire donor parts pile in the bed of the truck- barely! The truck was certainly at max payload between the trailer and the load in the bed so I used a weight distributing hitch, even with a relatively light trailer load, so that the truck wouldn’t be so rear loaded.
A few days later, I had the kit and all the donor parts in Georgia ready to start to putting together!