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Car is done! Kept it two tone for the win. Purchased new sheet metal including radiator support, center hood stay, and right/left hand radiator panels for about $160. These come painted (black) from Subaru. Or just cut them out of a donor. I counted just over 20 spot welds for the total weld job. Didn't have to completely remove the fenders to access the weld points for the radiator support, just moved them aside. Removing the bent metal wasn't hard using a 3/8" spot welder hole saw removal tool and a drill motor to punch through the spot welds. For the rebuild, these welds are beyond the harbor freight 240V "pinch" spot welder in my opinion due to the lower section essentially welding to a tube. My neighbor has a HF MIG welder that did an excellent job welding the new metal in place. Just cover the whole engine first with fiberglass cloth to avoid hot slag melting the harness. Before removing any metal I marked the outline of the pieces to help line things up. Having the headlights in place helped line up the two radiator panels (actually they should be called condenser panels) prior to welding. The hood latch was aligned with the hood and clamped prior to welding. After welding, put the condenser/radiator/headlights/bumper/bumper cover back on.

Only the block is good for this swap. You’ll need to drop the block between the 2006 heads. This will allow you to run the factory engine management etc with the EJ22. There’s no other east way to do it without a whole lot of bastardisation that would need to be pioneered - even then it might not be too reliable. The other way to do it is with a complete harness layover of the EJ22’s engine management and ECU. This will have complications as your 2006 may be a CANBUS system and will throw a tonne of codes at you since it won’t know it’s running another engine. Emissions stuff may also be an issue doing it this way. In Oz you can’t put an older engine into a newer car like you’re suggesting. Swapping the block in between the factory 2006 heads would be the way to do it if it were me. You’d be copping a power loss with the reduction in displacement and there may be an issue with the “mushroom” shaped combustion chamber created with the EJ25 heads on the EJ22 - might not be an issue, I really don’t know for sure. Food for thought! Cheers Bennie

Yep, totally fixable. Hood, grill, LH headlight and bracket, upper radiator support (still available new from Subaru), maybe latch support, radiator, RH fan shroud and blade, condenser (hard to tell how damaged, and if you want A/C), air intake duct. Maybe bumper cover and/or tow hook cover. Upper radiator support is spot welded in, there's a few ways to deal with that, depending what equipment you have access to.

Easy fix. I've done several of them. While you can pull out the support, if you have a self serve yard and you can cut out the parts you need from a undamaged car that's the way to go. You can cut out the damage and weld in the new parts. Cutout more than you need and then trim back.

I reckon you got off light - and your insurance company is being lazy. To me that’s not a difficult fix unless the engine crossmember or strut towers have moved, if it drove fine afterwards I’d say it’s fine. Buy the replacement parts and go to town on it. You’ve got nothing to lose from what I can see from those pics. I thought you’d have more carnage than hitting a kangaroo but apparently not. Cheers Bennie