Send me a list, I’m there every few weeks and will keep an eye out.
That’s awesome! Vicksburg roundabout on the way to DRV?
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Aye. I believe we topped off the tanks before peeling off the 10 for DRV.
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Let’s Cook…er Paint
We’d been joking that maybe she wouldn’t have hit the hood if it had been painted bright yellow when it hit me (pun intended?)—throwing a little bold yellow into the design would look fantastic on the magazine…and the car.
Lacking in both patience and time to have the car back together for looming events, I opted for killing two birds with one…rubber…and ran with a rattlecan bedliner hood blackout. This completely eliminated the need to pull the fresh (minor) dent and re-sand the hood, since it fell right smack in the middle of the black section, and completely eliminated glare when driving into the sunset/sunrise.
Seeing the new color scheme my buddy Matt over at MAXTRAX mentioned they were bringing in a new “Adventurist Yellow” color I might be interested in…
And the next day we were off to Desert Rendezvous for some fun in the Anza-Borrego desert with our co-conspirators, and to pick up some new wheels for Clax. (You didn’t really think I’d leave those silver steelies on there after all this work…)
Unfortunately, the paint issues continued. The first problem we ran into was an insanely fast, like two weeks fast, fading of that bold schoolbus yellow to something closer resembling a sun-bleached Post-it note. This is despite having put down two coats of color, and two coats of clear on top. Then, about a month after fading the paint shrunk, taking the factory paint underneath it with it as it cracked through to steel.
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Man…how does that even happen? That would have killed me after all the prep and work that went into it. It went from killer yellow jacket awesome to american cheese, grilled to death by the desert sun.
The description of a sun-bleached post-it note is great.
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The only thing I can think is the yellow coat wasn’t fully cured before the clear went on, despite being 48-hours later. I’ll admit I’m a n00b when it comes to auto paint, but I didn’t have this issue on the Discovery’s hood.
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The Gloves Come Off
At this point I’d pretty much given up on making anything “nice” out of the car. Form was fucked, and I was done burning money and time trying to make it shiny, so my mindset shifted and I focused on function at all (cosmetic) cost. We had less than two weeks before the car needed to be at Overland Expo for Adventurist Life’s launch event, and still had fabrication work to get done, so the Foz became the test canvas as we threw bedliner and paint at it to hide the cracks and add livery for the show. There’s something just amazingly therapeutic about throwing splatters of paint at a car.
Chasing performance on a naturally-aspirated Subaru is first and foremost a weight saving game. After a recent tire/wheel change on the Discovery had it chirping second gear again (on 33s even 
), I decided to re-double my efforts on trimming Clax’s unsprung weight. Enter the tidy-but-stout looking RS wheels, which naturally, I painted matte black to match the car. Between dumping the steelies and an upcoming tire swap I’d be dropping from a 208-pound tire/wheel combo to 168 pounds.
Next up: prototype aluminum rock rails to prevent (or repair) torn-up pinch welds on the car. These rails provide multiple additional benefits: protecting the doors with a slightly protruding step rail, aiding in overcoming obstacles by allowing the car to “sled” down them, stiffening up the chassis for more confident on-road cornering, and providing a solid jacking point along the length of the otherwise completely lacking SG chassis. These attach quite easily by removing the plastic trim, enlarging the stock holes, and adding rivnuts. I’ve debated whether or not to further refine the design and bring it to market simply because they’re too easy to fabricate and off-road Subie guys are cheap (yep, including me).
Scoobaru…it wouldn’t be one of my builds if I didn’t troll at least a little. What started as a $140 gag to draw attention at Overland Expo yielded a substantially noticeable performance boost, according to the butt-dyno. Installation was straightforward: removing the factory intake revealed appropriately sized holes in the chassis in exactly the correct location—almost like Subaru wanted the Foz to have a snorkel. The snorkel itself is actually for a '99 Pajero Diesel and mates up to the fender contour perfectly. With a little careful heating and bending of the vertical section it matched up to the A-pillar like it was stock.
And with just enough time to splash a little mud on it for effect, we were off to OX 2016 West.
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We returned from Overland Expo heavier on gear—the extra flare all over the Foz had done it’s job drawing attention from both consumers and industry, and both Bomber and Equipt gifted a few items to mount an Eezi-Awn awning to our current crossbar setup. (Note: Bomber is out of business.)
The MAXTRAX mounts were custom made, literally just 1/8th aluminum flat bar bent to the correct shape with standard-issue MAXTRAX pins clamping them to the bars. KISS.
Darth Foz
I’m sure it goes without saying we had no intention of running that two-tone grunge look for any length of time. Shortly after getting home I set about finishing the job I’d started: making Clax impervious to paint damage. It was time to go full #battlewagon on it. Duplicolor’s “Bed Armor” is awesome to work with—mask what you don’t want black and spray away in your driveway. Any dust, bugs, leaves, or other debris that fall on it before it cures can just be scrubbed away without any ill effect. It never needs washed, just rinsed with a pressure washer as desired and resprayed whenever it feels a little too grey (4 cans will do a Forester, every couple years).
As an aside: if you’re wondering just how bad the insulation was in a 2003 Forester, the interior temperature actually went down after covering the white Clax in black bedliner due to the extra insulating properties of the bedliner. Ridiculous. (Yes, 2004+ are far better insulated, and more comfortable.)
As winter approached we threw out the rear drum brakes in favor of a pair of WRX disc brakes (the fronts are already identical to a WRX), and wrapped the wheels in lighter and far grippier 225/60R16 Firestone Winterforce tires (original, not “2”…2 is garbage). We liked them so much we wound up running them all season for the next few years…it’s the next best thing to gravel tires, right?
The internet says converting a drummed Forester to rear discs is a ton of work, expensive on parts, and not worth the effort. The hardest part is pulling the rear seat so you can move the carpet and replace the e-brake yoke since the discs use a shorter cable. All of the parts, save new rotors/pads, can be pulled from practically any Impreza-based chassis from 2000-2009 (Impreza, WRX, Forester): knuckles, calipers and related hardware, e-brake yoke, brake valve from under the hood. That’s it, everything is plug and play, the ABS computer is programmed the same regardless of disc or drum. Do the swap when you’re performing planned brake maintenance and it only costs an extra hour and maybe $100 more in parts. Bonus: the swap converts you to the easily user-replaceable Impreza-style rear wheel bearings that don’t fail every 100,000 miles.
To help stiffen things up even further, a Whiteline strut tower brace was added out back with plans for an additional one up front in the near future (along with swaybars and additional bracing). The rear brace’s proximity to the rear seats also made it the perfect place to slip an Eezi-Awn medium-size table, which sits snug enough to be rattle free with or without the carry bag. (The medium is dinner-table height and sized for two.)
It didn’t take long for us to realize two things: 1) Clax rarely sits in one place long enough to make an awning worth while, and 2) if you’re going slow enough in a Subaru to need MAXTRAX you’re going too slow. Around the same time the course of my career shifted more towards photography and my rigid schedule became completely flexible, so Dani no longer needed a dedicated commuter. The awning was pulled and sold at the next Desert Rendezvous along with the MAXTRAX a short while later. It was the right move—with a naked roof Clax was the perfect vehicle for hauling the canoe again, and could easily handle any other oversize gear we frequently needed to move. Clax was officially the “camera car” again, an indispensable tool for scouting locations and providing logistical support on client shoots.
By nature many of those shoots required getting out into the wilderness (or returning) in the dark so we could take advantage of those morning/evening golden hours each day. It was time to start taking lighting seriously. Above you can see how bad the stock high-beams + upgraded foglights (yellows) are compared to the tiny little two-inch Element LED ditch lights we added (white). (No link, Element is now defunct as well. 
)
We also moved over a pair of Lightforce LED180 driving lights from the Discovery to aid in forward facing visibility (discontinued, but LF is alive and well). Fogs and the regular headlights were kept as-is for 50-state-legal highway use.
…and that was the last time Sir Clax-a-Lot would be seen, alive…
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I woke to the sound of the front door opening far too early in the morning. It was still dark out, or perhaps the insulated black-out curtains were still drawn shut…no, definitely still dark out. 04:30 on February the 21st, 2019. Bitterness still weighed heavy on my mind from a brief one-sided argument, no, a scolding I’d been giving about the importance of sleep just a few short hours earlier.
It had been snowing for days and there was talk of closing down the town for safety—native and long-term residents of Prescott are a hardy bunch, but there’s far too many recent California transplants here for a late-winter storm to be business as usual. I rolled over to see a string of unread texts on my phone ending with a comment about the county sheriff bringing Dani home. Too tired to care about the rest, I asked if she was ok then rolled over and went back to sleep.
It was afternoon when I woke again and groggily peered from the kitchen window at a solitary vehicle half-buried under a foot of fresh powder. Where was my Forester? It took a few tics before I remembered the texts and brief morning conversation where exactly what I had warned would happen…happened.
Somewhere in the first post I believe I mentioned statistics? You know the one about sleep deprivation, and that other one about most accidents occurring a block or two from home? Too exhausted, too inexperienced, and too fast she’d been driving in the “invincible AWD Winterforce-clad rally car” when one of those idiot California transplants decided to end her commute by tossing out a Honda Civic in front of her. Reactions were exaggerated, traction was lost, steel was crushed, and airbags deployed—there’s simply no amount of three-peak mountain snowflake you can apply to make up for alertness and experience. Too exhausted to think and unable to reach me she’d forgotten about AAA SuperPlat-nummm’s 400 free towing miles, left the car there for the government schleps, and gotten a ride back home.
It would snow non-stop for another two days keeping her work, the impound yard, and the majority of town closed.
164,192.7 miles
Full Circle
Look at that poor little Foz all locked up like an abandoned puppy. I was again floating somewhere between pity and being past the point of caring. Were it not for the daily storage fees that would start to accumulate I might have left it there to rot and walked away. But, the towing guys were actually pretty cool about things and were keeping all but the actual recovery off the books until the end of the day (thus “start accumulating”).
I needed moral support this time. I did not need to see Clax on a flatbed behind the Discovery for the umpteenth time, so I called a fellow adventurist and Subaru enthusiast friend with a sweet 60-Series Land Cruiser for some cheap entertainment on his day off. As it turned out the car started and drove just fine, at least in this climate, with electric fans clattering away inside of an empty radiator. Considering she was only a block away Dani could have just driven it home and saved me $500 of recovery and trailer rental. I cut away the airbag and pulled it up on the trailer under it’s own power.
Back at home I spent a few hours inspecting the damage starting with prying another pair of ruined headlights off. No big deal, SG5’s hit the local junkyard with intact lights all the time, right? Next I popped the pins and jimmied the hood open find the Lightforce LEDs just about fully intact—wow, when the Aussies say something is tough. Flattened bumper, I was planning a custom bumper anyhow. A/C condenser…pain in the ass, but a high probability of a solid U-Pick replacement. Radiators are cheap new. Timing-belt cover? Meh, it’d be due for another timing belt in 30,000 anyhow. Yet another hood, that makes three in the pile waiting for the next scrap-metal run. That so-called “radiator support” though, aka the entire front clip, dozens of spot welds in folded sheet metal needing to be carefully cut then re-welded with a new piece. I suppose this is where I’d be telling someone suck it up, the end result will be worth it.
Then I pulled the miraculously untouched outer fenders, spotted the fresh cracks running completely through the structure where the cabin “egg” mates with the engine bay, and decided I was better off going out for a drink.
She’s broke her back. She’ll never jump again. – Colonel Saul Tigh
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What happened to Bomber?
When I talked to him last year, he was expanding into a larger retail space and importing LHD Troopys from France. Now the site is dead and “what happened to Bomber” returns BBB (scam in its own right) complaints about not shipping orders.
Josh was a good guy in my book. Doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would pull any funny business.
I found the same when I went to link to the awning mount (which was solid, but overpriced, kit). Whatever it was, it was so bad he’s gone from social (Elise deleted her Instagram too). There’s a bunch of threads for 2019 in various forums about taking money and not sending product/answering phones/replying to emails. I never did any real business with him, but he was always generous with me as a friend and sponsor.
Funny…if you guys would like the full story about Josh and Bomber I may be able to dig it out a mere two houses down from where I sit now typing this. I’ve got a fairly new neighbor from Montana named Dunn who used to work with Josh at Bomber during the time it was burning to the ground. Small world…
Dunn has a very nice 4Runner with traction boards hanging off the the rear and all the other overlandaf goodies you’d expect to see on a 5th gen. Needless to say we quickly struck up a friendship around our shared hobby. Over beers one night he mentioned that he worked with an overland startup company before moving out here. I asked what they made. He said awning mounts and stuff…I asked, Bomber? Small world.
He seemed to have the same impression of Josh as you guys, but when describing what happened to Bomber didn’t seem very willing or capable of defending him. I didn’t pry, but it seemed to me that faults lie squarely in the lap of some personal issues Josh got into. I don’t know details beyond that, and like I said, I didn’t pry. I just remember thinking that night how small a world this industry and hobby is…
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I would be interested in knowing what happened, but we should keep any info on the front behind closed doors. It’s the right thing to do.
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I have a good friend here in Prescott that also worked for him, but would rather hear it from Josh than pry via third party.
True indeed about the industry, which is part of the reason I got out of it…the “politics” and rampant elitism were destroying my enjoyment of the hobby. I just want to tinker with cars, build stuff with wood/metal, and wander aimlessly until I find the next great firepit. If I occasionally get to write an article or shoot some photos that’s cool too. 
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I’ll be the first to admit I’m sometimes inspired into immediate action out of spite. It comes from a stubborn rebellious streak and repeatedly living through “the best vengeance is to rebuild, better.” This trait has always paid off in the long run, so I’ve done little to correct it. It’s too early to tell if that will be the case again this time around.
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Slammed: Introducing Sir Clax, second of his namesake…
The next morning I sat at my desk balancing out the previous night’s bourbon intake with with a steaming bowl of caffeine. The mouse moved on it’s own and I watched through a groggy haze as it placed an ISO ad for a rolling SG-chassis Forester in the local Subarus Anonymous FB group. By the time I was conscious enough to open Craigslist I already had a reply from a guy downtown with a 2004 XT (turbo). It was the usual story: 160k miles with a blown headgasket on a pristine no-accident chassis that’s spent it’s entire life on road. $1,200 included the motor on a stand, a super-low floor jack, and two huge bins full of rebuild parts (including upgraded heads). It was the highline trim too: black/dark-grey interior, factory subwoofer, and comfy bolstered heated seats. Perfect.
Well, mostly pristine. It was missing a few bumper clips and had a few easy-to-pull dings in the front fender. Oh, and the entire engine bay and undercarriage was slathered in grease because the headgasket blew violently on a summer day going 80MPH on a Phoenix highway. I don’t like manual transmissions off-road so I finished gutting the rest of the underbody and loaded up the pressure washer with degreaser.
I was about to start swapping over all of the good parts from the wrecked carcass when it hit me: why?
There’s nothing even remotely special about a naturally aspirated 2.5L Forester. They’re everywhere, dirt cheap, and will never be collectibles so there’s no sacrilege in perversion. The NAs are underpowered dogs, and I hated the idea of dealing with the headaches or costs of building a reliable 2.5 turbo motor. Dani had been tasked with finding her own new car and I was also about to leave for a year-long field assignment, so quickly “getting back to zero” was not the goal here. So I pulled the aftermarket goodies and parted out the rest of both chassis.
I was now the proud owner of a clean, stripped SG chassis on jackstands.
Present Day
The trained eye will immediately notice something fishy going on with the Subaru boxer sitting on that stand. 
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50% mo cylinders.
Also, I think the donor looked really nice, if not a bit low. Couldn’t you have just lifted that one?
That’s the plan. It’s still the same “new” (red/donor) chassis I’ve just sold the wheels, put a NA hood on for full sleeper effect, and pulled off the bumper temporarily for easier access.
O…M…G…wiiiiiiiiiidebody.
Spotted when reading up on H6 technical details. 
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To quote Tom Petty:
“Oh, my, my. Oh hell yes. You got to put on that party dress. Buy me a drink. Sing me a song. Take me as I come, 'cause I can’t stay long.”
That’s gorgeous. Yes, please.
Oh! I saw a Fozzy yesterday with a neat paint treatment. It was silver, but everything below the belt line (bumpers, over fenders, rockers) was dark charcoal—with a very tastefully applied, 1/8" neon green pin stripe separating the too.
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Nope, and nope. The Forester is the first casualty of the purge.
SG Fozzies look decent. Clean, boring…not really pretty or even remotely exciting without either going Mad Max (dirt) or doing a crap-ton of expensive bodywork (street). It makes for a good sleeper with the right goodies under the hood, it’s just so visually forgettable. This isn’t something I need or want out of a street car. (Not when I have a much easier and exciting Volvo 240 project waiting.)
As for softroad/offroad and photo shoot support, the plan for Something Blue changed recently—Dani no longer wants a car—and the Legacy Outback’s wider stance and longer wheelbase does a significantly better job in that role. It’s just so much more comfortable, handles great and drifts predictably, and has over a foot more space out…back for gear.
So, that’s it. It’ll get parted out, the unused goodies dropped back in the boxes and sent back to eBay, but I’m going to hang on to the motor as I have a couple other unrelated ideas for it…(Volvaru?)
If anyone’s curious or looking to do their own SG H6 swap (rare, but reasonable and well supported), here’s the loose plan I had for getting it swapped and pairing it with a “sporty” auto free of shift lag:
- Stripped 04+ SG Chassis (mostly stock interior, windows, lights, etc.)
- Legacy LL Bean EZ30D H6 engine
- 4EAT auto transmission with 4.44 final drive and VTD-style (45F/55R split) rear drive output (found in a few turbo Foresters, auto WRXs, and the auto Baja turbo)
- 4EAT fast-shift valve body
- R160 WRX rear diff with 4.44s and limited slip (R180 would be a more solid choice)
- WRX knuckles/hubs/brakes (5x100 stock bolt pattern)
- EZ30D ECM (2001-04 Legacy LL Bean)
- 4EAT TCM with SportShift programming (available from many years/models including Saab 9-2, but only two specific part numbers from a Baja plug right in)
- Baja SportShift shifter (physically fits a SG with no visible modifications, allows full 1st-4th access)
- Legacy GT paddle shifters, perhaps the whole steering wheel
- Instrument cluster from a 2005-06 Baja turbo with automatic (this is the only one with the combination of full selected-gear display, tachometer, and a size/shape that can be modified to work with some SG dashes)
- Merge wiring harnesses from a 2005-06 Baja and 2004 Legacy H6…supposedly plug and play
- Attach the Forester body wiring (plugs right in)
- H6 headers, custom exhaust because H6 Foz
- 2004 STI steering rack (static ratio 2.7 lock to lock, and fits without modification)
- HotBits +50mm coilover lift (dirt), or stock 2004 WRX take-offs for a 2" drop (street)
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That’s a very thorough build list. Would definitely make for a very nice scouting vehicle–but so any of your vehicles.
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