After making my way to SevenStock XII, I met up with Ken from ShineAuto in person and paid for their “revised” FEED front bumper. The revision includes lowering the angle the nose points at and making it more parallel to the ground, which suits the car much better in my opinion. I also did a lot of wheel shopping and researching, and scored some AME FS-01 Tracers. Additionally, since I wanted to lower the car, the old Apex’i GT-Spec cat-back’s canister was too huge so I had a straight pipe section made.

All of this happened over a span of some months… it took a bit of patience and quite a bit of work but I’m finally very happy with the car and pleased with the outcome.

I originally bought a set of ’99 sideskirts, but ditched them because they wouldn’t have matched well with the FEED front… so instead I picked up some FEED sideskirts and some bumper protectors in carbon kevlar:

Here are the AME FS-01s, sizes are 18×10 and 18×9. Tires are Federal 215/40 and 245/35. The amazing story behind these wheels is, since AME USA only had a few sets left and they were only in bronze, I decided to buy them anyway and have them powder coated black. I took the wheels to a nearby place and they were able to strip and repaint it all in one day… one of those times where things just click into place and work out. The paint came out great too.

The lowest these wheels would go offsets wise was +25, so I grabbed some H&R 5mm spacers to give it that little bit of poke.

Sticking on the fronts… This is what it looked like with the original bronze, not the look I was going for:

Now with the gloss black. The passenger side headlight cover is off because I gave it to the body shop to color match for the bumper, more on that in a bit.

Next I installed the sideskirts, it came out very clean with the use of some self-tapping screws.

Somewhere along the line, I bought a 4″ diameter 18″ length Magnaflow tip, and had an exhaust shop make me a cat-back to my taste. Since my car at the time was still on stands and with the bumper being painted, a local RX-7 driver was kind enough to lend me a hand. He drove over and we had the shop make the exhaust with his car as the template, basically. Here I laid down some high-temp paint with ceramic.

Installed… also did some fiddling with the diffuser at this point too.

Figured you can’t have a car that looks mean without sounding mean, right? This thing is a good deal louder than the GT-Spec but has a pissed-off snarl to it now…

Fast-forward to the FEED front bumper, once I got it back from the body shop I stuck on the turn lights and the protectors, etc. Then came the install, which actually wasn’t bad at all. I did have to do some cutting around the front vent since the intercooler wasn’t clearing. I also tinkered with some various adjustments of the headlight covers and hood latch to get things fitting more squarely. The paint job wasn’t exceptional, but atleast it matched and the bumper is going to get rock chips anyway.

The bumper wasn’t sanded and buffed yet in these pics, which is why it looks rough.

Here are a couple more pictures of the wheels and their fitment.

Fronts:

Rears:

Alas, this is what all the work and time and $$$ produced: