STI donor teardown - Zach34

[Zach34]

I liked Tamra and xxguitarist's approach of making a dedicated donor tear-down thread separate from the eventual build thread, so I figured I'd do the same.

I'm building an 818R, and I picked up my donor today. It's a 2005 WRX STI. I got it through Insurance Auto Auctions. AJW Performance was nice enough to broker my bids and really made the whole process easy for me. I highly recommend that route to anyone considering the auctions. FWIW, this car came from the Bridgeport, PA lot and appears to be unmolested as far as I can tell since it was placed there probably 10+ months ago. If anybody is curious about the process, feel free to PM or just call AJW.

It was a minor debacle getting it on the trailer, sifting through I-95 rush hour traffic, and getting it off the trailer in the dark. After a quick inspection I'm pretty excited about the condition of the car. It has 135,000 miles. It was a victim of a theft/interior fire. The fire was contained mostly in the back seat, but melted the backsides of the front seats and ruined most of the interior. The dash appears untouched by the fire, although everything is covered in soot and there is a large hole where the thieves ripped out the radio. After some time doing my best impression of a TV forensic detective, I suspect that when the theives cut the big 4 AWG power cable for the amps in the trunk, they just left the loose end dangling, which eventually shorted on something and caused the fire. The upside is no collision damage to worry about. There's twitter hashtag stickers all over the place, which has been great for finding a bit of history about the car.

I did get it to start up after charging the battery for a bit. Planning on a quick test drive before the big tear-down.
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