Remembering Japanese cars from the past
This Honda RA272 cutaway drawing by Yoshihiro Inomoto is even more beautiful than the Nissan R382 cutaway drawing by Makoto Ouchi:
Look at all the finer details he made, small case studies on the various parts, cockpit and complete car to get the end result just right. And this is just the original line drawing he made, not even the finished end product!
This is what it looks like after painting it: Continue reading
After being silent on the subject of my Carina for a while I’ve finally made some more progress: I’m assembling the Carina AA63 double headlights (after stripping and repairing them first):
This is only the right side assembly and unfortunately the left side has to wait a bit. And yes I know: it is definitely not the most beautiful glassfibre repair, but it will be hidden behind the grille anyway.
Why? Well it is waiting for the respray of some new old stock headlight surroundings: Continue reading
Fake or not: this video of a Nissan Laurel C130 pigsbutt (butaketsu Laurel) backing up against the dude helping reverse parking is very funny:
I really wonder what will happen…
Watch the video below for the unpredictable outcome: Continue reading
Last Thursday when I encountered this 1978 Mitsubishi Sapporo 2000 GS/R I thought I was very lucky to find it! I never found one parked on the side of the street before! However when I checked my bag for the compact camera I usually carry around it wasn’t there. Neither was there any charge left in my smartphone so apparently my luck balanced out and I had to take pictures with my Nokia C2 dumbphone. In the end they turned out better than I expected but certainly they don’t meet my personal baseline.
As you can see at the bottom of the driver door this Mitsubishi Sapporo suffers from the well known tin-worm: the very same that killed many before.
From the rear it is visible it also attacked the boot lid and it has been replaced by one in a slightly different shade of grey/silver: Continue reading
As I described a few weeks ago: I bought a CD-ROM with all Toyota Carina FR workshop books (scanned) on it and it is a treasure of information. From now and then there are a few hidden gems in there, like the initial design sketches for the four door sedan of the Toyota Carina A60:
The front is a bit more slanted than the production version and if you squint your eyes you can see the Toyota Corona A140 in it that shared the same platform. Wheel arches are more squared off than the Carina and this is quite similar to the Corona as well.
However the sketch from the rear is unmistakeably the four door Toyota Carina A60 sedan:
The tail lights are clearly the same design as the tail lights of the zenki sedan. Even the rear door has the blacked out triangular part that finishes of the lines of the rear door.
Perhaps Toyota made a study to see if they could fully merge the Corona and Carina with the A60/T140 generation? Eventually they managed to do it in the next T150 generation.
From various sources (like WasabiCars) I understood that finding a junkyard in Japan is very rare. There are some private yards that are mostly owned by garage owners and use the cars in the yard as spare parts. When I saw this photo of a real junkyard on a Japanese blog I couldn’t believe what I saw:
In this big pile of rust I detected: a Mercury Cougar, a four door Toyota Chaser X30, a Mitsubishi Galant Λ (aka the Mitsubishi/Plymouth Sapporo and Dodge Challenger), a Toyota Celica A60 (maybe an XX?), a Nissan Skyline C210, a Toyota Corona T130, a Toyota Crown MS50 and the nicest of them all: a Toyota Publica van.
More photos of this junkyard can be found here: route0030
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