Category: Cars

Minor Lamentations – Kujira Crown

The culprit: Bubble rust
The culprit: Bubble rust

The Crown needs to be stripped, patched, and repainted. The last time it was done, it was done poorly. I’m thinking about using a shop just around the way, so I can go watch over the work every day. Just need to save up some money now.. I’m sure I’ll have enough in a few years. Until then? An experimental mix of vinyl wrap patch, black ink markers, and spray paint. The Kujira Crown was apparently made in an era when Japanese steel wasn’t that great – so they made it thicker. There aren’t that many holes rusted through, except at the edges. It does need to be patched properly, though.

Nissan Leaf Insane Mode?

Teslas are badass. This much is indisputable.
But Nissan Leaves (Leafs?)? Not so much.

It occurs to me that eco-minded people (or bespectacled geeks, as shown in the vid) occasionally want to be badass, too; it’s just that a Leaf is not ideally suited for that purpose… It would also very much surprise me if a stock Leaf could outperform a stock 180SX.

The first problem you would run into when trying to organize such a test, of course, is finding a stock 180SX. As a sister model of the Silvia S-13 (ahem!) and ultra-iconic drift car in all of its forms (beginning with the first-gen “pignose” models), there probably hasn’t been an unmodified one since approximately two weeks after the last third gens rolled off the production line in 1998.

I miss my Silvia.

Gotta sell a pony…

I have one too many bikes around the house. My method of figuring the necessary number of bikes is simple. If I don’t ride it for more than a couple months in a row, it needs to go. This was originally a silver 110cc Honda Tena (true manual) that I converted into a Mad Max dirt bike of sorts. The engine internals and ECU are from a modified Honda Dash, but the big knobby tires made it impossible to get going very quickly, even with the ridiculously huge rear sprocket and a full year of trying different tuning tricks… I lost interest in this bike very quickly after buying the CRF. Farewell.

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A Farewell to Training Wheels

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Max has finally ditched the third and fourth wheels. We tried to get Mina on two wheels at the same time, but her sense of balance isn’t there yet. The moment of releasing your child to go forth on two wheels is a mix of hopeful expectation and fear of terrible crashes. Luckily, the early start of rainy season we experienced last week provided the best learning surface available – softened fields of dusty expanse.