VIEJO 4

Model: Alexis AmorMakeup: Brianna Lemus

As many of you know, the lowrider lifestyle spans all cultures, creeds, denominations... well, you get the picture. So when we heard about someone who's from the "Land of the Rising Sun" and how he wanted to bring a car over to the States for a build, we knew that it would be a nice story to tell.Enter Tashimichi Suzuki of Torrance, California, who's a recent transplant from Japan. Suzuki had the notion to finish building his '64 Chevy Impala ragtop in the United States of America. He did try and build "Viejo 4" at home, but soon realized how expensive it would be to do this while trying to learn the art of building a lowrider, hands-on. So while scouring the surrounding Los Angeles area, he came across a shop that could do the majority of the work in-house. That shop is called Craps Inc., located in lovely Whittier, California, where most of the work was taken care of.
In a foreign economy, the American dollar can be a plus or a hindrance when financing a costly project such as building a lowrider. In Japan, there are shops that are very qualified to build lowriders, but Suzuki didn't just want to commission someone to build him a turnkey car; he wanted to be hands-on during the process. One wonders if he would have been able to partake in the build had he offered someone back in Japan an extra amount, but that's highly improbable.
So moving into the South Bay area of Los Angeles made it much easier for Suzuki to deal with some of the best builders in the lowrider culture. Sitting in traffic at times to get to a shop to get parts done can be a burden for many of us, but try to get something from clear across the Pacific Ocean; now that's hard!Luckily for Suzuki, he had a chance to get to know people like Yasayuki Igarashi, Mike Ishiki, Mark "the Glass Man" Luna, John Kennedy of Bowtie Connection and Mister Sakai, who helped tremendously in the build-up.
We hear that riding around in a "low-low" in Japan is for the privileged. There's hardly enough room on the small roads for those big-bodied "Bowties" and you can just imagine how much the fuel costs on the island, so with that said we can safely assume that Suzuki is sporting a mighty grin with his righteous ragtop. Sayonara.

Viejo 4

Owner: Tashimichi Suzuki
Vehicle: '64 Chevrolet Impala convertible
City/State: Torrance, California
Club: No affiliation

Engine/Drivetrain: The beefed-up engine is an '85 Chevy 350-c.i.d. small-block that has been dressed up with polished aluminum parts, upgraded to fuel injection and uses hard-lines for all of the fluid lines. A Turbo 350 transmission makes good use of the power that comes from the powerplant. The exhaust has been upgraded to a Flowmaster system for real-world horsepower.
Body/Paint: The bodywork was done in Chiba, Japan, by Yasuyuki Higurashi of Hikari-Jidousha shop before Yasuyuki painted the ragtop PPG ivory.
Interior: The quality of work coming out of Bowtie Connection in Artesia, California, reaches far across land and sea, so it was easy for Suzuki to pick the shop where he'd have the ragtop worked on. An OG kit was ordered for the '64 and a top was fabricated to match the color of the car.
Sound System: Craps Inc. in Whittier, California, gets props for the sound system that includes a digital head unit, and Pioneer tweeters and mids, while a pair of Kicker 12-inch subwoofers pound out the trunk area. There's even a color bar mounted in the trunk for a little visual punch.
Setup: The crew at Craps Inc. seem to know their way around building a top-notch hydraulic system using a double-pump hookup. Two Marzocchi pumps were picked up from Hi-Low Hydraulics with Hydro-Aire #8 three-way dumps. The hookup is connected via hard-lines of stainless steel along with #8 hoses, four check valves and two hydraulic oil filters. The blocks are of a double-pressure double-return design. Eight batteries are wired via solenoids and four switches up front provide the control. Six-inch cylinders bring up the nose while 12-inchers can be found in the rear. Mr. Igarashi of Craps also redid the chassis and had a hand in the installation of the four-wheel disc brakes and rear sway bar. The frame itself was taken down to Homie's Hydraulics in Paramount, California, where it was wrapped for reinforcement.
Tires: P155/80-R13 Cooper
Wheels: 13x7 Gold Star