Very nice
As for the red stitch why don't you just change the wheel and use your existing airbag? Straight on I've just given my old sti steering wheel to my little bro and bought an airbag for a wrx to go on for £25

M2 RTX has one for sale in good condition exactly the thing yo complete that red stitched finishing you'll just need to use your rear plastic trim and airbag all will be red stitched then

 

Thanks for the tip. I'd been debating getting my wheel re-trimmed or getting an sti red stitch version for a while, but I'll drop M2 RTX a pm and see if it's still for sale.

 

I took my boys swimming and came back to the car to find a large dent in the front passenger's wing and another by the petrol flap.



Front wing





Then on the way back something flicked off of the road and scratched the door down to the metal.

All in all an expensive trip to the pool.

 

Doesn't look like much of a dent in the picture

Great thread, and I'm nicking some of your upgrade ideas, now that I've bought back my old 05 plate black PPP Wagon.

 

Thanks for the comments.
The dents are more than the usual dink you get if someone opens their door onto yours, and being the wing it's really noticable. I've dropped it at a local bodyshop and wheel place and they've said £300 for both dents and the scratch.

 

Aye, £300 is beyond annoying.

Mine has a bit of a pimple on the front wing, but I'm not going to do anything about it. When I've had cars with virtually mint/show car bodywork, all I've done is worry about them. If it's already got a small blemish, I'm more relaxed for some reason lol (so long as the paint hasn't been broken).

 

Yep that hurts me bad when it happens! I'm the sort that carefully opens doors and holds them to make sure they don't touch another's car

 

By the way, we had an ST220 as well,......Performance Blue estate

 

The ST220 was a great car. But performance wise the impreza wipes the floor with it. It's just a shame the impreza isn't as well equipped, comfy and quiet.
Both of them make a great noise and they're both good rapid daily drives.

 

We bought the ST220 as a second/economy car (sounds daft in hindsight), that mainly my wife used. I had the 5.0 E39 M5, but that wasn't too good for getting my drums to gigs. The ST220 estate had LOAAADS of room with the seats down, but sadly we learned that it had self levelling rear shocks,....that were pretty dead,.....so I couldn't load it up with the weight of the kit. Ford only parts, and they wanted about 900 quid for a pair. Then the rear brakes started binding,...had to get that sorted. Then it died one day when the fuel pump expired. I removed the rear seat base, only to discover that the ST220 got a larger fuel pump than lesser Mondeos, but Ford hadn't cut the hole in the metalwork any bigger to get the pump out. So I had flatbed costs to the garage, then they had to drain and remove the tank and all sorts of other stuff to fit another pump. Nightmare. Prior to all this, I had to have other stuff sorted under the 3 month warranty, like dicky alarm sensors and duff electric window switches. Oh, and then for some reason, the paint on the bonnet went completely flat. And rust started appearing on the door bottoms and inner bonnet edge etc. The car was only 7-8 years old at the time.

It sounded like a racing car, drank fuel like a racing car,......and was as flat as a pancake. Seriously, any reasonable TDi rep mobile could pull away from me, and according to friends that have them, ours was quite a 'quick' one.

As for economy,...circa 19mpg. So no better than my M5 with almost twice the power.

No more fords for us lol

 

I'm off fords too. I had no problems with mine until it had the major fatal failure!
But as you say it did drink like a fish, even worse than my impreza...

 

Oh yeah, the Impreza is much better on fuel, and wayyyyy faster.

Our ST220 was an early facelift (with the Sony stack hifi), and the only options it had were xenons and an electric sunroof.

Oddly, it had healthier looking alloys than most I saw. The others seemed to have lacquer peeling issues.

 

First rate job by ACE finish in godmanchester. Not the cheapest but the end result was immaculate.



While I was there I had the wheels done too.
While they were good at a distance they were beginning to bubble in a few areas and had a few deep chips.

 

looking great.

 

Lovely jubbly, great work dude. I've recently bought a wagon PPP and I'm looking forward to some subtle mods next year, not sure what to do but at the very least some handling mods and better brakes.

 

Shiny!!

 

Congratulations, enjoy the car. Start a thread and let's see some pictures!

 

I've just picked up some of those gold STi wheels and some Brembos to upgrade my wagon. The wheels could do with some refurbing really, but I'm trying to get the brakes fitted before the MOT is due so might run out of time. What did they do to correct the deep chips?

 

No idea. I gave them some money and they returned my car with immaculate condition wheels. What happened in the mean time is a mystery.
Sorry.

 

Filler, sanding and a respray.

 

Cool. Might do some basic repairs and touch up the paint myself in lieu of actually getting them properly refurbed then...plus they came with awful tyres, according to online reviews (Autoguard SA802), but at least with enough tread to get through the MOT.

 

Another quick one.
I found a set of STI chrome door handles going cheap on ebay so I've just fitted them. While it's not transformed the interior it's an improvement.






This was pretty easy, there are a few tutorials on how to do this, but this link give a good summary:

https://www.scoobynet.com/interior-1...e-replace.html

 

nice touch, have these in my 2005 wagon, maybe these are standard from that year on...

 

Don't know what month mine is without looking, but it's a 2005 Wagon, and has plastic handles. Or was this the year they changed to Hawkeye?

Nice mod though Stuart

 

I think just the SL's and STI's had chrome handles. The WRX had plastic.

 

makes sense, mines an SL

 

Ahh right. I have a humble 'normal' one

How long did they take to fit, Stuart?

 

The first one was bit of a learning experience so took about 30 minutes. The fiddliest bit was removing the plugs from the window switches, and taking the trim off from around the handles takes some care. Lining the door card up to re-fit was also a bit tricky.
After that, the rest took about 10 minutes each.

 

I also splashed out £1.79 on a set of these:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/301610627532

They are cheap crap that will only last for a couple of jobs, but still useful.

 

Don't you have any plastic bike tyre levers, or Lego piece taker-aparters you could have used for free? Look like they would do the same job.
https://shop.lego.com/en-GB/Brick-Separator-630