Category: Cars

Citroen AX and BX

This is what the view from the front of T's house looked like before the town ruined it.
This is what the view from the front of T’s house looked like before the town blocked it with a senior center/foot bath.

I’ve been meaning to write about these cars for a long time. I came across this photo, from around 1999, when going through old albums. I put it aside and it’s been collecting dust on my PC desk since then.

Anyway, about the cars: Yuko-sensei gave T the red Citroen AX and replaced it with a Renault Twingo (She probably still has a thing for French cars – being a doctor, she’s one of the few in Japan able to keep up with repair bills for them.). This was a good small car with manual transmission, and didn’t break down as often as the BX. I used to see a few of these around Mahasarakham, but not for the past couple years.

A teacher who T knew gave me the black Citroen BX with the strange condition that I service it at his friend’s garage. I honored that promise for a while, but got sick of the guy overcharging me for LHM used in the hydropneumatic suspension system. This car was used on several legendary road trips to Tsukuba, Tokyo, and all around Kansai.

Mosaic used to protect the mosaiced.
Mosaic used to protect the mosaiced.
View from the sunroof.
View from the sunroof.

I also traded it for one day with T’s cousin for a Mitsubishi Delica when we needed a party bus. Owning this car was a love/hate kind of thing.

There aren’t many people who get to own cars designed by Marcello Gandini (the designer of the Lamborghini Countach, the Lancer Stratos and the original BMW 5-series) with oléopneumatique suspension to adjust the ride of their car. This system served a couple purposes: It could be used to slam the car to the ground so it couldn’t be towed away when parked illegally on the street, and it was a fucking spectacle to behold the car slowly rising and falling in any given parking lot at any given drunken time.

Alas, the car was a sensitive and fragile little crybaby, and not suited to my violent driving style (although it was spared handbrake turns because the parking brake was attached to the front brakes!!). Indeed, I broke the gears when screwing around on the racing overpass in Tenri one hot evening, and barely made it back to our garage in Horyuji to get it looked at… Kataoka-san, our mechanic, mentor, and adviser for all things auto-related, checked it out and pronounced it dead on the spot.

I have to admit, thanks to the otherworldly suspension characteristics, the Citroen BX had the smoothest ride of any car I’ve ever known, especially in the back seats. And the home cabinet speakers I carried around in the trunk coupled with mad interior cabin acoustics made for awesome tunes. But due to something breaking or temporarily ceasing to function almost every week, along with assurances from Parisian friends that this was quite normal when owning Citroens, I would never feel the desire to own a French car ever again.

Babyblade CBR fun

My friend Ben just bought a used 2011 Honda CBR250R w/ABS in Pattaya and brought it back to Sarakham. I helped him out a little with the details of the transaction and choice of bike, so of course, I got to try it out. Perhaps today wasn’t the best day since it was drizzling and quite windy out on the highway, but that did not deter us.

Honda-CBR250R

The bike was lighter and more refined than I expected – I would say it’s more tame than beast. The single-cylinder engine is very smooth and steady, and the bike is very quiet with the stock exhaust (even if it is wrapped with a faux carbon fiber sticker – which according to the internet, grants about 3 extra hp). In my mind, the CBR 150 is more fun at lower speeds, but the 250 is great for cruising on the highway (and probably even more fun when the wind isn’t kicking grit into your face at high speed).

Until this point, I had been riding the CBR around town and Ben was following on my scooter. When we stopped, Ben said he wanted he wanted to ride bitch to “see how girls felt,” so he got on the back and I pretended to be a twenty-something French guy on a glorious circuit around the Maha Sarakham bypass. Getting into the role of a racer-playboy, I recommended embedding a switch-activated vibrator in the rear seat cushion for increased high-speed thrills. For his part as a scared young Thai girl, Ben kept saying, “slow down, Ajarn, slow down!” (I was actually riding very slowly since I’m no longer invincibly young).

It was a lot of fun.

I found the part!

… or at least, my sister-in-law in Bangkok asked a garage who did… Amazing Thailand!

Turn signal assemblies for 1971 Toyota "Kujira" Crown MS-60 - broken latch one on right, replacement on left
Turn signal assemblies for 1971 Toyota “Kujira” Crown MS-60 – broken one on right, replacement on left

The replacement part is actually in much worse condition, over all, than the one I took off my car, but the plastic latch that holds the turn signal in place (and keeps me from having to hold the lever when turning – which annoying as hell) is intact. I’m asking my pal, Ot, from Wattana Sound, to pull the best parts from each and create  a “best-functioning” amalgamation.

It’s funny that Taro had this same exact problem on his Mitsu Jeep when we were at university; the garage told us it would cost x amount to fix, but being poor students, we just used it broken until Taro bought another (used) Jeep. The difference between then and now is a huge cost differential (probably about 10:1 in favor of labor-cheap Thailand) and that while you expect an old Jeep to be a gritty driving experience, I’m aiming for a more luxurious experience in my Crown (it originally came with a refrigerator in the trunk and a pneumatic central locking system, after all).

I need this part

This post is a simple plea to the monkey in the sky to help me find a working turn signal assembly for my 1971 Toyota Crown. The molded plastic latch lasted many decades before succumbing to normal wear and tear. Looking at modern cars, I’m pretty sure none of them will last quite as long.

Juju booster +10!

2013-03-05 12.33.52

2013-03-05 12.33.59

I really don’t want to try replacing the whole steering column.

Mystery VIP Car, Khon Kaen

I raced this car home back to Sarakham last week.

Perhaps the ugliest sedan I've ever seen.
Perhaps the ugliest sedan I’ve ever seen.

I guess the driver was worried about spilling his Grey Poupon, because he had me on the straightaways (kind of rare because my wife’s VQ30-powered Cefiro A33 smokes almost everything under 2 million baht; such is the sad state of affairs in many road-tax-by-engine-displacement countries) , but slowed way down on the curves. I’m kind of sad because I don’t even know what kind of car it is, but if I had to guess — Chinese Bentley? Korean Cadillac?

Either way, it was hideous. Almost as bad as the ugliest car ever made, which I’ve been seeing kind of often lately.

UPDATE: Of course, Chris the master of all things with engines, called it – this is definitely a Mitsuoka, probably a Galue-III. It’s the first I’ve ever seen, having been in Thailand almost the whole time they’ve been produced, and it totally matches with what I saw. On another page it says this car “incorporates styling touches from such classic designs as the ’94 Cadillac Fleetwood.” Also, the specs indicate it was loaded with the same type of engine in our Cefiro, but newer and with higher output – either a VQ-25HR or VQ-35HR. Interestingly enough, the Galue-III was made in both RWD and AWD.