Took advantage of the beautiful weather on Sunday to dip the chrome handles on the Forester and do some rattle suppression work in the "hatch" area.
It was my first time working with Plasti-dip and thankfully I managed to not burn the car to the ground. After 6 coats of flat black and 2 of glossifier the results were only so-so, mostly due to my learning curve and being a little too heavy on my first few coats. The trickiest part was placing a narrow strip of black electrical tape behind each handle. This is meant to prevent the Plastidip from peeling, but it can also jumpstart the peeling process if you screw up its placement and then need to re-set it. Having skinnier fingers would have helped.
I'll probably redo it sometime later this summer, but I already like having the chrome gone from the sides of the vehicle. There's so much black trim on the Forester that the handles blend in better now.
Rattle SuppressionAn annoyance with my Forester has been the amount of rattling from the back of the vehicle. At first I suspected the metal STI license plate frame (which only has two top mounted screw holes) was vibrating, so I went to work on it with some double sided tape (between the front of the plate and the plate holder) and then some weather stripping (between the bottom half of the plate holder and the vehicle). While this completely immobilized the plate, and helped the overall problem somewhat, there were clearly other culprits at work.
A key discover was when I noticed how much quieter the rear was when the seats were down along with the cargo cover removed. So after investigating a bit on subaruforester.org I not only discovered that
reclining split-folding rear bench seats
were a thing, and that my Forester possessed them, but that their latches can also be a significant source of unwanted noise. It wasn't really worth taking pictures for it, but following the suggestions there I reclined the entire bench to the middle setting (those mysterious square buttons on the seats near the door control this) from the highest, and then wrapped each "latch loop thing" with a small amount of electrical tape. It took a few tries to get the bench latch to take hold of the loop thing, but once it did, it was on there
solidly with no play at all. Next up was the cargo cover.
It was also suggested that there can be a fair amount of lateral play to the cargo cover and, sure enough, I found I could easily shake the sodden thing a half-inch from side-to-side after "snapping" it into place. I'm not sure what the product is normally called, but I used a few squares of that grabby, rubber like product you use to line kitchen cabinets (which happened to be lying around my place and matches the interior of my vehicle) at each end of the cargo cover. Now it doesn't move at all.
I've driven the car around town a few times since and the difference is hugely noticeable! This mod cost me $0 and took about 5 minutes to execute.
Rear Sway Bar and End LinksCarrying on today's theme I dropped by First Gear Automotive and finally got my 19mm STI rear sway bar (replacing the meek 16mm OEM one) installed on the third attempt. The first two (at an unnamed dealership) were thwarted by a missing bushing and then by a need to cut off my existing end links when I had no replacements on hand... but interestingly... I see that First Gear had no issue removing my previous end links so I'm not sure what that was all about. I haven't had a chance to really run the vehicle through its paces, but it's feeling nice and solid back there.
^ New swaybar, end links (silver), and a guest appearance from my Swifts.