Category: Cars

Having a truck is nice

Yes, I can fit all of these things in my normal cars. But I don’t need to dust them off or lay down plastic because it’s a TRUCK.

Honestly, the Mitsubishi pickup truck fills a very specific role in Thailand – it has enough loyal fans that buy them new to enable secondhand value hunters like me to find customized gems that are good for another couple hundred thousand kilometers or whatever. These things lose value like crazy compared to the top-tier pickup brands like Toyota and Isuzu, yet are equal in most functions to other mid-tier brands like Nissan (best for towing) and Mazda (best interior). If you just need a cheap, reliable truck in Thailand, Mitsu is the obvious choice.

This is where the tiles were going (although they were just temporarily placed in this photo, along with a butane cassette burner because we were going to replace our gas range). We had a sheet of dark glass as the splash guard for the wall since we built the house, but it finally broke. So Nam’s older sister gave us these nice tiles she brought from Bangkok.

It’s time for a road trip

These are some photos from last year, taken on my expired Pixel 6. If in this lifetime self-driving cars become the norm, I will miss driving. I see the greatest things on the road, but usually when I’m driving myself. Otherwise, my phone is much more interesting.

I’m going on a trip to Nakhon Pathom tomorrow, a bit past Bangkok from here. We’re taking students to an academic competition at the Rajabhat there, in a van.

Crown update

After our house and the Kujira got flooded, I needed wheels and bought the Triton pickup. I halfheartedly tried to sell it a while back, but we ended up using to haul stuff for student activities and whatnot. Having a pickup and a sedan turns out to be a lot more convenient than having two sedans, badassedness aside. So the Crown has been sitting at my mechanic’s place waiting for daddy to kick up funds for bodywork, paint, and fixing the flooded aircon… So yeah, it’s been almost 3 years, even though she’s always on my mind.

The registration has to be done before next March or it gets de-registered completely, which would mean something more permanent, so that’s not going to happen. So I’m thinking of getting the registration and taxes renewed, and the AC fixed, and getting her safe to be on the road, and just driving her again for a while. As is. Because even like this, she’s kinda badass in this ago of soulless EV plastic trash.

Triton is no longer the Bang Saen Special

We wanted to transfer my lowrider to Nam’s name from her sister’s, in order to prepare it for possible sale. The prefectural inspection officer we ran into at the Land Transport Office either wanted a bribe and didn’t ask for it clearly enough, or was just having a bad day, and decided to insist that my truck was too low and had to be restored to standard height (which is technically not a law here). Either way, we were not in the mood to pay into corruption and thought it might be easier to sell the truck at standard height anyway, so we took it for modification to Nam’s old classmate across the street, who runs a garage in front of his house. Pics of the restored-to-stock truck will follow after I’ve replaced the tires to match the ride height. The photos below are just a remembrance of why I bought it in the first place (in honor of the lowered racing trucks AKA rod sing cruising the beach roads in Chonburi Province).

Gauge cluster (mostly wrong/defunct – true racer style)
A shift indicator – the first one I’ve used since learning to drive stick in a Porsche 944 35 years ago!
Up on the stand
Rear drums, baby!
Pickle loves hanging out under the truck and in its shadows all day – it’s very secure

The shop pictured is the one written about above, but the photos are from a previous visit, when they were replacing brake pads and doing maintenance.