It has been a while since I posted an AE86 in the AE86 Wall of Shame. It’s not that I have a shortage of content, in the contrary: I have lots of AE86 photos that may raise your eyebrows. However, I have rather more other interesting things to blog and share. Luckily, earlier this week, a friend of mine sent me this AE86 with a Mark II JZX110 front crafted on it:
There are so many questions I have about this Levin AE86:
This Levin AE86 suits me fine!
It has a GT-S door sticker. Where did it come from?
It has correction stickers for the headlights going from LHD to RHD while the dashboard is on the RHD side. If it were a RHD car I would expect it to be the other way around!
There seem to be traditional Chinese writings on the wall of this garage / gas station
It has a kouki grill and zenki bumper and the car appears to be a kouki model.
So what’s going on here? The traditional Chinese writing on the wall would place this car either in Taiwan, Macau or Hong Kong. Cars drive on the right side (so LHD) in China and Taiwan and on the left side (RHD) in Hong Kong and Macau. I could explain the LHD headlights if this person lived in mainland China or Taiwan. So my best guess would be that this Levin used to be owned by someone living in China mainland or Taiwan and he was visiting Hong Kong or Macau.
That still doesn’t explain the GT-S door sticker and the zenki bumper though.
A few days ago I experimented with the Waifu2x image scaler to identify a small car in the background of a Family Album Treasure AE86. Then I remembered I recently came across a black and white photo of a mystery Carina in Okayama. The photo is dated as Showa 58, which is 1983 and thus the Carina must have been brand new!
A Toyota Carina in Okayama in 1983
AI image upscalers
As you can see, due to the slight motion blur, the Carina does not have any readable badges to properly identify it. Also, the photo is a bit grainy, which also makes it difficult to read. So let’s try to improve things with various AI image upscalers and see if we can get anything readable from those!
Last week I already posted an abandoned kouki two-door Toyota Sprinter Trueno AE86 that started to be consumed by the foliage of the fields surrounding it. This week, I have another Toyota AE86 that is slowly being consumed by the woods.
Toyota AE86 slowly consumed by the woods
This AE86 is so far gone, I can’t even tell whether it’s a Levin or a Trueno! What I can tell, is that this is a two-door facelift model. The small holes next to the tail lights are made to fit the inner reverse lights of the facelifted two-door tail lights. In the picture below you can see the difference between the two:
zenki vs kouki two-door AE86 tail lights compared
As you can see, there is a small reverse light mounted right under where the bootlid slopes down to its lowest point. So having these small holes in the rear at least give us the indication it is a kouki model.
The roof has caved in with various tree branches around it, so probably the roof was hit by those branches. The AE86 once was yellow and painted over in white. The white paint is slowly disappearing, showing the car’s true colours. As the boot is also yellow, I would assume it was yellow from factory
I was under the impression I posted this Nissan Sunny B310 van a long time ago, but apparently, I didn’t! I photographed it over 12 years ago and it has been sitting idle on my backup drive for an almost equal amount of time.
Nissan Sunny B310 van
Spotting the Sunny van
I spotted this Sunny B310 van being parked near my garage, but back in 2011, I didn’t rent that space yet. It must have been one of my long bicycle journeys that took me past this van and I decided to take a photograph of it. The photo isn’t skewed, but the road is actually sloping down to the right. I kept the houses in the background horizontal to create this skewed effect. I really liked the amount of fog- and auxiliary-lights on this car and also the two slats on the grill painted in gold!
Stolen camera gear
I must apologize for the second photo being unsharp. Back in early 2011, my Canon EOS 350D was stolen alongside my manual focus lenses. As the camera was 4 years old, the insurance only paid out 10% of its value. By the end of 2011, I sourced a half-broken EOS 350D, got a new M42 adapter plate and restarted photographing with old manual focus lenses. Unfortunately, I did not yet have a manual focus focus-screen yet, so I had to guess the distances between me and the objects and this was often a hit or miss. In the photo above, this was clearly a miss and my focus was off by about a meter or so.
Nissan Sunny B310 van
The specs
Normally I always obfuscate license plates. In this case, I didn’t as I checked the plate for registration. Unfortunately, it no longer exists in the Dutch register. This means either it has been exported or been salvaged.
I still do remember the stats for this van. It was a 1300cc engine van from 1987. You can see it’s a van as the roof is raised with at least 40mm. Also the rear side windows are blinded and a separation wall has been placed between the rear cargo area and the rear seats. This would make this car eligible for an official registration as a van back in the 1980s. According to the current regulations, it would no longer be eligible. Strangely enough, the registration was made as a regular passenger car and not as a van.
You can see the car leans towards the back. This indicates it was loaded with some heavy gear. I didn’t take a photograph of the rear of the car, but I remember it having some decals on it and it seems to belong to a plumber.
I have been dreaming about this for years now, and now finally, someone took the effort to upload the Shakotan Boogie anime to Youtube! You may wonder why this is such a big deal, so let me explain to you what Shakotan Boogie is, why I have yearned for this and why it is great to have it on Youtube!
What is Shakotan Boogie?
Shakotan Boogie (シャコタン★ブギ) started as a Manga in Weekly Young Magazine in 1986 and remained serialized until 1996. It’s a manga about two boys, Hajime Yamamoto and Koji Watanabe, who are into zokusha and the whole subculture around it. This is closely related to the Bosozoku, but they aren’t the same.
The two boys are car-crazy and they drive around in a blue and white Toyota Soarer Z10 on SSR Mk Is. This car has become so iconic that it became the stereotypical Soarer for many people who are into zokusha. Similar to what the panda-Trueno is for Initial D fans.
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