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At this point, I'd finished with all my engine bay paint work and repairs, and I was sick of tripping over the engine and transmission on the floor. Time to get it installed! It's starting to look like a real car again! I immediately ran in to my first oversight. A seasoned FF-1 enthusiast will note that this intake manifold is missing an important hose barb for the heater core. I used a 1400 intake I had lying around because it was one piece and fit right on, but it turns out I can't use it. I started running coolant lines and found this right away. Thankfully the parts car had the intake I wanted, a single piece but FF-1 specific unit, 1300g only. I quickly stripped it down and cleaned it up. My first coolant hose mock up, you can see where I really needed that last hose connection. Of course, I now needed to swap the carb throttle body back to the smaller base FF-1 style, so I took apart 3 carbs to piece together one nicely moving and functioning throttle body. I'm working on the throttle cable linkage now, it's been a challenge because the 1100 and 1300 are completely different and share almost no parts. I didn't take many pictures, but I spent many hours drilling out all the broken front end fasteners on the car, more than 12 by my count. This allowed me to bolt up everything on the front for the first time in possibly 45 years! Look, a real car! I'm stoked, it's really coming together! A recap of what you're looking at here: none of this car's original front sheet metal is present at this point. The hood, fenders, grill, and headlights are from the parts car, the turn signals are straight from Japan (used but extremely nice), and the green valance was from the Seattle trip. The bumper will be a project on its own, but the hood opens and closes with the latch as it should, a huge achievement! The holidays will surely slow my progress, but I'm pleased with how well it's come together at this point. Stay tuned for more!

Update time! I pulled the trigger and made the 4500 mile round trip to get the parts car. I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and the car was just north of Seattle. It is also a '71, but has a 1300 engine (1300G?). It has the window, it has a good subframe, and tons and tons of other small parts I'll surely need. I also picked up an EA71, an EA63, and an EA61 short block. I'm back in business! Picture time: The car is safe at my storage lot, it snowed a bunch while I was gone so I need to get everything re-organized over there. More progress to come!

Thanks for the kind words folks! Still have some catching up to do, enjoy another deluge of photos. Gotta love that factory repair manual! The crank pulley was very very stuck on, it is pretty rusty. I saw a picture of the official Subaru puller tool in the manual, so I fashioned one out of scrap. I had to heat it with a torch a few times, but it finally came off! The pulley is in very rough condition, the side where the belt was touching is very rusted (the belt held moisture against the pulley). Once I finally had the pulley off, it was time to split the case. Nothing too exciting happened, I used small chunks of fuel line to hold the lifters in place, I should have taken a picture of that. The excitement began when I saw the distributor drive gear: Before I saw this, I was starting to wonder if it was a good idea to go this deep into this engine, as parts have been very hard to find. Once I saw this timing gear, I knew I did the right thing, there's no way to fix that without tearing it ALL the way down. When I stripped the accessories off the engine, I did notice that there was no bolt holding the distributor in. This is what happens when you crank the engine over with a loose distributor! Now the panic set in, where the hell would I find an EA61 distributor drive gear? I looked at it closely, then remembered I had a spare EA81 crank in the shop. I went and grabbed the distributor drive off of it, and this is what I found: It's exactly the same. Except it's not destroyed. This feels like blind luck on my part, but I guess I should thank Subaru for using the same timing gear on every OHV engine! More later.