Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2004 i Hot Rod

I've accepted that I have an acute talent for losing hideous money on cars, but this scenario is extensive and ends in just plain blackmail. Let's go back to 1998 when I decide to build a Rat rod '28-'29 Model A roadster pickup after scoring a complete, bone-stock rolling chassis and drivetrain that a neighbor had liberated from a barn-find '29 coupe on the way to ruining it with a small-block and a bunch of bellybutton billet. Anyway, I buy the roller for $1,000. Then I find a Model AA flatbed truck onto which someone has put a decent roadster cab, so there's another $1,500. The neighbors gripe about the monstrosity on the trailer in front of the house, so I jerk the sheet-metal from the AA, sell the chassis…

Although modern advancements in technology make for remarkably smooth-running engines, the combustion process itself is nothing short of brutal. Pistons try to eject out the top of the block on the compression and exhaust strokes and blow the crank into the oil pan during the intake and power strokes. At the center of all this calamity is the poor old reciprocating assembly, which is both squeezed (compressive load) and stretched (tensile load) continuously throughout the four-stroke cycle. When the pistons and rods reach bottom dead center then change direction to travel back up the bore, the load is compressive. Likewise, expanding combustion gases literally squish the piston onto the wristpin and connecting rod. Conversely, as a piston approaches top dead center then reverses direction back down the bore, tensile loads…

The bold heritage styling of the new Dodge Magnum and Chrysler ' 300C (see above) traces its roots (in part) to the ’53 Chrysler D-Elegance show car. To pay tribute, we dug up this ½5-scale M Berkeley Models balsa-wood kit that dates back to 1954. As MIGs and Sabers diced it up in the skies over Korea, kids in suburban America whittled and sanded feverishly on crude kits like this before the revolutionary advent of much more realistic plastic model kits a few years later from Revell, SMP (later AMT), Monogram, JoHan, and others. Never again would instruction sheets contain the dreaded words: “Trim excess balsa away as needed.”…

The city and suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, are peppered with nondescript industrial buildings housing all manner of fabrication shops and testing and prototyping facilities whose mundane appearances mask the trick nature of what’s going on inside. All of the Big Three automakers enlist these operations to build many of their concept cars, one-off prototypes, and show cars. During a recent trip to Detroit, we got a sneak peek at three spectacular show cars under construction at McLaren Engine Technologies that were displayed by Ford Racing Performance Parts (FRPP) at the 2003 Specialty Equipment Market Association convention in Las Vegas. All three vehicles—an '04 Ford Focus RS, a ’53 Ford panel truck, and a '65 Mustang fastback—will feature FRPP’s upcoming 5.0L DOHC modular V-8 crate engine, each with a unique form…

Here’s a beast that sort of found us recently during a shopping spree that netted a '59 Rambler American. Though the car itself is another story for probably no other time, the seller said something about having “an old boat motor that’s been sitting out behind the garage for the last 15 years.” His wife wanted it gone, and we could have it for free if we promised to drag it away. We agreed, hoping we’d stumbled upon an old Holman Moody 427 or Chrysler Marine Hemi. Instead we were greeted by this amazing oddity. Though the tag riveted to the intake-manifold plenum reads Gray Marine 170, long hours prowling salvage yards taught us to recognize the familiar double-wing-nut valve covers of this early American Motors V-8. Produced between 1956…

Among the new technologies featured in Ford’s new 4.6L three-valve mod motor is variable cam timing, which makes its first appearance in an American V-8 rear-drive musclecar in the ’05 Mustang. Unlike Honda’s VTEC, which activates a second set of “high-lift” lobes on the engine’s cams, Ford’s Dual Equal Variable Cam Timing system mechanically alters cam timing through the use of a solenoid-activated hydraulic circuit linked to the camshaft’s chain sprocket. In Ford’s version, an actuator attached to the camshaft’s drive sprocket adjusts the camshaft’s physical position in response to various loads rather than activating a second set of lobes. Although production engine calibrations have yet to be finalized, according to V-8 Engine Manager Terry Wagner, variable cam timing is used in place of a traditional exhaust gas recirculation (EGR)…

Last month we showed you our Wilshire Shaker 63 Nova altered-wheelbase Match Bash car. Finally complete after nearly six years of blood, sweat, and at beers, we had planned to bring you a good ol’ fashioned, Southern-style, run-whatchya-brung-and-hope-ya-brung-enough, best-three-out-of-five match race in this issue. But a broken rear axle-housing on our Nova put a lid on the festivities, - at least for now (see sidebar). So instead, we present here a pair of beautifully executed Match Bash Plymouths to whet your appetite. What is Match Bash? Simply put, it is a building style that seeks to pay tribute to the glory days of the altered-wheelbase door-slammer Funny Car. Match Bashers are modern enough to be driven on the street but retro enough to conjure the smell of nitro and nights…

We’re gonna roast meats and get skin cancer. We're gonna be simple, be fast, drive it everywhere laughing like fools, and we’re going to look too good doing it. It’s the core character of a hot rod applied to what many consider the only true hot rod: a ’32 Ford roadster. Meet the HOT ROD Roaster. There’ll be nothing technically revolutionary about it except perhaps the revelation that a guy well south of retirement can enjoy a street rod, and that there never has to be a trailer under it, a lawn chair in the trunk, or a crybaby doll within a hundred yards. We’ll get lots of letters enlightening us that it ain’t real 'cause it won’t be steel, but face it: gennie Henry doesn’t come around much any…

North Carolina, circa 1962. There in the Piedmont hills, the son of a gas-station owner consistently beat every other Stocker at the local drags, including another young man who worked for Norfolk & Western Railway. The rail employee, Buddy Martin, finally decided that it would be easier to partner with his nemesis Ronnie Sox than to futilely keep trying to beat him. The two reached a gentlemen’s agreement to race together While Sox expertly grabbed gears to make the headlines, Martin contributed his own gift for securing factory deals. So the team went racing full time, switching from Chevrolet to Mercury in 1964, and then getting one of the altered-wheelbase Plymouth Funny Cars built in 1965. They would stay with Chrysler’s now-defunct Mayflower marque for nearly a decade. The car…

Tapered Ring Compressors For Late Models Automotive Racing Products 805/339-2200 www.arp-bolts.com Tapered ring compressors eliminate the need to fiddle around with clumsy pliers, set-screws, or handles as with conventional piston-ring compressors. ARP now offers them in bore sizes compatible with Chevy Gen III and Ford modular V-8s. They feature a radius that gradually tightens from top to bottom to simplify piston installation and significantly reduce the possibility of breaking rings. Corvette Coilovers Speed Direct 888/253-9680 www.speeddirect.com Owners of ’63-’82 Corvettes have a new toy at their disposal for scorching the twisties. Speed Direct’s Shark Bite front coilover-spring kit bolts in without any other necessary vehicle modifications. They offer reduced mass and adjustable shock valving and ride height. The kits are available in a variety of shock-damping settings and spring rates…

This Month’s Mail As we pen this one, it’s about a week into the sales of the December issue and its Miss HOT ROD contest, and so far there’s only one gripe letter about girls in the magazine, and that one’s not even about too much skin. Who’s asleep out there? We worry when the irate letters slow down and are replaced with reasonable, well-considered input and criticism. Lay it on us. —David Frei burger E-mail: HOTROD@primedia.com Mail: HOT ROD Reaction Time. 6420 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90048 Fax: 323/782-2223 Web site: www.H0TR0D.com (click on “Message Boards”) The NASCAR Look I enjoyed your article on "The NASCAR Look" (Nov. '03) and agree it is a great theme for a street car. 1 believe the picture you were unable to…

Driving one of the world’s fastest sport compacts will grab plenty of attention. Abel Ibarra's been doing it for years, and last October his 6-second K&N Filters Mazda R-100 became the first sport compact (unless you count Topolinos) to be inducted into the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum. Can you imagine piloting so much power with so little wheelbase? Yikes! Kudos to Abel and the other pioneers of import racing who continue to push the envelope and teach us traditionalists a thing or two.…

So the other day we’re grabbing lunch in Burbank and in drives Jay Leno in a ludicrous handmade roadster powered by a Korean War-era tank V-12 engine with 1,800 ci. Really. One thing leads to another, and we end up at Leno’s place to witness the tail end of the build-up on his ’55 Buick Roadmaster, the first car he bought when he moved to California. Now it’s fully built with a GM Performance Parts 572ci crate big-block and Corvette suspension. Look for a full story coming in a few issues down the road.…

In the last two issues we told you how to J select a turbocharger, then we provided some general guidelines on piecing together a complete system. So much for theory. This month we'll get into the real McCoy and examine what goes into an actual street/strip 33 lei turbocharged engine built by the pros at Bennett Racing. Located in northwest Alabama, Bennett is a major builder of kick-butt small-block and big-block Ford drag racing motors. The company is particularly dominant in NMCA and NMRA class racing, supplying normally aspirated, turbocharged, supercharged, and nitrous engines to a variety of winning racers. At Bennett, you can buy anything from cams all the way to turnkey engines developing over 2,000 hp, but the “mild” 900hp engine shown here is designed for street reliability.…

Ever gone for a ride in a genuine 900hp car? If you have, chances are it rattled your bones and assaulted your senses, and thanks to lightweight seats and a rollcage, you might have needed the flexibility of a 13-year-old Slovenian girl gymnast to extract yourself once your joyride was through. When horsepower numbers start their inevitable rise upward, the soft, floppy flab of a production vehicle must make way for taut, sinewy muscle, lest something break. Flexibility is traded for rigidity. Weaknesses are reinforced. Creamy smoothness gives way to throbbing harshness. Buffers are stripped away, allowing everything to be heard, felt, smelled. Components that once peacefully coexisted now go to war in the name of lower e.t.’s and a race to see what can break first. The compromise is…

We can still feel the rib, probably cracked, It’s the eventuality we accept every time we get in a kart, be it a lawn mower-powered slicktrack basher or a full-race shifter kart. Thing is, nothing will stop us from a turn at the wheel of any go-kart—they're just plain glee on four tiny wheels and have been since Kurtis Craft Indy Car fabricator Art Ingels built the first one in 1956. Moments later, guys figured out how to race ’em, which meant that things got out of control, and today it costs a small fortune to go serious kart racing. Rotax is out to fix that. A division of Bombardier, Rotax has long been a manufacturer of performance recreational engines and is now delivering entire karts to support a new-to-the-USA…

’71 Chevy Chevelle SS Mike & Justina-Jo Keegan Bossier City, LA Even while proudly serving our country during Operation Iraqi Freedom, 12,000 miles away from home, Mike actively coordinated his project by placing phone calls and buying parts. With the help of his wife and friends at the ArkLaTex Chevelle club, he completed a full frame-off restoration. It’s powered by a 10.0:1-compression 454 with an Edelbrock 800-cfm carb that sends power to a TH400 trans and 4.10:1-geared 12-bolt rearend. ’70 Chevy Nova SS Sean Richter Kitchener, Ontario, Canada Sean says, “I have no qualms about dropping the Line-Loc and setting a parking lot on fire.” Lucky us. Tire smoke comes from a 350 small-block, Muncie M20 four-speed, and a Posi rearend with 3.23:1 cogs. With a more composed launch, the…

To See These Stories and More, Click on This Month’s Cover on HOTROD.com THIS MONTH ON HOTROD.COM • Subscribe Online • Message Boards • Events •Featured Vehicles •HOT ROD Project Cars Engine Builds Anvils on nitro, FE truck motors, and more variations of the small-block Chevy than a Sportsman race. See ’em in the Technical Articles/Engine section, pick up some tips, and build a homegrown Funny Car engine all by yourself. Pump Gas Drags Think about it. Rolling up with your toolbox and slicks, snapping off an 8-second pass, and getting the glory of being the fastest street car in the world. The rules, the application, and the wild boastin’ forum are online. The deadline to apply is January 15,2004, so do it yesterday. Real Suede Ever wonder why people…

IN THREE WORDS: Semis pullin’ g’s THE GIST: Even the most stubborn, drag-race-or-bust traditionalists can't help but get excited at the sight of 5-ton rigs clipping apexes and sliding sideways through a sinuous road course. It looks about as natural as a drag Ferrari with 30-inch meats and wheelie bars, but it sure makes for a great spectacle. Divided into two classes, Race Truck (fast) and Super Race Truck (faster), venues include the legendary Nurburgring and Le Mans circuits. Here’s something to think about: On any given road course, they’ll probably spank whatever’s sitting in your driveway. No joke. VEHICLE SPECS: • 1,1 OO-plus-cubic-inch, four-valve-per-cylinder, inline-six engines • Twin turbochargers spoolin’ more than 50 psi • Up to 1,500 hp and 3,600 Ib-ft of torque! • Curb weight close to…

On October 14, 2003, the DaimlerChrysler LX publicity tour made its sixth of seven stops in major American cities at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. We attended, and the Chrysler 300C and Dodge Magnum R/T on display weren’t hot-house-flower concept cars. No siree, these were the real deal, actual production-ready versions of the long-awaited Hemi-packin’, tire-smokin’ revival of the Mopar musclecar legacy. The 20-inch rims of the concept cars have been replaced with real-world 17s, and. the Magnum concept car’s supercharger is absent. Even so, GTO, Mach 1, and Chevelle (!) take note: There’s another leg under the table of Detroit high performance. We'll have a full Hemi LX road and drag test in an upcoming issue.…

HOT ROD has fulfilled many requests for free copies of the magazine for our troops on active deployment, and here’s what happened when Edelbrock did the same. “I can not thank you enough for sending the hats and T-shirts for my soldiers,” says recently promoted Army Major Victor Bakkila, who is related to Vic Edelbrock’s wife Nancy. “The guys are enjoying them very much. As a matter of fact, on a recent mission, a few got into trouble for wearing their Edelbrock hats instead of their helmets! ”…

Smoky burnouts are a sacred ritual at Ford's Special Vehicle Team, as evidenced by these wicked stripes in the parking lot outside SVT’s Allen Park, Michigan, headquarters. We have no idea what or who made them (big props go out to both, though), but our enthusiasm was definitely not shared in some quarters of Ford management. According to an inside source at SVT, a memo came down from a particularly humorless bean counter noting that the “wasting of Ford resources” was not appreciated and should be terminated immediately. Yeah, just think of all the better ways Ford could have spent that three bucks worth of rubber.…

The Last time Ford launched an all-new Mustang, a Democrat was in The White. House, interest rates were at 18 percent, and the country was in the throes of its second oil crisis of the decade The performance of the new-for-79 Mustang, which was derived from the econobox Fairmont launched a year earlier, was as dismal as the nation’s economy and everything else coming out of Detroit. But by ’82, when Ford announced that “The Boss” was back with the return of a 5.0L V-8 to the Mustang lineup, a new musclecar era was on the horizon. Today, we have a Republican in the Oval Office, the economy is borderline, and we still have oil-related troubles in the Middle East. But the musclecar renaissance that emerged from those dark days…

Grab your power/speed calculator and try this one: How much power does it take to make a 2,350-pound car run 6.70s in the quarter-mile? Our Moroso slide rule says it takes about 1,650 hp. Getting there takes some serious hardware. The NHRA’s Pro Stock heros do it with 500 naturally aspirated cubic inches from a carbureted pushrod V-8. The top dogs in the NHRA’s Pro Import RWD class do it with 189 turbocharged cubic inches from an overhead-cam straight-six. Either way you slice it, fast is fast, regardless of the name on the sheetmetal covering the tube-frame chassis. To put the comparison in even sharper contrast and fan the flames of our raging import versus domestic debate, we flew to the NHRA’s 18th Annual O’Reilly Fall Nationals at Texas Motorplex…

GM’s Gen III V-8 ain’t your old man’s small-block Chevy, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all. For everything the original Bow Tie Mouse accomplished since its 1955 inception— from weaning the masses off flatheads, to transcending brutal emissions crackdowns, to establishing itself as the default motor of choice for hoards of automotive enthusiasts—it was time to move on. Although met with much initial skepticism, the Gen III platform has quickly earned a reputation as one of the baddest small-blocks of all time. Not-so-lightweight LSI-powered F-bodies routinely dip into the 12s in bone-stock trim, and 400 hp is only a few bolt-ons away. Try that with your old-school 350. At the heart of such phenomenal performance are exceptionally well-engineered cylinder heads. With F-cars and Vettes running in…

We’ve got a Baskervillian adoration of Bonneville, the hallowed ground of land speed racing Top-speed competition there is one of the proudest remnants of HOT ROD magazine's early years, it’s the last bastion of real grassroots innovation in racing, and we love that pleasing crunch of cool salt between the toes. The whole thing's less a hobby and more of a calling. It’s every platitude every journalist has ever laden onto the place since the first National Amateur Speed Trials in 1949. But corporate duties kept us from our annual trek to August Speed Week in 2003, and we had a serious jones for flat earth and nitro. Our second plan was to attend the Utah Salt Flats Racing Association’s World of Speed event in September, also waylaid by pesky…

A quarter century has passed since Chevrolet unveiled the intermediate Monte Carlo for 1978, a departure from the once mighty personal luxury leviathan first introduced in 1970. GM coined the term “downsizing” to describe the miniaturized designs it was forced to peddle in response to ever-tightening federal fuel economy and emissions standards, and while the term has come to be reviled as corporate doublespeak for impending pink slips and unemployment checks, the downsized Monte Carlo (and its corporate A- and G-body siblings) have become very popular with many of the same hot rodders who threw eggs when they were new. One example is Nathan Mach, a computer calibration technician from Arlington, Washington. At 42, Nate is old enough to remember the dark days of catalytic converters, electronic feedback carburetors, and…