About Me

        I didn’t come out of the womb a car guy. There’s not one mechanic in my family. No one was into cars. My mom had a first-round shipment of the Prius that arrived in the States. I grew up with Smog checks, surrounded by environmentalists, hippies, and computer wizards in the town of the Ocean Shore Railroad, so I was a train kid. 

        Trains were the best thing since sliced bread. I had a neighbor who worked at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, and I would scoot over to his backyard to watch his model trains. Naturally, this led me to get my own G-scale, because watching machines move lit my brain on fire. This was the genesis, the moka pot of mechanical love, of the dormant motorhead neurons that would soon be firing and wiring together, sublimely and increasingly screaming for recognition as I got older.

Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like the speedometer.

        The only thing denser than my brain in high school was my lead foot. I got my license, and then I got a speeding ticket, which led to a slap on the wrist in juvenile court and a judge telling me to get my needs met at a track day. Unfortunately, I wasn’t old enough to attend such events. So I decided to embark on an overzealous first project car at seventeen and sank more money into it than the Titanic. It was a 1966 Ford Mustang that didn’t run, didn’t brake, and came with an assortment of items in the trunk that told me more about the previous owners than I ever needed to know. I still have the baseball bat. 

        Enter the pandemic. I was a college student during Zoom hell. As a mechanical engineering major, I got to drive a friend’s E36 M3. What does the three stand for? Perfection. The trinity. The IQ needed to know that it’s a great car. One thing led to another, and by the summer, I drank the Kool-Aid and had myself a priest-owned M3 that was running with a slight attitude problem. The dampers were leaking, every bushing was shot, and the shift knob broke off in less than a week. Regardless, I loved every second of driving it and found myself trying to fix it more than a doomed relationship.

        I built my foundation on this M3. I started tackling jobs I wouldn’t have otherwise touched out of necessity. My first serious undertaking came after a miss-shift at Thunderhill that left me with bent valves and a broken heart. Of course, I created a spreadsheet of my track days, with more detail than my medical record: this one was high on the numerical pain scale, leading to a cylinder-head rebuild, my first encounter with a machinist, a deeper teardown of the engine's top end, and a complete introspection of my life’s priorities, which happened to align with the teardown of the engine’s timing system.

To err is human, to edit is divine, to drive well is a supernatural miracle in the state of California. 

        I made mistakes. Many mistakes. My saving grace was the tips and tricks from people who knew what they were talking about, and plenty of hours spent on what seemed hopeless, trying it anyway and learning as I went. The wombo-combo of frustration + an awesome car + a piece of junk + no clue what I was doing made me the mechanic I am today. 

        Speaking of today, my AE86 has been my weeaboo, Toyota-synchophant dream come true. Not only did it introduce me to a different era of tuning, but it pushed me out of the nest further than the E36 did. I rebuilt the engine, replaced the fire hazard that was the wiring harness, and made my girlfriend sit with a laptop and read off the AFR as I drove. This car really made me start to appreciate the complexities of life. Maybe it was my brain forming grey matter; maybe it was the supremacy of a mid-80s economy car; all I can say is that my interests broadened significantly, mechanically speaking.

        Initially, suspension captured my attention. Then I rebuilt engines and discovered how much I enjoyed that. Later, I tuned a standalone ECU and felt the wonder behind a solid electrical and control system in a performance build. What I enjoy most now is seeing multiple components working as one. In a car. Together. At the same time. And preferably for more than five minutes without blowing up.

        And then there's the mystical satisfaction, the DIY pride of paying your dues and being able to explain every modification you made happen, your intentions executed and now in physical form. That doesn't mean doing everything alone, but it does mean you didn’t kick the can. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to listen to those who know more, keep that pesky ego in check, and try things to eliminate as many "Will that work?" questions as possible, to build concrete knowledge. I never regretted the hours spent researching, designing, assembling, and troubleshooting because it’s all worth it when I have the privilege and bittersweet necessity of driving it to the gas station. That's what keeps me coming back. 

Give me six hours to fix a car, and I will spend the first four on Reddit.  

        I wanted to compile all of my bright ideas, headaches, points of suggestions, recommendations, shortcuts, roundabouts, and foolish detours into one place so that others can take what they want and be on their way.  

        I've spent countless hours reading forums, old build threads, technical documents, and discussions from people who took the time to share what they knew and at no cost. Free, useful, and great for building your bullshit detection skills. I've benefited enormously from that, so now it’s time for me to do my part. 

        It’s 2026; no one should have to sift through the labyrinths of the old internet, compounded by the organizational strategy of stream-of-consciousness writeups, rabid prescriptions scattered across dozens of websites, or, surprise, a holy grail site disappears, and with it the knowledge of an entire generation of car nerds. The AE86 community, in particular, with light and love, has an incredible amount of knowledge tucked away in the basement of antiquity. I want to help keep that kind of information available in a contemporary manner. 

        Selfishly, this site is also a place for me to organize my own research. I tend to plan projects well before I can afford to build them, spending weeks figuring out the parts, comparing approaches, creating spreadsheets, and working through all the details (that I know of), only to have months pass before I actually get around to doing anything. By then, self-confidence bias is at an all-time high, and many critical details are stored in deep memory as “I’ll figure it out when I get there”. So this is my digital scrapbook, vault of receipts, handbook of one man’s automotive genius where I have one place to lay out the research, document the process, and look back at what I've broken, fixed, and made. 

        Inevitably, someone will come along with a project that I perhaps had success in—swapping an engine into a different chassis? Figuring out a suspension setup to be a work of art? Abusing bathroom time to amp up the collective knowledge for a 1ZZ-FE ignition coil as a “technical post?” I’ll have that all here. Instead of starting from scratch every time, voila, here’s beautiful data. This doesn't replace a good conversation with a Q&A, nor is it a substitute for critical thinking, but it can give at least one of us a starting point. Or so I hope. 

       My goal is to share not just what I did, but why I did it: what I was trying to accomplish, the options I considered, what worked and what didn't, and where the information came from. I distilled the chaos into bathtub gin, and someone could take a shot of it somewhere.

          So that's what Jasooon is about. It's a place for me to do my thing, share what I learn, and hopefully make someone else's project a little easier along the way.