As some of you may know, I was in California for the past 3 weeks on vacation. Originally, I wasn’t planning to check out any car stuff because for one, I no longer have a car to modify. I’ve been slowly trying to transition out of the tuner scene for the time being because I need to save money for more important things in life, say like a house. lol! For most of the vacation time, I was staying in the Socal-LA area at RTHR’s brother’s house along with some friends and fam. My sister used to stay up North and my girl had never previously been up there before so it was the perfect time to make a trip up. To make things even more interesting, we decided to make the 6+ hour drive up instead of taking a plane ride. Cruising in our Chevy Impala rent-a-car, we made the trek up and visited many of the requisite tourist spots in San Francisco…

Like this place… Lombard Street. Weird ass windy road in the middle of the city. Look it up on Google. Place is pretty nuts… and yes we actually drove on it.

For those who haven’t been to San Francisco before… many of the roads and side streets look like this. Everywhere you go you feel like you’re driving up and down Latte Heights Hill. The car shops in SF probably make a killing on replacing burnt clutches. I shit you not, I think we were driving at 90 degrees at one point…

As we were cruising around to one of our destinations, I caught a glimpse of Franklin Auto Body Shop. For those who follow the Honda scene, they know that this shop recently has been in the spotlight for working on some of California’s top Hondas. If you look closely, you can see the owner’s hooked up Honda Insight chillen livin the lyfe up front.

Like this one… Photo courtesy of DJ Murdok
http://www.flickr.com/photos/djmurdokphotos/

We drove by rather quickly and decided we would be back to check the place out. Bad decision because when we finally decided to head back, the address on the GPS was wrong. I was kinda bummed because I was so excited. At the end of the day, I was thinking that since I was out here in California… I might as well take the opportunity to check out a place I’ve been meaning to see, Weaksauce Industries. I went there already in 2007, but like my visit to Franklin Autobody, I wasn’t able to get down and actually check the place out. Since then, Weaksauce has grown “hella” big… Not only do they slang parts like Harry, they have moved onto having their own car show known as Wekfest.

So why am I so goo-goo ga-ga over this place? When I first got into the tuning scene, I started out with a 96 Lexus ES300. The Menace Fam at the time was comprised mostly of Honda vehicles and I was always on the net checking out the latest trends and styles coming out of California. I ran into a website called WekSos which featured this black Civic coupe on some Mugens with CTR headlights. At the time (2005), it was just an enthusiast website, pretty small-time. I emailed them for some stickers and they sent it out to me here on Guam. They were probably wondering who the hell is this guy asking for stickers in the middle of nowhere… Alot of people on island were also asking me what that sticker was all about. I was probably the first guy to know about this place! lol

Me rocking the banner… back in 2007?

When I did the rebuild on the Civic, they were already getting pretty big and I ordered a ton of parts from them including this…

Buddy Club N+ suspension

Cool story: I ordered the ones without the top-hats but as you can see in the pic, they sent me the one WITH them. They emailed me about the mistake and told me to enjoy the +$250 upgrade. Yea boy!

The day before we were supposed to drive back down to LA, we plugged Weksos’ address into the GPS and arrived to what seemed to be a closed office. 🙁

You can see my girl taking a pic of me looking into their seemingly closed shop. It was pretty sad for me because again I thought I had missed the opportunity. I was thinking of calling them up to check if they were open… which I was about ready to do when we got back into the car to decide what to do next.

Forever sad…. 🙁

Right when we were about to pull out of the parking lot, my sister says she thought she saw someone moving inside. I was like WHATTTTTT! So I got back down and started knocking on the door. No one answered, so I actually tried pulling the door and what do you know it opened! What’s funny is that I thought those bars were protection bars, like the ones we have on our windows here on Guam. But Weksos didn’t put those up for potential sakis, they are there to look cool! hahaha! I heard a ding-dong sound and one of the guys, James, comes up and says what’s up! I was completely thrown off-guard and I know for a fact that I was stuttering talking to him. I was like “I’m from off-island…” Fail. Once again, these guys were probably like what/who the F is this guy….

After the awkwardness died down, he was pretty hospitable and welcomed me to take pics of the place. When I got to the fact that I was from Guam, he said that he gets orders from us all the time. He even mentioned “area code 671.” That guy knew his stuff. Legit!

 They had a bunch of wheels around the shop… Didn’t take a pic of the rest though.

There were also many of these covering their walls… Magazine features from Honda Tuning, Super Street, etc.

Their Wekfest show is not only the West anymore… They got one planned in the Windy City too.

Last pic… found this cool banner setup in the corner. It’s not a big shop at all as they distribute parts from larger companies.

Since I don’t have a car to put any parts on anymore, all I left with was a t-shirt and some stickers. They were also kind enough to throw in a pair of license plate frames for free. All in all, it was a pretty surreal experience for me. Hearing and reading about these places on the internet is one thing, but seeing them in real-life is so much different. Read more about Weak Sauce at http://www.weaksauceparts.com/.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to check out our online store to get those stickers! We only have a limited amount, so get your orders in asap! 😉