My LS motor won the lottery because it's rich!

 Now almost a full year since the initial trouble(s) began, the engine is back in the car and it runs.

Sort of.

My LS motor won the lottery -- it's rich!

That's after maybe 5-10 minutes between three startups idling in the garage.

I'm guessing that since the first engine didn't have the ring gaps set properly on any piston, the tune Peter put on the car was compensating for something. Now the engine runs more efficiently, and now it has to be re-tuned. So in a couple weeks, I'll load it up for the trek down to Virginia Beach next week so Peter can tune it again.

The car actually fired up the beginning of December, but I had issues with the clutch engaging. I worked on it for about a week bleeding and bleeding and bleeding, but the pedal was still soft. Even the 6-speed Crosstrek had a stiffer pedal. Finally with Christmas out of the way, I decided to splurge for an adjustable Tick master cylinder from Walter Racecraft. Matt Walter is a thirdgen guy who lives in Maryland and sells parts to fund his Camaro drag car, not to put food on the table.

If you're scoring at home, my car originally had a mechanical "Z-bar" clutch linkage, and I decided to convert to hydraulic. The company I bought the hydraulic conversion kit from (that the slave cylinder twice, so no free advertising for you) sent it with what looks like a stock 1998-2002 F-Body clutch master cylinder.

This is what should have come with the original kit from the other place that I won't name. (As I mentioned before with the writeup on the Aisin AR5 install, it now has the slave cylinder FABbot has in their LS conversion kit.)

Installation was pretty easy even though the master cylinder is jammed under the brake booster. Only a little blood was donated. I decided to make it fit better (or something like that) with a plate from the cabin side.

It ain't pretty but nobody's going to be looking under there anyway.

Some people online recommend doing this but welding the plate to strengthen the firewall. I don't have a welder, so this is how it's going to be for now

The rod end didn't exactly fit on the nub of the clutch pedal, so with my new air compressor (Christmas present from the brother-in-law) fired up, I grounded that bitch down.

Custom work!

Searching online, I couldn't find a rod end that would work. I even found a website that had the correct specs for the rod end, but searching on McMaster Carr, Grainger, etc., produced no results. Since this rod end doesn't really do much but hold the rod in place, I figured grinding away wouldn't be an issue.

But if anybody can find someplace online that has the correct rod end, I'm all ears.

So I guess it's ready for dynoing. If you're reading this now and in the future can't find this post, it means something bad happened on the dyno and I deleted everything.