The conversion kit comes with a fancy new crossmember/cradle for the engine mounts which had already been loosely installed, but some adjustments had to be made.
Due to the swap being installed on an aircooled vehicle instead of water-cooled, a custom plate had to be fabricated (using directions supplied by the kit designer) in order to properly secure the gearbox since its position in the aircooled vehicles is different than the water-cooled. It had to move towards the rear of the vehicle by over an inch (which will cause us problems later due to the clutch hose not being long enough). It also meant that we had to cut and lengthen the large shifter rod to accomodate the new position of the gearbox.
We installed the exhaust using all of the supplied hardware.
A lot of time was spent tracing all of the circuits in the Subaru harness, marking the circuits we need (with the help of some difficult-to-find factory wiring diagrams) and eliminating the ones we don’t. The box below has all of the eliminated wiring, along with some oddball Mazda relays that somehow found their way into the project boxes.
We had to make two trips to the junkyard to locate some engine parts that were missing for one reason or another. This car came to us missing both the alternator bracket and the tensioner bracket (which also serves as the power steering pump bracket). In addition, we had to go back again to find a power steering pump. This car does not have power steering, but we still needed it as a belt pulley (otherwise the factory belt won’t fit). Instead of eating up a lot of time fabricating a pulley we just gutted and sealed the factory pump (after making sure that the bearings were good and sealed) and installed it to serve as a dummy unit.
The last piece needed was the throttle cable bracket, which we found at the junkyard as well.
