Washed

I gave the Civic a wash, it had been neglected for ages over winter so I thought I'd show it some love. Now that is has no registration plates on it looks a little more evil at the front.

-5 Civic

I feel sorry for my Civic being sat alone and cold on the driveway. The weather has been insanely cold for English standards over the last week, some places were tipping -20 Celsius, that is pretty damn cold for Yorkshire. Once the weather clears up around March time I will hopefully commence preparing the Civic for competitive racing.

project-eg6 is still alive

After a few months of no progress and no posts maybe some of you wonder what's happened to my EG6. Well it's still with me, not totally road going at the moment though due to having it declared SORN and no tax. I have some major plans for this car over the next year but first I have to put it on hold whilst I save up for my own place with a garage and driveway before progress can begin.

Here is the current state of the car now.

Hasport EG6

I seriously love time attack Civic EG6's. This one is without doubt wildest one around. The Front Wing is probably OTT but I'm sure it does serve a good purpose similar to Chris Rado's F-Wing. Soon I am hoping to turn my EG6 into some sort of semi-professional racing car over the next year.

This is great inspiration for all those who love the EG6 Civic.

Video

Night Shooting

Just practising some night time photography with my car and showing off my hid kits and led rear number plate lights. Due to the different coloured lights all around it was hard to get a good white balance, and again exposing a Black car is never easy at night.

Exhaust Problem

I heard a little blowing sound coming from the underneath near the centre of my car, which can only really mean one thing. So I got it up on the ramp and had a look over and confirmed a hole had appeared in the silencer on the mid-section of the Fujitsubo system.




Clearly its still a bit low for UK roads and speed bumps as you can see the scrape marks have worn away the thickness of the metal over time. I have the car booked in with Zorstec next Wednesday to make a up a whole new centre section pipe without the silencer this time, should sound pretty good I'm hoping!

Experiments | Nikon 70-300mm Lens

I borrowed a different lens from my work, as stated in the title its a 70-300mm Nikon lens. I've used this before at work but never really had much time to play around, my current lens is the 18-70mm Nikon but you can't get that same soft blur effect when you use the zoom quite extensively on this 300mm lens. Here are a few shots just experimenting with different angles etc.

70mm



300mm

Cleaning

So it was a sunny but windy Sunday afternoon this bank holiday so I decided I'd give the car a little inspection and check the oil and other fluids. In order to do this on a nice level surface on my driveway I would have to remove my front bumper as the Spoon lip would get ripped straight off due to the crazy steep driveway I am lucky to have. I checked all the levels and they were all ok, so no worries there. As you can see now that the bumper is off, I have mounted the second set of HID ballast boxes behind the bumper which are for the fog lights.





One thing I have been meaning to do is clean the exhaust tip, the inside of it mainly as it has loads of carbon build up and looks pretty nasty, so I got the trust wire brush out and a little bit of Autosol and off I went scrubbing away. The results speak for themselves really, great looking exhaust system the Fujitsubo Power Getter.

Photoshoot | R33 GT-R & EG6 SiR

So here's my first attempt with my new Nikon D70 at a photoshoot. I called up my friend with it being a sunny day and me being pretty eager to test out the new toy. He agreed to come along for a nice drive and some photo's at some point along the way. I was completely shocked that even a standard GT-R is extremely fast, no wonder they are called Godzilla! After having a blast on some of the windy roads that England has to offer we had a bite to eat then decided on an industrial location for the shoot, below are the results. I welcome any comments and criticism as this is my first real shoot with the new camera, I think they turned out quite well, perhaps I should have set the ISO to 200 instead of 320 to reduce grain.













I really think the photo's are a vast improvement on the previous calibre, I look forward to hearing your opinions.

Full quality versions can be found here | R33 & EG6 Flickr

The New Bad Boy | Nikon D70 D-SLR

Well it was about time I purchased a proper camera, so being quite familiar with the Nikon D70 after using Jo's a few times in the past I decided to purchase a used one for myself. I picked up a beauty that was hardly used, came with all the original packaging even the ties for the cables were still on. So expect to see a little more quality on here and my other blog's once I get used to it. Full photoshoot coming this Sunday so stay tuned if your interested.

Nikon D70 D-SLR

HD

かれ　の　ばか　です　ビデオ 1 from jo kirk

かれ　の　ばか　です　ビデオ 2 from jo kirk

かれ　の　ばか　です　ビデオ 3 from jo kirk

Euro Trip 2010 | Part 3

Ok so here is my final blog from my European trip. Firstly a quick video of the road from the hotel which we stayed at in Austria, this road was awesome, if only I had more time to practice on it for a little while and film a full throttle run along it.

Austrian Roads | Semriach from Richard Raw on Vimeo.

After watching and loving the Austrian Hillclimb event we were headed for the would famous Nürburgring via the also famous German Autobahn roads with unlimited speed sections along the way. This was the first time I had been able to not worry about the speed limit and just concentrate on people pulling out into my path whilst travelling at 113mph (Japanese limiter was still installed). Here is a quick video to give you an idea of the speed, it looks as though the cars in the slow lane are travelling at 50mph, when in reality they are travelling around 80-90mph.

German Autobahn from Richard Raw on Vimeo.

About halfway to Nürburgring we stopped in a town called Koblenz which is only about 50km away from the actual circuit. After being away from home for about 4 days I was actually in the mood for a good old curry. So I had a quick search using the TomTom and I found a curry house right in the centre which sounded good, so it was time for a spicy Jalfreizi and Lamb Tikka for starters, yum. Here is a quick shot of the town square, very nice architecture throughout Europe in the city centre's.



Nürburgring





A quick video of one of the test cars that day. I think it is an E92 M3 GTR.

Nurburgring Test Day from Richard Raw on Vimeo.

Now for a kool story, whilst preparing myself to drive on the Nürburgring an EG3 Civic turned up from Belgium no less, I got talking to the owner and checked out what he had done to his car then vice versa. He asked for me to take him for a ride round the ring and vice versa, this was great fun as he was more experienced on the ring than myself so I got to see what speed to take the corners and which lines work the best for FF layout cars. So I'd like to say many thanks to Niels, and here is his Civic.





Ok so that was all the footage and photograph's we had time to capture at the Nürburgring, from there we headed for one of the larger cities in Germany, Cologne aka Köln in the local language. This was an awesome city, much like the others we had visited with its classic architecture and large city squares. This place had a huge main street with all the bars, restaurants and clubs along, it was a very buzzing place with some random graffiti.




Overall the trip was amazing and although we were quite pushed for time we managed to make the most of it I think. I've learnt that the next time I go it should be for much longer so we can absorb and explore more of the cities and countryside as most of this trip was driving, we roughly covered 2,500 miles in 5 days. The little Civic didn't miss a beat at all, I drove it hard on the Alpine roads, I thrashed it around the Nürburgring, smashed it along the Autobahn and it made it home in one piece. It is a testament to how well a 15 year old Japanese car can handle that kind of abuse day in day out.