Ben’s Car Blog

Over at AusRotary there’s a great thread with a few pictures of 1960s and 1970s Japanese cars, most of which never made it out of Japan. Go on, have a look.

A couple of the cars in that thread are what I’d call “big iron”. More than 4 cylinders, fast and, well, big. In Australian terms most of the cars that we didn’t get (or at least didn’t get the interesting versions of) would be XP Falcon or EH Holden sized and intended for the top-end of the market. Things like Toyota Crowns, various big Nissans and so on. In the US these would be classified as “compacts”, I think.

At the other end of the scale are the things like the Cosmo Sports, the various Celicas (probably running interesting engines like 2TGs and 18RGs), the Belletts and the Lancer GTOs.

Oh, yeah. Ignore the first picture of the Alpine as that’s French.

I love the Japanese Restorer in Australia magazine. It’s produced by Jonathan Barr in Queensland and it’s devoted to old Japanese cars.

Australia is in a fairly unique position with old Japanese cars. We were usually the only export market for a lot of old, interesting, cars from Japan. Coupled with the mostly warm air and lack of salt on the roads, we have many more old Japanese cars getting around than any other country.

JRiA is a broad church, covering all Japanese manufacturers of cars and trucks. The contacts Jonathan Barr has allows him to cover car shows in Japan as well as locally. If you’re at all interested in old cars, check it out. And if you’re in to old Japanese cars — Toyota, Datsun, Mazda, Honda, Mitsubishi, and more — you really need to check this magazine out.

I recently showed several of my copies to my parents, which was interesting for two reasons. First, although I knew that my Mum owned a new Toyota KE20 Corolla, back in the day, I didn’t know that what she really wanted was a KE15 Sprinter. I reckon she’d be in for a KE15 today, given her enthusiasm for the ones in the magazine. Second, while I’d always thought of my Dad as a Holden (and maybe Valiant and Volvo) man, he told me that he’d always like the 1970s RX-4/929 coupes. Excellent. A KE15 and an RX-4 coupe would go nicely with my 1500ss.

I love stuff like this.

DATSUN.ORG presents the “bible” of preparing your Roadster for the track by veteran racer Bob Sharp. While over thirty years old, the manual is still a wonderful resource chocked full of schematics and photographs of the 1500, 1600, and 2000 Roadster.

It really is awesome. I’ve geeky enough that I even like the typesetting.

Converting Bob Sharp’s Datsun Competition Preparation Manual into Adobe Acrobat format took just over 50 hours.

I love that there is so much passion for the Roadster that someone took the time to re-produce a classic manual. Modern technolgy and techniques had probably surplanted what the manual describes as possible but that doesn’t really matter, does it?