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My opinion is paint it black for sure and trim the bumper cover. Add lights to the bumper or inset. What's left of my bumper cover stays attached to my car much better than when it was whole and it looks damn sano. I left a small gap between the bumper and the cover, about 1/8". Well done on the tubing mixed with the sheet metal: I've modified mine twice and plan on doing it again to make the center punch much stronger. K

If it still runs, the timing belt didn't snap. Maybe skipped teeth. But if it snapped entirely, it won't run at all. I personally wouldn't put any money at all into a 20 year old, 200k mile, Dodge Neon. Junk it.

Ideally you diagnose first. It’s almost always rings before valve stem seals. But a swapped engine with unknown history can surprise anyone Rering it, don’t hone or touch the cylinders and don’t split the block.

You’ll see the same cross hatching in your EJ engine. Probably best to post in the EJ to present models subforum for best results with answers. Most will probably tell you to get a good second hand unit. But they’re easy enough to work on. Provided you haven’t broken any rings or ring landings, the bores should be fine. You could also try replacing the PCV valve so see if that changes the oil burning. Also do a compression check, why repalce rings etc if it’s just valve stem seals? This could be done without removing the heads with the right tools too. Cheers Bennie

The first of your eBay links is from Six-Star, which I think is a Subaru dealer (someone can correct me). They list all well-known manufacturers (although they mis-spelt Mitsuboshi). Total price at $240 is high but not unreasonable for OE parts. The second eBay link says "OE Spec". Who know what that means? And their total price is suspiciously low, $70 for all those components. I wouldn't touch them.

Yeah, I've looked into both those conversions before and spoken to Dave and Nico about them. Got some good ideas from both guys, but I think I've found an elegant middle ground. Long term, I'd love to do upper mounts similar to what Nico did, but the machining involved will probably put it out of reach for a lot of people. His design gives a lot of opportunity to modify mounting points and to use the upper mount to help lower the vehicle. For now, I've prototyped something closer to Dave's set up, but with a few tweaks to allow reuse of the OEM upper bushings and chassis mounting bracket. Need to bang out a new drawing for rev 1.1 on some rear end parts, and develop the final piece to convert the front coilovers to the EA82 chassis. Pretty excited about all this!

Is the 92- oil pan lower capacity? Do you have to use the older pickup tube also? Thanks for the tip on the water pump, wish I'd known that when I did the timing belt on the Impreza.