Nath's Corner

Yesterday afternoon i went for a drive and photo shoot with fellow old school enthusiast Nathan McKenna, who has been asking me recently for some photos of my car for his blog.
Always being up for photos and drives and with yesterday being the perfect weather i was more than happy to.

Check out his blog here:
http://static-sunny.tumblr.com/

This is Nathan's Sunny which is quite a damn cool car, and a very clean example as well. I've wanted one of these for a while now (among like a billion other cars) but they are quite hard to get... But i guess you have to expect that for anything when you like cars pre-80's

Here's Nathan getting some shots of my car, we just went for a bit of a drive around Hope island which made for quite a relaxing Sunday afternoon.

Obviously i decided to bring my camera as well and couldn't help getting a few shots of my own. I might have to return Nathan the favor of a photo shoot some day with his car, or his new project. But more on that later ;)

Also, this is the view we had at the end of the day when we were just wrapping up the shoot. God i love L glass so damn much, there is absolutely NO editing in this shot, not even cropping. I did the slightest unsharp mask and that is it!

Literature Of The Orient

I absolutely love Option, Drift Tengoku, and particularly G-Works magazines, but not as much as i absolutely LOVE my girlfriend who picked all these up for me when on a trip back from Sydney without me even mentioning a thing.
I gotta say I'm pretty damn lucky to have a Girl that knows exactly what Japanese car mags i love without even asking me!

Morning Session Tandems

I had such an awesome day yesterday and had some of the closest tandems with Nick that i have ever had. I'm very keen to keep driving with him as often as possible so we can get some extreme driving going!

Here's the best pic ive seen of it so far but we got much closer!

C's Garage Ke70

We all know them as the boys in NZ with two (one now - Sad face) of the most, if not the, baddest S13's around. Recently it came to my attention that Adam & Joel have been working their magic in the form of a toyota.

So far its looking pretty damn cool, Twin Carb 4a, wagon, and best of all; SSR Starsharks <3

This car has inspired me to better my fitment, so maybe in the not too distant future i will be doing more low and 185/55's instead of 60's

Thanks Guys!

http://csgarage.files.wordpress.com/

Corolla spotted in Zoom!

Thanks to a friend with a keen eye i found out the other day that my car had been posted in an article in Zoom!
I'm pretty sure they are the some of the photos that are going to be used in HPI in the next two months, but needless to say I'm ecstatic!

The article is basically about budget race cars and the modifications you can do, I'm extremely happy they used mine as an example of what can be done with an Ae71. Lol funnily enough it even had some ideas for budget modifications that i didn't know about

Japan

Well, its official, i am going to Japan!
No plans yet, but flights are booked and so i will be spending ten days moseying about in what is quite possibly my most desired destination of the last 8 or so years.

Burleigh Beach

I'm quite lucky to live where I do, most of the really nice beaches on the Gold Coast are within 10-20 minutes drive for me so keeping cool for my friends and I is never much of an issue.

It has been fairly hot of the last couple of weeks, up until then we have been getting silly amounts of rain and summer has really only just started so there has been plenty of trips to the beach.

I don't often bring my camera with me when I go to the beach, but the other day I happened to bring it along to a late afternoon trip to Burleigh beach where there are some amazing views.

The old 40D takes some good photos, but good god i want a 5D

Corolla Shoot Revisited

I'm quite lucky living in the estate I live, it's not the most picturesque of places however it offers the occasional spot for a car photo shoot if you don't wish to travel too far from home.
One such place as you will have seen is where i took the photos of the silvia the other day.

I wanted to take some photos of the corolla today but quickly lost motivation after realising i had mismatched wheels and almost no fuel... After thinking for a while i realised there was a spot in which i hadn't taken photos of the car for about four years now.

Turned out to be the perfect spot, and a perfect way to show the difference between then and now of the car and of my photography skills and equipment.

2011

2006

It's a Boy!

So we've been around for a couple of years now, but our Midnight Mechanics blog has only just celebrated its first year! The 30th of January last year was my first blog post for us and I'm very excited that it's been a year already!

I hope you have all enjoyed the crap we have been getting up to so far and im definitely looking forward to giving you guys much more content in the coming years!

Let me know also what sort of stuff you guys want to see posted up here! Obviously we are working on trying to get as much track time and photos to share with you, but anything else you can suggest will be great!

Thanks for reading guys!!

Jasons 4agze Progress

So behind the scene Jase has been making some fairly impressive progress on his car. Impressive progress despite saving as much as he can and actually buying a house in between all this car work.

About three months ago we had all planned to head up to a drift day, unfortunately Jase's Ze decided on the morning it wanted to only run on 3 cylinders this was not to happen for Jase.
The motor had been having problems before this, we were all leaning towards problems from the head upwards... Gasket, valve guides or stem seals etc... This was not to be.

Luckily Jase managed to find out about about an engine builder in tweed who knows his shit top to bottom.
After Marky, the engine Jedi as Jason puts it, pulled the motor apart it was found to have fucked bearings, rings and a scored crank. This always means a lot of fun ahead.

So the solution for the motor was to grind the crank, hone the cylinder bore, deck the block and shave the head because apparently they were both warped lol.
Seeing as the whole thing was apart they also decided to port the head, port match the inlet manifold and extractors, put in a 1mm ACL head gasket, ARP head studs, ACL rings, new bearings and of course replace all gaskets and seals plus smooth all the oil galleries.

Here's an idea of the porting that was done to the head, razor sharp!

How the block turned out, Marky has truly gone all out with this motor as you will see in further pics. No part has gone uncleaned/polished or painted.

While all this was happening in the workshop Jase decided to kick start his career as a professional painter by painting his engine bay.
With all the motor out this is how it was looking

With a solid bit of tidying up this is how looked

Meanwhile, at the Legion of Doom...
Oh wait..

The motor got treated to new sump bolts and stainless welsh plugs. By this point Marky had been going all out on the motor. Every minor detail was becoming more significant with every step. The porting on the head was still being completed at this point.

Prep for the engine bay

Painted

The final result when cleared. I'm very impressed with Jason's efforts on this, i really want to do this myself with my car. I think i want to eventually fork out for a compressor though so i can comfortably paint my metallic honey paint in there.

Here is what the motor is currently up to, we aren't joking when we say Marky has thoroughly gone way out of his way for this motor. As Jase put it, good enough is just not good enough for this guy. I honestly cannot wait to see this running, its going to be the worlds most beautiful smoothest running gze ever.

On top of all this, Jase has picked up an SC14 supercharger and will be doing a W box conversion in order to prevent those nasty T box breakages.
That's it for now, i will have some more progress and pics for you when i go help Jase put it back into the car!