Month: May 2009 (Page 2 of 6)

For sale: Really cheap Honda Civic 4th gen 1.3 Luxe

May 26, 2009 / banpei / 25 Comments

The car has is a 4th generation Honda Civic with aftermarket alloy wheels, sports exhaust and hatch spoiler. The red color has faded just a little bit, but it should be no problem for future owners to get its initial bright red color back:

Honda Civic 4th Gen with just a little faded top layer

It was always parked in a really nice and quiet neighborhood (Rotterdam Charlois), so no parking damage or dents:

Honda Civic 4th Gen with no parking damage or dents

And as you can see the sports exhaust is still like new:

Honda Civic 4th Gen with sports exhaust

And only a small vermin problem:

Honda Civic 4th Gen with a small vermin problem

Car is located in Spuikade Rotterdam and can be visited anytime. ;)
Price: 5000 euros (with vermin) or ONO

Pictures are made by Keet Moves and RTV Rijnmond

For those people who can’t read Dutch: the street this car is parked in suffers from a plague of rare caterpillars. The public services of Rotterdam refuse to do anything about it because the caterpillars will disappear within 4 weeks anyway. Apparently this car is the first victim of the caterpillars.

YZ circuit: east course

May 25, 2009 / banpei / 0 Comments

I found this short video of an AE86 doing the YZ circuit last week:

The AE86 is heavily modified and got its dash replaced with a light weight thing. The gauge cluster and engine sound is recognizable and the car almost literally rips up this small circuit!

The YZ circuit was opened back in 1996 to for fill the need for a small circuit. The smaller east course was only opened august 2008, so this is a relatively new course. This course is also used for the MSC round 5 and they even have an AE86 drift king event with Hibino Tetsuya!

AE86 Trivia: Levin and Trueno meaning lightning and thunder?

May 24, 2009 / banpei / 2 Comments

As being an admin of AEU86 I’ve seen a lot of questions, facts and fun stuff about the Toyota AE86 (hachi roku). I also see a lot of questions returning even though we documented it on the FAQ already.

AE86 Trivia
So I thought: why not share it in a returning item on my personal blog as well? Be prepared to encounter silly trivial facts about the hachi roku you probably never heard before! ;)

This week we’ll start off with the Levin and Trueno naming. Where did it come from?

Toyota started using the Levin and Trueno designations already back in 1971 when they created the high performance TE27 models. The TE27 Corolla was called Levin (and SR5 in the US) while the TE27 Sprinter was called Trueno. This naming scheme for both cars lived on till the AE111: the Sprinter line ended with the AE111. The Corolla line still lives and still carries on the Levin badge for the more sporty models.

Classic TE27 Levin trunk emblem

There was a rumor that the Levin means lightning and Trueno means thunder in Japanese.
The Japanese part is not true: look it up in the dictionary, there are no such words listed in Japanese.

Classic TE27 Trueno trunk emblem

Then we started looking into this on AEU86 and first found that Levin meant lightning in Middle English.
Levin/lightning part confirmed! So, if Levin means lightning, does Trueno mean thunder then?
TE27 Levin grille emblem: lightning picture
TE27 Levin grille emblem: clearly lightning!
As you can see at the end of the topic I sent an email to Toyota Japan asking where the naming came from.

Yes it does: before the Initial D hype flushed google with references to the Sprinter Trueno I already found the name Trueno matching a lot by El Capitan Trueno on images.google.com:

El Capitan Trueno deriva al rescate
Note the lightning arcs in his name! ;)

So it was not difficult to look up trueno in the Spanish dictionary.
Trueno/thunder part confirmed!

TE27 Trueno grille emblem: is this supposed to be thunder?

Funny story is when I had a dinner with a couple of friends in a restaurant and gave a few of them a ride in my old Trueno (featuring the AEU86 reproduction decals). One of the friends was a Spanish girl and she couldn’t believe the car actually was called Thunder and she was having a ride in the Thunder! :D

AEU86 Reproduction stickers of the Sprinter Trueno AE86 trunk decal

In the end I never received a reply back from Toyota Japan. So the decision why they took a Spanish and Middle English word still remains unknown!

Next week another AE86 Trivia! :)

AE86: Whining diff?

May 23, 2009 / banpei / 0 Comments

AE86ers.org posted a video of an AE86 doing Central Circuit in Japan:

The first thing I thought was that the driver of the car really needs a new ring and pinion! (aka crownwheel) It sounds the same as on my old Trueno but then at least four or five times as worse! You can hear the diff whining from about 50 km/h till 140 or 150 km/h, that is if I remember the pitch of the sound correct and presume the owner still got a 4.3 ring and pinion! ;)

The whining diff is a very well known issue of the AE86: its design was never meant for drifting, so if you put too much stress on it the crush sleeve will deform. Only a small deformation on the crush sleeve will cause an imbalance on the ring and pinion and wear down the teeth of the ring much faster than normal. So in case this happened to your hachi stressing the ring will only wear it down more and the whining noise will get worse! To prevent this TRD created a solid spacer which can not deform.

Another possibility for this amount of noise is that the AE86 is driving on the circuit with uniball 4 links. These will return all vibrations of the axle back to the chassis. Correct me if I’m wrong, but with uniballs you would hear much more noise and feedback from the road than this.

Also you may think the noise is coming from a straight cut gearbox. This isn’t the case as then the whining noise would change pitch when shifting up or down. Here the pitch is constant and continues with the same pitch after a gear shift.

So for all those people out there wondering what a whining diff sounds like on an AE86: this is it! If you hear it this much you really need to think about getting a new ring and pinion.

Hilarious: Muscle March

May 22, 2009 / banpei / 0 Comments

I can’t believe someone actually would buy this game on the Wii: I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this trailer!

At first I expected some sort of bodybuilder game in which you have to compete against other bodybuilders: grow muscles and stuff.
Sure, that’s one of the goals of this game, but I wouldn’t have expected it to be in such a gay way!

It is almost as gay as this driftcar with its tires smoking pink clouds in the air:

I know: it is supposed to be some cool and it most probably should have been red smoke… If they only would have applied some more it would have been a really nice red color instead. ;)

Popular Bosozoku cars: Daisuke Shouten

May 21, 2009 / banpei / 0 Comments

Last week we featured three videos of Daijiro Inada and the Mark II platform. The poster of that video also posted part one of Daijiro Inada and Daisuke Shouten!

For people who are unfamiliar with him: he creates the most bizarre bosozoku rides! It is more a sport for him to create something exceptional than to perfection a zokusha into something beautiful!

Have a look at his bizarre creations:

I love the Corona JZT141 sedan! It looks bad and with the 1JZ swap it is bad!

[I posted this article earlier this week on Bosozokustyle.com]