Posted Sunday, March 29, 2026 at 11:05pm
If an engine has four cylinders, chances are they’re arranged in-line—unless that engine was made by Subaru, of course. A boxer-four is second only to all-wheel drive as a Subaru calling card. But the mad Russians at Garage 54 laugh in the face of the status quo, so they decided to convert a Subaru boxer-four into an inline-four.
These are the same YouTubers that tried to make a diesel engine run on gasoline, and built a V16 out of chainsaw engines, but this project was even more technically challenging. It started by cutting a boxer engine in half and placing the two cylinder banks side by side vertically. The water pump is attached to one bank of cylinders from the factory, so that bank became the front of the new inline-four. This reorientation also meant a timing belt from a Toyota 1JZ fit perfectly.
