I've been on here a little while but haven't made any real significant progress with my Sherpa (affectionately known as Herpes because doing stuff to it is like a disease) until the last month, so here's what I've done so far.... Be warned that tastefulness is not an option and this car is going to be the epidemy of a Bozosoku / rat rod styled JDM ghetto spec box on wheels, which in the end will make it look more awesome (i hope) lol...
This is the only picture I saw prior to inspection... I was already sold because it was yellow (i have a weird fetish for yellow cars - i don't know why)
So I drove it home, took a couple of pictures, and took several months to reflect on what I wanted to do, how I wanted to do it, and whether I was gonna do it at all.
The options were
1) Do nothing to it and keep it as a cheap little daily (500km travel for $20 - WOOT!!!)
2) Restore it to its original glory, or
3) Modify the bejeebus out of it...
My now wife liked option 1, as did my wallet. I originally liked option 2, however original parts are hard to find and although you can get them recast from Subaru in Japan, the cost is phenomenal, so this fastly became less appealing. So option 3 it was - because i can't leave cars alone. I've modified every car i've ever owned just about. One night over a few drinks I was talking to a mate and the stupid ideas started rolling hard and fast.
Now many of you are probably shaking ur head and asking why. My problem was this - the original air cleaner was starting to rust through, and just you try finding a replacement air cleaner housing for a 1985 Subaru Sherpa. Not gonna happen. And secondly even if I could find a replacement, try finding a replacement circular air filter to go in it - they don't seem to make them anymore. Solution? New air intake system. Purchased a Ram Flo filter - as in old school like they stick on side draft carbies as I noticed that my sherpa has a side draft carby. Now they didn't make one quite the right diameter so a short length of silicone hosing with scoring on the inside not only did the job of adapting the join, but the scoring added a cyclonic effect to the air sucked in, increasing the velocity to create sort of a home made, non mechanical forced induction if that makes sense... end result - killed 2 birds with one stone - I now have an effective and renewable air intake set up, and the car now has better breathing ability and more performance. It did mean cutting a hole in the bonnet to accommodate it all hence the WRX scoop to keep it all enclose and legal. A quick shot of air cleaner oil on the foam in the filter keeps it waterproof also...
I was unhappy with the stock wheels. They simply weren't good enough because that is never my style. The sherpa has a ridiculous wheel size so finding wheels that would fit proved quite hard, until I came across a set of Watanabe 13x5.5's... now this was half an inch bigger than I could fit on the rear, however the law states that the only rims that can be wider are the rears so I couldn't even swap them out for a set of 13x5's on the rear, so I'm running a wee bit of poke at the back. Oh well lol... As you can see from the pictures - I can see the potential in anything and quickly set to giving them a quick scrub down and a blast with the hose. Unfortunately somebody had attempted to paint these and quite poorly I must say with an orange peel effect in the paint alot of the dirt was engrained into the previous paint job. After cleaning as best I could, a squirt of matte black paint had the Watanabes looking JDM as F*CK and ready to go on...
Once I took the wheels off to replace them, I noticed that the rear drums and the front calipers were looking quite dreary and sad and not nearly louty or loud enough for my obnoxious tastes, so a nice coat of metallic anodized subaru blue brought them up to scratch and made them noticeable... The end result was this -
As I said, many of you will think this is ridiculous, and it probably is - however this is the first car that I've had that it doesn't matter if I balls something up. The beauty of it is that there are very few replacement parts so I'll need to improvise. Let us know ur thoughts - good or bad... Next on the list is a stereo install, new seats, laying marine carpet through the whole car, dying the dash, door cards and plastics black, and replacing the clutch and radiator...
