06 EJ255 and my journey with the oil filter and housings.

[bstuke]

I thought I would post this here for someone else's benefit.

My 06 WRX turbo was a rollover wreck I bought from copart. It was in remarkably good shape considering.

My biggest challenge with the motor was a persistent oil leak around that crazy coolant loop and oil filter. My initial thought was eliminating all that crap. I talked to Perrin about their kit, and it seemed like a fit so I had them send me one.

It wasn't a fit at first. I had to order the longer STI oil feed pipe to even make it work. $60. So if you are looking at this kit and don't have an STI motor, you need an 06 and later oil feed pipe for an STI. The WRX coolant loop is smaller then the STI. Otherwise it works great.

But it didn't fix the leak.

After more talks with Perrin and some research, I discovered that the boss the assembly mounts to is actually an extension of the block, and was designed to tilt the oil filter forward and make it easier to change.

I removed the six bolts holding the cover on, wrestled that off, and removed the mount boss for that cover with a 21mm socket. Once all that crap was off, there was the holy grail, the original filter boss!

So I simply mounted everything to that boss, buttoned everything up, and the leak was gone! Yay!

It was actually beneficial for a few reasons. It moved all the lines up and further away from the header, and better positions them from an 818 perspective. It also is a requirement for using quite a few headers, especially equal length headers. I have the Tomei Extreme so not a problem but still removing all that junk make everything so much better positioned. It also simplified everything and eliminated the coolant loop.

bypassing the coolant loop is actually very easy. Simply unbolt the metal pipe from the timing cover and relocate it behind the oil filter. Loosen the 90 degree hose from the block and turn it so it lines up with the metal pipe. Reattach it and you are done!

The Perrin kit uses standard -10 AN press on fittings, so it is easy to modify the lines as needed to fit where you want to mount the cooler. Right now mine is mounted the roll bar.

Hope this info is helpful! I will post some pictures of the housing and such.