Tearing into the KE70 and finding a few surprises inside… interior out, wiring chaos, vents confusion, and a bit more progress on the build.
After spending a full year driving my AE86 on the road, I wanted to share the honest truth about what it’s like to actually live with one of these Truenos.
An old Irish Corolla KE70 van, a shed-built V8 swap, and pure Mad Max drift energy. This retro beast shouldn’t exist… but it does — and it’s glorious.
Wild AE86’s, Ke70’s and MORE! Drift style lives on at Final Bout Nikko.
Looking around a K12 NISMO March cup car, saved from getting scrapped/
A rare encounter with a gang of wild Kaido Racers and a Vertex track day at Mobara
We find the remains of Yatabe, Japan’s lost high-speed Test track.
It’s hard to convey here just how happy he was to finish his seven-year itch finally. I’m not going into great detail here. I think we covered it perfectly in the video on the 86, but being able to finally do a shoot like this on an unusual April evening in the same spot I had shot this car seven years before. I don’t think the vehicle will even look this good again, but either way, I wanted to get these photos on the website for some time.
As sad as this sounds, and I know there won’t be a lot of people looking at these, I never thought a time would come when I could finally post my build on Juicebox; doing this blog since 2009, I was always out of capture whatever I thought was cool in Ireland and beyond. I hope to get my car to be proud of up here. By the time I got to it, blogs were essentially dead, so we’ve moved the story to YouTube, but it’s a real sense of achievement to shoot this car and post it on the blog. Please enjoy a generous amount of images from that evening. And as always, thanks for looking.
This was probably the most significant change in the ae86 build. The car had sat in that strange maroon colour for so long in various shades, paired with primer and glimpses of restoration work; the car was essentially a patchwork quilt of misery. After years of tackling this without seeing any significant visual change, sanding the entire body down to bare metal and seeing the whole car uniform in silver was a moral boost.
A productive weekend at the shed, finding more Trueno problems, fitting the headlight assembly, checking out Foley’s forgotten S14 and more.
At the time, I didn’t realise just how important this day would be. In well over three years, the ae86 hadn’t seen the light of day on its wheels. After we fitted the engine and box, we decided to push the car over to Flips to fit the manifold, sort a Flexi pipe and do the exhaust.
Fitting new parts onto the shell was one of the greatest feelings. Everyone was buzzing to help, which made for a hilarious weekend of assembly craic with the lads. It was a huge milestone, it felt like we had reached the peak, and everything was going to be easier from here on in. After looking at the 86 as a bare shell for so long, I was starting to wonder if we would ever get to this stage. Out of nowhere, the body went from looking more or less the same for two-plus years into pretty much a rolling chassis in the space of two nights. It all happened so quick that it took a week or two for my brain to catch up.