We explore the world’s coolest Exhaust and Muffler shop known as Kakimoto.
After an exciting night in Osaka with Rob and his friends, we ventured out to the wilderness to meet with an old friend, Alex from Circuit Soul. He had moved to the countryside outside of Osaka, and we would get breakfast with him and head to the central circuit as we had never been.
We head back to Osaka to meet the younger Kanjo enthusiasts with whom we went on the loop and see how they are doing.
On our mission to Osaka, we salvaged our trip to Japan by stopping at Fuji Speedway to see the old racetrack bend and visit a forgotten tuning shop.
So, after the buzz of Japan in a van, right in the middle of editing the series and getting it online at the height of COVID, I decided to book another trip to Japan. Rob suggested that I buy an AE86 and drift it on a track, and that’s what we planned for this trip in September 2020. I sent money and got my hands on a rough-and-ready door, Levin, privately sold to me through Koizumi. Rob drove to Nagano to pick it up, and we hoped this COVID stuff would blow over real fast. Unfortunately, the world had other plans.
The pandemic only got worse, and we had to put the 86 into storage Stack in Osaka; as time passed, I felt like the borders would never reopen, but somehow, in early 2023, they said travel would resume as long as you were vaccinated. Most of you coming here will have seen episode one of our series by now, so I won’t part too much of what was said in the series on here. Looking back at these photos, reliving the emotions playing as we did the long flight is funny. Travelling from Ireland to Japan usually takes about 20-plus hours due to getting up at a weird time, driving to the airport, and then flying. We landed 35 hours into this and got thrown into quarantine. We had less than half an hour to comply and book the hotel. Here are some photos from the first few days in Japan. Covid messed up the plan, but Andrew Joyce came to the rescue, and we tried to salvage what we could.
We flew to Japan to pick up my new AE86 but were almost deported and locked in quarantine.
Here is a little photoset from the time we shot Tadghs S13 before he decided to emigrate to Australia for a year. Tadgh managed to win this car in a raffle in Ireland during the pandemic, and they gave him back 50 euros as good luck, so he essentially won this car for free. If you have not seen it, I recommend watching the video where he tells the story. It’s extraordinary to say you won your dream car for free. What’s incredible is he could then style it however he pleased. He went for the 90s vibe with the TBO bumper and Bwave wing. Enjoy this selection of photos we shot that moody September evening.
We assemble wheels for the AE86, tracking down a set of used SSR Star Sharks from Japan.
I realised I never added a little photo dump to sync up with when we fitted the Tommy Kaira kit to the K11; the Calsonic was past the point of no return, so I decided to go all in with this little one I had picked up during the pandemic. We had already fitted a 1.3, becoming the new base for fitting the parts. After searching for years, I picked this kit up in Japan on Yahoo auctions, but I want to delve into a story on that very soon on the channel. For now, enjoy this manic rush to get this thing up to an acceptable standard for LZ fest last year.
We attempt to build the wildest K11 March/Micra possible, tracking down a Tommy Kaira kit in Japan and matching the colour.
It’s hard to convey here just how happy he was to finish his seven-year itch finally. I’m not going into great detail here. I think we covered it perfectly in the video on the 86, but being able to finally do a shoot like this on an unusual April evening in the same spot I had shot this car seven years before. I don’t think the vehicle will even look this good again, but either way, I wanted to get these photos on the website for some time.
As sad as this sounds, and I know there won’t be a lot of people looking at these, I never thought a time would come when I could finally post my build on Juicebox; doing this blog since 2009, I was always out of capture whatever I thought was cool in Ireland and beyond. I hope to get my car to be proud of up here. By the time I got to it, blogs were essentially dead, so we’ve moved the story to YouTube, but it’s a real sense of achievement to shoot this car and post it on the blog. Please enjoy a generous amount of images from that evening. And as always, thanks for looking.
We go all in on the K11 build and try to build the wildest one possible
With the AE86 project finished, what’s next for Juicebox?