#014 View of bottom of seat and main chassis leaning against the pole. #011 Heavy duty springs and other parts in need of re-chroming. The emblem in center of bumper is of the deer with wings again. #009 Rear bumper was not damaged but had some rust on back side, needed re-chroming. Notice the blue roof was taped on with black electrical tape. Hated to remove it but had to do repairs to the seat and removed 4 layers of old paint. #007 Scene hand painted on back of passenger seat is of the Bridge Over River Kwai. #006 Looking down at the floorboard shows a lot of rot and damage. Man at the re-chroming shop did a great job of grinding them off and re-chroming handlebars. #004 Notice the motorcycle mirrors welded to handle bars. Notice a lot of rust and front fender damage at the bottom. #002 Center of the photo is a cast iron emblem of a deer with wings with the name of the company : Liang Service Co. Things looked ok before I bought it, boy was I wrong!! The picture makes it appear to be in good shape. The last new samlors sold a few years ago for around $2000.00. If you click on the link that I have attached you will find the pictures and if you look in the lower right hand corner you will find the comment on each picture same as below. I will use the picture number in my draft here and hope that they will match up in order when I attach the photos to this email. I will try to explain a little about each picture the best that I can and hopefully you will understand. Most people thought I was out of my mind, but I already knew that. It was a real experience trying to explain to shop owners which parts that I was looking for when they were not expecting a foreigner to be fixing up an old samlor. It won't be long until it will be impossible to find parts. I quickly discovered that parts are hard to find because all the companies that made samlors went out of business several years ago and there are very few shops in the country that still repair samlors with remaining parts from years past. I disassembled the entire samlor and started to check, repair, replace and restore everything as best as I could. I first want to say that this samlor that I purchased was at least 30 years old and that the old Thai man that sold it said he just got to old to peddle it and had bought a motorcycle with a side cart for his taxi business. I have taken a few before and after pictures of the samlor and wish that I had taken more especially when it came time to put it back together. Restore a piece of Thai history in hopes that some young people that have never seen a samlor will be able to experience a bit of their own culture after their grandparents and myself are gone. So after being in Thailand for 10 years, I decided to Tourists coming to Thailand have always looked forward to a ride in a samlor just to experience a little of part of Thai culture. Some parts of the country still allow samlors to operate on the backstreets but with the loss of income to samlor drivers, they will be forced to change to other modes of travel. Presently in Thailand due to modern day traffic such as car taxis, buses and millions of personal cars and trucks crowding the highways, the slow samlor is just getting in the way and have been banned inside some cities and will surely become a thing of the past in 10-20 years. The samlors were first built in the northeast of Thailand in Nakhon Ratchasima in 1933 and quickly spread throughout Thailand as a popular mode of transportation. It was one of the first forms of public taxi service in Thailand.
#Reddit scrap mechanic driver#
Just to give you all a brief description on what a samlor is and a little history about it before I start telling you about the restoration:Ī samlor is a three wheel bicycle with a seat behind the driver in which to carry passengers. Hope you enjoy the story and pictures and if you leave a comment I'll be sure he see's them.
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I'll let him tell the story, I think he did a great job and lots of hard work and love went into this project, I went by every week to check on progress and was always amazed at the work he did little by little. My friend Jerry has been for the last few months been busy restoring a old and I mean old Samlor( a bicycle with a passenger seat.