Month: June 2009 (Page 4 of 5)

Model cars by Jon2

June 10, 2009 / banpei / 0 Comments

I still remember my first model car kit: it was a modified König Ferarri Testarossa. It took me more than a month to complete it and it looked…uhm…interesting… After that model kit I tried my luck with another, but the result remained the same: it looked like crap!

So I decided model kits were not the thing for me. Then I forgot about it and made the same mistake by buying a Oh My Goddess! Belldandy model and tried to do it right this time. It is still looking great in half completed state. ;)

That’s why I have a lot of respect for the people who are capable of doing model kits and doing them the right way. For example I came across joh2 on Youtube who posted amazing videos of his model kits in all different states/steps of completion. My personal favorite is this red 4 door Toyota Corolla TE71:

I really like his personal touches, like the black vinyl roof (my dads TA60 Carina used to have one!), the sunroof, the hood scoop and the trunk spoiler!

Another great one is this second generation CRX:

And his last creation, a Corolla Levin AE86:

Games: Super Auto Salon on Nintendo DS

June 9, 2009 / banpei / 0 Comments

A colleague of mine came up with this trailer of this great game yesterday:

It is Super Auto Saloon and you’re supposed to modify your car to the max, show it on an Auto Saloon and drive with it against other pimped up cars! I see VIP style, drift style and cube style! Only thing lacking is the Bosozoku style mode… Sounds like hours of fun to me! :D

Anyone got a DS for me?? :P

PS: you can buy it here: Super Auto Salon at Play Asia

AE86 Trivia: Rotating grille Corolla Levin

June 9, 2009 / banpei / 16 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
This week we feature the rotating grille found on the zenki Corolla Levins!

First of all you probably think something like rotating grille? What is that? Well, it is exactly what it says: a rotating grille!

zenki Corolla Levin GT Apex with rotating grille

During the 80s Japanese car manufacturers were packing their cars all sorts of gadgets and to keep up with the competition they had to come up with the latest inventions! One of these things was the rotating grille as found on the Corolla Levin AE86, but only in the GT Apex trim. It is just another thing like the side mirror wipers found on the Toyota Mark II X80 series.

Rotating grille in opened and closed position

Basically what it did was having a closed grille when the engine is under normal operation to improve the drag coefficient and when the engine is under stress it would open up to give it more cooling. It had a thermostat which opened the grille when the water temperature was hot enough. Then the grille would open up and show the twincam 16 logo instead of the Levin logo when closed.

If you want to mount one yourself you definitely need the grille itself and the hoses and thermostat as well! As far as I know these parts are not available anymore at Toyota, so you will have to get almost all parts to make it work!

Rotating grille assembly as in the EPC

Then you need to hook it up between your engine and radiator like this:

How to hook up the rotating grille

As said before: it only operates at really high temperatures, so you really need to push the engine far to have the grille open up! Remember that the GT Apex trim was meant as a luxury trim and not a performance trim: therefore the GT and GTV trims got the louvre grille instead of this the much heavier rotating grille.

So is it worth its money then? Well that’s a bit hard to tell: it does serve a purpose to decrease the drag coefficient but it won’t save you much in fuel, especially if you push the car hard to get it open! ;)

Smell the Mazda Cosmo AP

June 7, 2009 / banpei / 1 Comment

Some time ago I wrote about the Mazda Cosmo AP RX5 in both the popular Bosozoku style car regular and a police car chase with a Cosmo AP when I had too little Seibu Keisatsu. I just found this original Japanese Mazda Cosmo AP ad from the 1976:

I really don’t get the slogan: Now, the smell of Cosmo. I know AP stands for anti pollution so they don’t mean I am supposed to smell the unburnt petrol fumes, so do they actually think that I am supposed to smell something else, flowerlike for example, when the Cosmo AP passes?

Lucky enough it is not too hard to understand the story behind this commercial: those cops are just jealous! Even though they drive the best motorcycles of the world, deep in their heart they really want a Cosmo AP too! So, fast forward 30 years on the cop with the sideburns and mustache and see him standing in his very own Mazda Cosmo AP police special:

If you are interested, I found several other Cosmo AP advertisements:
1978 Mazda Cosmo AP advertisement
1979 Mazda Cosmo AP advertisement
1980 Mazda Cosmo AP advertisement

Is manji drift a nazi thing?

June 6, 2009 / banpei / 3 Comments

About a year ago I was working on some project for my work which allowed submission of unicode characters. Shortly after the project was launched a user submitted its name as a snow man:

When you select the snowman above with your mouse pointer you can copy the character and paste it anywhere! (as long as it supports unicode)

We then figured out that some unicode characters are actually not wanted in such cases. One of those characters was the swastika in the Unihan (East Asian) unicode block. This character is the mirrored version of the swastika used in the second world war. Of course we block characters like that to prevent the Nazi-Germany association on our portals.

However I did spot this picture in a post on Nori-Yaro about kei car drifting:

Subaru Rex driftcar with instructions
As you can see the Rex driver has a cheatsheet for the sequence he is supposed to drive in the demo lap. First in the sequence is clearly the asian (mirrored) swastika! This is the comment Alexi Smith (Nori Yaro) wrote about it:
They’re not Nazis in case you’re wondering. That first symbol is back-to-front compared to the swastika, and it’s a kanji character that means “manji” (fishtail drifting) in this case

I looked it up on Wikipedia and indeed, manji is one of the meanings of the swastika:
Also known as a “yung drung” in ancient Tibet, it was a graphical representation of eternity. Today the symbol is used in Buddhist art and scripture, known in Japanese as a manji (literally, “the character for eternality” ??), and represents Dharma, universal harmony, and the balance of opposites.
So the fishtailing described by Alexi can be translated into an harmonic movement (sinus), which is described in Japan by manji.

So next time you are doing a manji on the streight, think about it whether you are a nazi or drifter. ;)

AE86 Trivia: Digital dashboard

June 5, 2009 / banpei / 4 Comments

AE86 Trivia
This week we feature the digital dashboard of the AE86!

If you are unfamiliar with it, this is what it looks like and how it operates:

If you want one you can get them either from a first generation (zenki) AE86 3 door with the GT Apex trim or find them through auctions.yahoo.co.jp in Japan. This version of the AE86 got the digital dashboard installed, unless you really didn’t want one and ordered one without it. That also means that Bunta Fujiwara ordered his Sprinter Trueno without digidash back in the 80s. ;)

The 2 door zenki and both 2 and 3 door kouki GT Apex trim didn’t get the digital dashboard default: you had to order it as a special option. It was also a Japan-only feature: it wasn’t even available as an option in the US like it was on the Celica and Celica-Supra! That was a weird decision taking into account that 1984/1985 (launch of the AE86 in the US) was the peak of the popularity of Knight Rider!

Digital Cluster in a Japanese zenki Sprinter Trueno catalogue

The digital dashboard was, like it implicates, a digital variant of the normal, analogue, gauge cluster. It displayed almost everything digitally:
everything except the mileage was digital. This also meant some signals feeding the cluster had to be digital: the fuel sender should give the signal digitally while the oil pressure became nothing more than a “warining” light for too high pressure.

In case you want to convert your analogue cluster to a digital cluster you arein need of two parts:
– digital oil pressure switch (one of a EP71,82,91/SW20/AE92/ST16x will do.)
– digital fuel sender (part# 83320-19725)
Especially the digital fuel sender is hard to get by!

Even though the digital dashboard has the same connectors as the analogue cluster you need to convert them to the digital cluster. You can find the wiring schema here:
Wiring conversion schema for the AE86 digital cluster

Is the cluster worth it? Personally I wouldn’t care more or less if the digital dashboard had featured in my Trueno. In some ways it would even be a set back since you would lose the oil pressure gauge!
On the other hand it does have a certain coolness factor!