This has been a fast year. It seems not so long ago when we covered the Annual Toyota meet in Cork last year. I really enjoyed this meet because you never know what comes out of the wood work. Even the machine we came down in is worthy of a picture, (TRD Camry which you see here). You can also see Flip using his best shammy cloth to clean the flies.
After a night of madness on the docks, we woke to a familiar Irish sight, a soggy grey morning. Regardless of the weather, there was a shop that had been on the hit list for a very long time and I was incredibly eager to check it out before our trip came to an end. Tec Arts has been around for a long time and is a very familiar name in the 86 world. They primarily deal with AE86’s these days but are known to have built some very cool cars over the years.
After a quick bite to eat and a shower, we were back in the van. Burnt from a day of walking the city looking for a battery we didn’t let that dampen the mood. We were hungry for some night action and had heard about an All that Low meet which was happening at Daikoku.
A few months back, Dan a good friend of some of the OG Waterford guys called down to Waterford for a visit. After a few conversations, I told him I was after buying an AE86 shell and was looking to go down the path of misery chasing parts and doing a restore.
Tokyo would be our final destination on the road trip, I was a little sad knowing this once in a lifetime adventure was coming to an end, lucky for us we were staying in Tokyo for three nights and had the Van which would give us the freedom to explore the surrounding area. Butterflies grew as we edged closer to the beast.
So about three weeks ago the site went down, unfortunately, I didn’t have it backed up properly after a couple of updates and the internals failed. It took some extra help to eventually diagnose the problem. The problem was out of my knowledge but luckily I had a decent friend who was willing to go through everything and eventually we figured it out the issue. I have to give a big shout out to Nicky O Keefe of Ireland Web Design for taking the time to sort things out. Thanks to everyone who sent in emails or asked if they could help, everything is back to normal now and we will resume our usual scheduling tomorrow. The shop will be live in the next week and we have a video blog series coming about the trusty old 86 we pulled out of the ditch, a trailer for this is coming this week.
Stay tuned and thanks as always for your continued support.
– Neil
As much as I enjoy seeing a stationary Honda, it’s hard to beat the sound of a B-series screaming around a track.
During our trip to Japan, we ventured as many Up Garages as we came across. There was always one close to tuning shops and just after some food and a visit to Top Secret we spotted a relativly big one on the same street. Each one is completely different so its really a lucky dip, some are heavily packed with absolute gold whilst others were a little tamer, regardless there was always something of interest in each one of them.
I didn’t want to miss this event. Last year Flip made the drive up and any of the photos I had seen from the day were amazing. The days of seeing Hondas out in the open have quickly disappeared. It seems the bad image the Honda had just over four years ago has vanished.
This weekend Reuben gets to live out a dream. A couple of months ago he toyed with the idea of turning his already superb C33 into a fully fledged drift machine to drive at Gatebil. He bought this C33 on a whim last year, a car he was curious about that came up for cheap, this was right before Americans could get their hands these which tripled the prices overnight.
After our visit to RWB we pushed on further into the outskirts of Tokyo. One shop which was not too far from RWB is called G Corporation, another on the must-see list for a long time, we had to go. I’ve always been a huge fan of their S-Chassis kits and outlandish paint work.
Google maps were kind to us, as we consistently selected to avoid toll roads we were brought deeper and deeper into the countryside of Japan.
Like I’ve discussed in previous posts, there is so much automotive content to take in when visiting Japan. On our journey, we spotted so many interesting car sales or car related businesses on the side of the road. If we tried to pull into all of them we would have gotten nowhere.