The Zen of Using Used Parts

It's with great pleasure that we can report our successes with used parts. We still need new parts retailers for everything else, but the coolest junk just might be found online, in a buddy's garage or hiding in a wrecked such-and-such that somebody parted out. Reach deep into this miasma of availability and you too can find a few of the extra-cool whatevers you need, perhaps used but still useful.

Intakes for Bonzo
What part? An APS fender well intake for our '02 Subaru WRX. It's a piece of tubular cast aluminum finished in the same red crinkle finish as Subaru's other underhood hot bits—that's right, STi red—so it matches the spider manifold we picked up a few months ago not without the pulling of some hair. The APS intake is also available in a short-ram style that puts the filter element in the engine bay, but that design sucks hot underhood air into the engine, and we all know cold air is better. The longneck fender-well unit terminates outside the engine bay just above the passenger-side wheel well, behind some plastic shrouding, and delivers ambient-temperature air to the engine.


Now, this isn't one of the high-demand JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) bits that you find circulating the web with exorbitant, unreasonable prices. The V7 Spec-C S202 STi manifold, which we hunted down previously was about as obscure as JDM gets. In this case, the availability and excellent price of a quality used hi-po tweak (built in Australia—they've had the WRX for a long time), not to mention the matching crinkle red, had us forsaking JDM for AUDM and U-S-E-D.


We'd originally been quoted $150 for this APS fender well snorkel (retail was somewhere in the $300s), but with a touch of grinding and some icing on the deal, the seller let it go for $100 plus and a box of car care products we'd been saving for a rainy day. Seller Guy was an old race buddy and eager for the car care bonus, so we met him at the RaceLegal drags on a Friday night, exchanged stuff and said our seeyas.


The APS intake was dirty but in good shape. Looked like it had been sitting in a box with a bunch of other dirty WRX parts. Seller Guy had de-contented his own WRX prior to unloading it, as he was returning to the rock-crawler ranks with a 4.0-liter Jeep Cherokee he was building. Fabrication guys have all the fun, building cool long-travel this and tube-framed that. You see a lot of that sort of rig in the San Diego area. Sorry, got distracted...Anyway, Seller Guy's subsequent removal and distribution of hot-rod WRX bits was our gain, as they usually won't add much to the resale value of a car or truck. Thanks, pal.