A Sunday Morning at Daikoku. (Patreon)

So in between all the sanding and episodes, I've been trying to get out and about a bit more. When some friends came to visit recently we decided to head to Daikoku but rather than go on a Friday or Saturday night like everyone else, we got up early and headed out to see the turnout on a nice Sunday morning.And I'm glad we did because having been already, the cars on display and the atmosphere in the morning was completely different. Pulling into the parking area, the first car that caught my attention was a fellow Suzuki Twin.

Just absolutely pristine condition, and the I managed to catch the owner as he was pulling out, an older gentleman and I was able to show him my Twin and we got to share a laugh about our dumb little cars. I'm sure I was not what he was expecting when he left that morning.

Before he left I crow-barred this little Twin into a handful of other photos so keep an eye out as a little easter egg.

Moving through the cars we immediately saw the main difference of the Sunday morning turnout which was the massive number of older cars, "Kyusha" which have always been my favorite and the ones here were absolutely stunning.

This gorgeous little KE is a car that I've always seen in magazines growing up and it's in my top 10 picks for cars to make up my dream garage for sure.

This one was looking incredibly clean just on a nice set of Hayashi Streets with the classic bolt on flares.

It wasn't just Japanese cars, there were quite a range of cars from throughout Europe and America as well.

This 64 Impala is the same car my dad owned when my parents first met, was pretty cool to see this out and about.

Loved this little lifted Land Cruiser. It's been kinda wild to see how popular these cars have become after just seeing them everywhere as a kid.

A particularly sick car that pulled up while we were walking around was this Lotus Esprit. If I had a higher budget, this would have definitely been a contender for the base for the group C build I'm working on.

But I'd say the stand out moment of the morning was hearing the distant chorus of exhaust pipes accompanied by entire group of bosozoku bikes pulling up for a quick break before heading off to peacefully terrorize another early morning coffee spot.

Honestly these guys were great, lots of laughs, nobody taking themselves too seriously, and they didn't want to overstay their welcome so after a few minutes they were gone. But it was great to see these works of art up close. And of course it just wouldn't be Daikoku without the obligatory row of hachi rokus.

A car that is a bit rarer to see was an S-chassis. As a Silvia owner myself these cars are always cool to see in the wild given their reputation for going up on axle stands and never coming back down. This 180 in particular had exactly the classic 90's vibe that I'll be going for on mine once it finally arrives here in Japan.

It took me a while to warm up to these B-wave spoilers, but now I love them and they are one of the pieces that I've already ordered, ready to install on mine once it gets her.And anybody familiar with S-chassis is probably asking the obvious "so where's the trailer?" well jokes on you, this one didn't come here on a trailer.

It came on a flat bed truck. Classic Nissan.

Some other Nissans that did manage to make it here under there own power included all the usual suspects.

Then you had the Z's, Just about every year on display, new and old.

The wheels on this new Z just gave it a completely different feel with a surprising amount of meat on these tyres. It kind of gave it a drag car sort of feel.

The two with this orange Z were great. I'd never seen this colour so I went up and spoke to them and you could tell they were such a fun couple. Always great to get to talk to these owners. One day I'll have one of these Z's.

And then there were just all the other cars here, just an awesome mix and some cars that you have to take a second glance at because you aren't sure if you're seeing that right.

This Lancia stratus just casually sitting between a 4 door skyline and a Dastun Sunny with the Hakosuka front end swap.

I'm glad I grabbed a photo of it quick because the parking lot at Daikoku is constantly moving, so by the time you've walked from one end to the other and back, there's a different line up, and so a spot that was being taken up by an old Datsun truck was quickly replaced with this pretty red Italian thing.

A classic Z has to be one of my favorite cars of all time, so it's very impressive when there's a line up like this that can actually force me to take my eyes off it.The Stratos though was just unreal. I've driven these countless times in my video games, but never seen one in person, and so this was something I was super grateful for.

Just as I was picking my jaw up off the floor I step back and capture a Shelby Cobra driving through. This one didn't even stop I don't think, just drive in and out, something I've seen a few cars doing here. I guess with the popularity of Daikoku especially among foreigners, the atmosphere has changes slightly (and the number of available spaces) and so you do see quite a lot of people just passing through rather than getting out and chatting.

I've always loved the Mercedes 190e, I'm really drawn to boxy old cars. There were two of them here, one even seemed to be the Cosworth model, very cool.

As a fellow MX-5 owner I did feel like I had to capture this quite clean and very low eunos roadster, with no front plate surprisingly, didn't know that was a thing here. I'll have to look into that for the Group C build when I start taking it down to the shops.

There was a pretty cool little camera rig set up, I guess someone had just been out shooting rollers on the wangan before stopping in to review the footage.

I absolutely loved this little Pulsar. This was very nearly my first car so these will always be special to me.

I'm quite a fan of those wheels. The old dvan RG / SSR Type-C's. What do we think, potential daily wheel for the Twin build?

This cool little cyberpunk itasha 86.After this I'd seen just about everything and so just walked around grabbing more random photos that have taken me about a month to sort through.

It's wild to see the absolute choke hold that Nissan had on the car scene up until the 90's, I'd say maybe 30 - 40% of all the cars here were either a Nissan or Datsun. And now Nissan just don't have any idea what they're doing it seems like.But the fun of the morning didn't end there. Since we'd come into town, we decided we might as well hit up a couple other spots and so one that I'd been keen to check out for a while was the Nismo Omori factory.

Nismo umbrella holders anyone?

You bet I took plenty of time to get close up reference for our own group C build.

It's beginning to feel a bit like this post was brought to you buy Nissan, but we all know they aren't doing well enough right now to pay my usual sponsorship fee.

Just look at it. There just hasn't been a nicer looking car. (Obviously excluding the Twin)

The Omori factory is pretty small. It's completely free to enter and has it's own carpark which is unusual, on one side of the building they have a glass wall showing all the GTRs getting restored.

A little 40% scale model for wind tunnel testing. Might be a good idea for us too. I'll just need to put together a wind tunnel.

We saw some cool stuff in the magazine of what they had for sale, but they didn't have it in stock there at Omori, but they did let us know the Nissan Heritage Museum was pretty close and we could grab it there.

OFF TO ANOTHER NISSAN SHOWROOM!

There really wasn't that much here, a cool carpark that was like a car vending machine and then some concepts and a gift shop.

There were some sick scale models, and even some less sick scale models.

Honestly though, the convertible Micra looks better than the real one.

In the store though there was a gift shop and although I didn't walk out empty handed, these 33,000 ¥ Nismo sandals were a bit much. But if any of you want to just throw your money away I can get these and make them my new safety jandals for out in the garage. (maybe)

What I did grab however was a few smaller things.

Life's all about little treats. And so every time I go somewhere I try get a little cheap souviner. Here I got a genuine Nismo badge to make feel slightly less bad about all the fake Nismo merch I buy because I'm not paying some scalper off eBay $1,000 USD for a shift knob.

These were pretty funny. If you've ever been to 7-Eleven here you might have picked up a common beer snack, "kakinotane" which are basically little rice crackers. Nissan sell some in a beer can in the shape of some classic models.

Probably not many people can say they got Skyline rice snacks from the Nissan museum.

Then to round that off, in the 7-Eleven on the way back, we found a gachapon doing a limited edition GT-R keys capsule toy, so we grabbed a couple of those because might as well.

I got the R33 and the R34 keys, and you bet your ass I'm going to get a new key cut for my Twin and find a way to put it inside the R34 plastic housing.But that was not the end of the random car stuff, and this last stop was one that I have actually been meaning to do for years.

I finally visited an Up Garage.

Up Garage vending machines.

And then in the stores we have exactly what you'd expect, a huge assortment of wheels and tires, exhausts, and a bunch of random bits and pieces.

I didn't exactly need anything from Up Garage, but that didn't stop me from buying anything. You'll see in the next Twin update.

I figured since there's nothing really too exciting in this that I'd throw this up as a free post for all my Patreon followers, even the ones that don't love me enough to give me money for no reason. I'm going to be posting a few more little behind the scenes / random updates I hope. I've been taking plenty of photos of things like little road trips, work on my house, as well as some photos of the next round of mods for the Twin, but it's just been hard to find the time to go through them, colour grade and edit them, then upload them on here. That's it.Peace out.