Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2018 i Hot Rod

Overhead-valve pushrod engines are supposed to be dead. At least, that’s the proclamation all the major in-market car magazines made on the eve of the LS1’s debut in 1996. The cam-in-block, two-valve-per-cylinder V8 was an anachronism with one foot in the grave, soon to be replaced by all manner of innovation—internal combustion and otherwise. And while many of those rapidly developing technologies have come to pass—direct injection, diesel, hybrid, electric, and variable displacement to name a few—we still have major breakthroughs in “knuckle-dragging” V8s every few years. These advances have often been combined with pushrod V8s to raise the bar of mechanical efficiency—a term that’s associated with fuel economy, but is really a proxy for horsepower. Try as its detractors might, the mighty pushrod V8 in the guise of…

Motorsports journalist Joe Scalzo has a saying that best describes the life trajectory of a race car. I’m paraphrasing, but it goes like this: “Old race cars never die; their parts just go on to live lives in other cars.” He usually invokes that when explaining the whereabouts of cars that seemingly cease to exist. Usually, it’s because of obsolescence or a terrible crash that demolishes a chassis beyond repair, but in all but maybe a handful of instances, bits and pieces of a car really do see another opportunity to do battle on the track in other cars. And the 1948 Shreve Special is one of those examples. The Shreve’s life didn’t start in 1948, the year it was “built.” Its beginnings track back nearly two decades—several lifetimes in…

For the past 10 years, the folks at Dream Giveaway Garage have been granting gearhead wishes while providing much-needed relief for a variety of charities. In that time, Dream Garage Giveaway has handed out no fewer than 42 gobsmacking prize packages to regular guys like us. If you’ve seen the ads, you may have wondered how all this works. It starts with a core group of car nuts who have been part of the aftermarket industry for years. The company’s Clearwater, Florida–based headquarters is home to not only its operation and vehicle photo studio but a well-stocked garage any gearhead would be proud to own. If you had to boil it down to one idea, Dream Giveaway Garage is essentially a building full of muscle-car maniacs with a heart of…

Cross-drilling brake rotors supposedly helps vent gases created when the resin bonding agents within the brake-pad material begin to break down at extreme temperatures. When this happens, the pedal still remains firm while the friction coefficient decreases, causing a loss of brake effectiveness. Racers often refer to this condition as “green pad fade” or “outgassing.” With new-tech, preburnished carbon fiber or ceramic racing brake pads, this gas buildup is no longer a major concern. Less exotic street-pad components are still subject to outgassing, but only when used on a racetrack at extreme temperatures rarely, if ever, seen on the street. Another theory was that drilling multiple small holes in the rotor surface increased the coefficient of friction between the pads and the rotor because all the additional small edges let…

Simplify Your Interior With Dakota Digital Dakota Digital // 800.852.3228 // ClassicInstruments.com Dakota Digital’s HDX gauge line comes with either black or silver-alloy faces with your choice of script, needles, and TFT center display. Color settings and calibration can be handled with the capacitive-touch buttons or a Bluetooth app available on the App Store and Google Play. The coolest feature would have to be the user-programmable warning light and buzzer for each gauge. The buzzer can be set using button-presses, too. The solid-state sending units are weather-tight and keep the system working properly; having a separate control box also makes servicing a lot easier. Price: HDX series starts at $1,295 MSRP Paint Protection From Jay Leno’s Garage Jay Leno’s Garage Advance Vehicle Care // 888.930.8743 LenosGarage.com It doesn’t matter if…

Every year leading up to the SEMA Show, we’re treated to announcements of builds that will be unveiled during the week. In October 2016, HOT ROD reported there was a Camaro being built with an LS-derived V12 that was to debut at the show. Beyond some teasers, we really didn’t know what to expect. We know that the SEMA Show never fails to pull in some of the coolest cars from across the globe, and the mix is usually pretty eclectic with rides you wouldn’t otherwise give a second thought to. Having said that, there’s also no shortage of the tried and true. One of the biggest culprits to fall into that category is the Gen 1 Camaro. There are always new interpretations of GM’s F-body unveiled during the week,…

In recent times, the business coupe has changed. Traveling salesmen defined the body style while stuffing their wares in stripped-down, rear-seatless coupes. The lack of options and seats meant that the cars were thrifty and traded passengers for inventory. Practicality was the key, allowing for the spread of consumer culture in America before the advent of department-store catalogs and the impending internet takeover. By the 1960s, the business coupe body style fell out of favor as vans, carry-alls (the proto-SUV), and pickups became more prolific for cross-country efforts. So then, what’s a modern business coupe? For jet-setting entrepreneurs, four wheels can be an escape from the world, even if they’re a little slower than a pair of wings. More and more, we’re seeing the business coupe evolve from what owners…

A first impression is everything, and the shoes your project rides on make up nearly half of it. Given the general expense of a wheel and tire package, it’s definitely one you want to get right the first time. Before you go window shopping, you need to first figure out the physical constraints of your project’s wheelwells and chassis so you can squeeze the right wheel and tire package underneath. THE HARD WAY There are a few critical measurements you need to make while selecting a new wheel and tire package. You’ll need to decide what diameter wheel package you want to aim for, then decide your tire package. It’s important to take note of what tire sizes are commonly available for the dimensions you’re aiming for. For example, using…

THE RESCUE SO FAR Last month, a missing 25¢ oil-galley plug cost 1998 Bronco owner Tevete (“T”) Usumalii his cylinder block, although L&R Engine was able to salvage the 349ci small-block Ford rotating assembly. Swapped into a good used, precision-machined cylinder block using Mahle-Clevite bearings, the assembled short-block was returned to Advanced Engineering West (AEW) for camshaft and top-end assembly before reinstallation in T’s 1998 Ford Bronco. It should have been a relatively routine process—but “Murphy” always gets a vote! In this case, many votes: AEW owner Mark Sanchez would find multiple valvetrain, fuel, oil, cooling, and electrical problems. MORE MOTOR FIXES The Bronco’s existing Air Flow Research (AFR) Renegade cylinder heads (PN 1456) are its largest small-block Ford castings. AFR’s 220cc intake runners were probably way overkill for a…

Horses usually doesn’t have anything to do with hot rods, but at a shop in Chicago, we found a car unlike anything we had seen in our travels: a starting-line car for horse racing. Of the 3,305 Buick Roadmasters built in 1954, this one was ordered specifically for this purpose. Unlike thoroughbred racing, where the horses start from a fixed gate, the gate in harness racing is mounted to a vehicle that starts the race by pulling away from the line of horses. The gates fold forward on the vehicle as it accelerates and then it turns off the track at the end of the straightaway, while the horses continue around the turn. Nobody we spoke with knew the car’s history, but the snow tires it used to claw its…

Many of us have gazed thoughtfully at purpose-built race cars and pondered what it would be like to drive one on the street, but Michael Hunt took it one step further and followed through on that crazy idea. Hunt and the guys down at TredWear Tire Letters have always loved race cars, and the idea that you could possibly terrorize the streets in one seemed like the ultimate driving experience to them. So when he came across a neglected 1939 Chevy Coupe that had been bobbed and turned into an open-wheel, modified dirt-track car at some point in its past, he knew he had to have it. That was November 2016, and upon getting the car back home, Michael realized the thing was a bit of a basket case—like so…

No, you didn’t pick up Hot VWs magazine by mistake. This is HOT ROD, so relax. Behold Robert Freeman’s “Berlin Buick,” christened as such because there’s a whole lot of Buick wrapped in that Volkswagen shell. Robert has wanted a mid-engine Volkswagen since he was a kid, and this is the manifestation of that childhood dream. The key to this fantasy fulfillment was to find the right people to help with the hard stuff, and that happened when he took the old Beetle body with a sunroof grafted sometime in its ugly past to Gary Brown at Browns Metal Mods in Port Leyden, north of Syracuse, New York. Robert arrived seeking only a top chop for the body he’d owned for 15 years to kick off what would be a…

Way back in 2015, we performed the mother of all LS intake tests by running 20 different intakes designed for cathedral-port heads. That test included every cathedral-port intake we could get our hands on, including the various factory versions. The problem with doing the mother of all intake tests for the cathedral-port guys is that it left out the LS3 owners. GM eventually replaced the cathedral-port heads with high-flow, rectangular-port heads when it introduced the LS3, L92, and L76 motors (to name a few). Blessed with what were essentially race heads right from the factory (flowing 315 cfm), the rec-port motors offered even more potential than the factory cathedral-port combos. Not surprisingly, the aftermarket jumped on the bandwagon to offer all manner of intake combinations for the new cylinder-head configuration,…

Q:Why is it that the upper rpm limit on most street engines seems to be in the 6,000-rpm range? Why isn’t it 5,000 or 7,000, or even 9,000 like a NASCAR motor? Is it material strength, airflow due to the 14.7 psi of ambient air, or something else? A: For typical overhead-valve (OHV), gasoline-fueled, street engines used in cars and light trucks, a 5,500- to 6,000-rpm redline seems to be the target speed for delivering a satisfactory daily-driving experience at a cost the average consumer can afford. Generally, a typical street engine has about a 1,500- to 1,800-rpm powerband—defined here as the rpm range of separation between the torque peak and the power peak. With the usual street gearing, this yields a vehicle well suited for daily driving. Really heavy,…

“I want to be able to bolt my heads on and have them work. Simple as that.”— Greg Brown “Blasphemy!” That’s the outrage we’d expect from the Mopar faithful or perhaps even the Ford hemi guys. After all, their righteous indignation is aimed directly at a set of hemi heads sitting astride an LS short-block. Allow that to stew in its own juices for a moment or two. Then ignore the automotive theologians and focus instead on the fact that hot rodding has always ridden on the knife’s edge of automotive heresy. It wasn’t all that long ago that hot rodders were reviled hooligans. Still, the two terms “hemi” and “LS” would seem to be mutually exclusive, except to Greg Brown. To him, the two were destined to partner up…