We are quite fond of any excuse to go on a road trip. I was very keen to make my way up to Flo’s garage just outside of Galway city. I needed some brand new essential bits for the 86 and his garage is the best place to find them. For anyone that missed the last vlog, Flos has a very rare setup on the west coast of Ireland. He managed to create a business out of his passion for old school Toyotas, mainly the KP and AE86 chassis.
We go shopping for new parts at Irelands only AE86 specialist shop. Flo Muller has created a very unique AE86 restoration/ spare parts shop in Galway so we head west to take a look at his setup.
To be honest, I wish I took more photos of the car in this form before we tore it apart. I guess when you are in the moment you don’t really think of these things. As the car was slowly being torn apart, a little voice from the future came back to remind me that the 86 was never going to look like this again. As fucked as it looked, the car was already cemented into peoples minds like this and long after its restoration, this version will be the car people remember. It was still running and driving, just missing the dash and seats and cage and well everything from the interior. I quickly placed everything inside and brought it out for its final photo shoot.
Did we just find the rustiest AE86 ever? Barry finds this poor Corolla at the side of a shed and we chop off its chassis leg to use in the Trueno.
Barry chases the last major rust holes in the AE86 and Reuben gets his C33 Laurel back up and running.
I had wanted to see this place for years. We are going to call this Person Mr X as this is what was requested. Being friends with MR X on facebook for a very long time and chatting back and forth about various cars he had imported, we already had a solid relationship. I had shot a few of his cars for the website at various track days over the years but never had the chance to visit his house, I had only seen photos of stuff for sale on Facebook. I was originally going to get a shell from MR X and build on it from there but then a whole other thing happened with the Trueno from Dans Garden.
Let’s get stuck right back into our walk around Japfest 2017. I can’t stress how good this event was, it’s a clear indication that we are out of the dark times. The car scene is booming once again.
Sadly the AE86 pockets are not what we thought…Not to fear, Barry is on the case. We also check out a another Trueno bare shell build not too far from our shed.
This article was lost when the website went under. I managed to recover most of it and felt it was right to get these photos up here from what was easily one of the best Irish car shows to date. This will be coming in two parts as there is a huge photo dump with this feature. I’ve left the original writing intact so it might sound a little weird as those were supposed to be posted back in 2017.
If you scroll back a bit you will see the original post where we went to check the 86 out for the first time. Looking at these photos it’s actually hard to believe this is the state the car was in for at least two or three years. I really wanted to shoot as many photos as I could the day we rescued it but to be honest, I was a little wiped out pulling this thing out of the bush. So many things were going through my head as I trying to focus on making some sort of a decent video to kick start these vlogs. It’s funny looking back over a year and a half later at these snaps and take it all in once again. I really had no idea how this was going to pan out.
Another slightly productive weekend at the shed. Barry calls around to do some more welding on the AE86 and show us his Wispa lunch combo. Reuben fixes his gearbox, sets fire to stuff and Dan calls down with some race drones.
We pull apart the AE86’s new blacktop 20 valve 4A-GE heart and see if this engine swap was actually worth the effort…
In this Episode, we piece together this history of the AE86 and the recently acquired 20valve 4A-GE engine
We get some more work done on the AE86 but not without a bunch of distractions. Barry calls down to do some more metal work and we get carried away with fire.
In this episode, we paint some of my AE86 parts, we also learn about the Irish and UK spec AE86 Twin cam GT coupe. What a mouthful!
