Photos Unboxed: The Hachiroku Brothers
You’ve more than likely seen the recent vlog episode about Sean and Barry, two brothers with an undeniable love for old Japanese cars, preferably old Toyotas. I’ve known the lads a very long time, and I’ve always admired Sean persistence with his builds.
He’s a man that hangs on to everything and still has his original EP82 which was his first-ever modified car. Barry had a boxy starlet, but that was crashed off a good few years back. Otherwise, that would still be in the yeard too.
The brothers lived outskirts of Waterford and were very fortunate to have a father who also had a massive obsession with cars. Their father’s knowledge and enthusiasm rubbed off over the years. All three of them work on projects after work at the back of the house.
Sean picked his 86 up from a friend of ours back in 2009! Here I am stressing about not having my 86 done in less than a year. I get no sympathy from many of my mates as they have been working on projects for a very long time. It’s great to know his car is more or less finished now. I’ll have to call out for an updated photo shoot.
We don’t see Sean and Barry as much as we used to, years ago we would all hang out in a car park and talk shit about cars for what seemed like forever. As we got older, the sheds came along, a lot of us bunched together to create the shed community you see in the vlogs and others went and built their own.
As we get older, I find there is less and less time to do all the things we took for granted growing up. Time starts to become more valuable, and we squeeze whatever opportunity we can into working on these longterm projects.
Barry lives in Dublin midweek as an aircraft engineer, and he’s in a similar situation as myself. We only get to see and work on the cars on weekends, this can be a bit of a pain but its the best we can do. We might not see each other for a couple of months, but when we do, we pick up where we left off. It’s nice to be able to do that.
Sean comes home from work and hits the shed to get stuck into the various obstacles he has with this build. As you might have gathered from the Vlogs, Sean has built every inch of this car himself, from the engine to the metalwork, from the paint to the ECU, it’s genuinely a one-person build, and I admire him for doing that. Sure it has taken him a lot longer, but he has learned so much along the way.
Where we live in Ireland, there has always been a very active AE86 scene. It has rubbed off on many people we know and one after another when the finances allowed; we have all tried to purchase our version of the dream, some of us only achieving it fifteen years later.
I plan to take trips out to other friends with interesting builds as I said, When many of us got older, Irish car culture retreated to the sheds, its mainly because of our weather and if we wanted to keep the passion going, we needed roofs over our heads.
Sean and Barry have their own little thing going on, and it’s great. I’m sure many of you can relate to that, and I hope you enjoyed the insight into their car life in the most recent vlog.