At the time, I didn’t realise just how important this day would be. In well over three years, the ae86 hadn’t seen the light of day on its wheels. After we fitted the engine and box, we decided to push the car over to Flips to fit the manifold, sort a Flexi pipe and do the exhaust.
This was another one of those incredibly productive weekends. During covid, things were patchy, and progress ground halted for much of Christmas 2019/2020. With lockdowns and everything in between, the car progress had stopped, and it wasn’t until May/June 2020 that things started to move again.
This build has always been feast or famine, massive chunks of progress in the shed or small dribbles of effort. Over this weekend, our friend Darrel had re-adjusted the clocks to zero, as we felt the car deserved it. It had never come with the original Clocks. If you are a long time viewer of the build, you will know that the clocks were out of an AE92 supercharged FWD Levin, along with the entire loom.
I can still taste the rich fumes on the back of my throat from this weekend. I’m sure this was a moment Flip would never forget. During the lockdown period of 2020, Flip and Reuben were quietly working away on resolving all the gremlins in the FC and sorting it out for its first start. They gave me a call when they knew they were close to the first proper start.
Reuben was jobless and looking for something to occupy his time during what seemed like a never-ending lockdown, and what better way to pass the time than jumping headfirst into the unknown land of rotary power. When I called out, the lads were talking about things I had never heard of, and it was great to see just how far down the rabbit hole both of them had fallen on a mission to get the 13b Fired up.
Here are a few shots of Evan’s lovely GX71 work in progress. We pulled it out of the shed about a month ago to shoot the B roll for the episode as I had realised we filmed nothing extra from the original video.
Evan is excellent on camera once he warms up to it, and it was nice to immortalise his build in the videos. Much like all our builds, progress has been slow due to other life circumstances. He has a clear vision of what he wants to achieve with this build over the next year, and I’m looking forward to this taking shape.
For now, enjoy these pictures of Evans time capsule. This GX71 was the same base he was searching for, and he somehow came across it on the auctions, a low mileage, un-modified example, a perfect slice of eighties bubble economy goodness.
We had some good times with this little Civic. We were always one of the first out at each event and usually the last to pack up. The car loved every second of the punishment we gave it on track with its trusty little B16A. Continue Reading
Sometimes I am my own worst enemy when it comes to organising photos. I forgot about this shoot we did with Roberts Volvo as I had these photos tucked away on an older hard drive and only found them again recently.
Robert was in the middle of finishing this car when we first visited their workshop back in 2018 and when we returned in 2019, they had just put the final touches on this completely custom build. I’ll be the first to admit I was entirely out of my comfort zone looking at this incredible build. Robert himself didn’t want to be on camera, so in our video where we chatted about the car, I did a lot of waffling to fill in the blanks of our interview. For the lack of talking Robert did in our original video, he makes up for it with this absolutely mental build! Robert is a reserved guy and prefers to let his craftsmanship do the talking.
Here is another batch of photos that never made it off of the to-do list. I should have posted these right after the Sweden episode where Reuben decided to drift on a melted lake. Nonetheless, here are a few shots from the day before and after the ice adventure. This couple of days will always go down as one of the most mental weekends we ever had as a group of friends, pushing that car out onto a melting lake and extracting joy from frozen water, knowing it could all end very quickly. It’s an ill adventure take to the grave. Either way, here are some photos from that wild weekend. Hopefully, we can do something similar next year!
Continue Reading
A Glitch in the simulation! Seeing this car on the other side of the world in Ireland, what are the odds?. What’s incredible is we made a friend in the process! Danny Gave it socks in last nights video before he went home. His Corolla was the first AE86 we spotted in Japan back in 2016, and it was surreal to see it once in our recent video.
I got a message out of the blue one night, and it was a guy called Danny from Wexford. He had watched our first Japan video, and he couldn’t believe his eyes. His very own 86, which he had recently imported, had just driven past us on the motorway in our feature-length “Japan without a plan.”
A few shots from a random weekend messing about at the shed, sometimes I have to remind myself to take some photos as there is always something interesting going down.
This was the Nissan March’s last shoot before we raised it. I tried to get it through a test and ultimately had to face the fact this was no longer the machine for the long 220km commute I have to do every day driving up and down to JDM Distro.
Here are the photos from our trip to shadow rotary back in 2019 when we dropped flips engine up for a teardown and had a look at their shop. I’m not sure why I didn’t post these when we launched the episode, but a few backlogged articles slipped through the cracks. Nonetheless, I know some people have always enjoyed the little pieces we have thrown on the site over the years and I’m sure many of you have seen the full episode, so ill let the photos do the talking here. Enjoy
Kevin’s Dads Be-1 was the real star of the last video. Here are a few photos from that visit to his collection.
Here are some photos from the time we drove down to Group D. Group D is the brainchild of Darren McNamara, a well-known legend in the Drift scene. Darren has been tinkering with Corollas for a long time, and he developed a rear coil-over suspension for the AE86 with a company from the UK called AVO. You have probably seen the vlog episode from this day, with the old legend and his lovely little starlet. I had a mega backlog of photos from older episodes that I will throw up on the site every Friday. Enjoy the images of the day below.
We are very fortunate to have people like MR X in the car community. For years, he has been supplying the AE86 community with much sought after parts. He has been breaking Corollas for parts for well over ten years, and it is a necessary evil, sometimes it’s sad to see cool cars he has killed, but most of the time, every last piece of that car ends helping another.
