Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2009 i Hot Rod

RETURN OF THE CRUISE Cruising was a rite of passage for young people that for the most part, todays generation never got to experience. Slogging the local boulevard in your hot rod, parent’s car, or a friend’s ride was the thing to do when I was a teenager. I had the cool car, so my buddies and I would pile in it nearly every Friday and Saturday night and head to Colfax Avenue, Denver’s traffic-clogged cruise spot. We’d crawl through the bumper-to-bumper traffic checking out the other cars, revving on guys, occasionally setting up street races (I know—no letters, please), and flirting with girls. It was a cheap, mostly innocent way to hang out, have fun, and be around a bunch of cool hot rods. That all went away in…

POWER TOUR® 1 The coverage of the 15th HOT ROD Power Tour® starts on page 40 of this issue. For those of us who were there for the very first one, it’s hard to imagine that it’s been so long since we staffers decided to take a cross-country drive from Los Angeles to Detroit and invite the readers to come with us. It’s also a bummer to realize that the event has become so overgrown that we never get to drive our own project cars on Tour anymore because we’re too busy covering and managing the event. But that wasn’t the case in 1995, so here are some flashback photos of the HRM staff cars that were part of the very first Power Tour®. CRUISIN’ DETROIT One page ago, we…

This thing is unstoppable. With the depressed economy, the staggering unemployment, the devastation in Detroit, the increasing gas prices, and an encroaching government, there isn’t an analyst on Earth who would have predicted that a mass of people would have paid $65 in advance to take a weekplus vacation burning fossil fuels and rubber while chasing friends on an eight-day, sevencity, 1,176-mile trip from the Midwest to the South. But that’s the HOT ROD Power Tour®, and it continues to amaze. This year’s 15th running was, once again, the biggest ever. The margin of gain was not massive, but considering the situation, it was miraculous. We had the most Long Haulers (who drove the entire route with us) ever at 1,342 cars and 2,375 people. The total number of cars…

SEND STUFF IN: EMAIL: PITSTOP@HOTROD.com • MAIL: HOT ROD, 6420 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90048 PHOTO REQUIREMENTS: Minimum size 1,600 x 1,200 pixels MESSAGE BOARD: HOTROD.com PISTON RING STAGGER I’m assembling a new 302 Ford and can’t seem to get the same answer twice about how the piston ring end gaps should be oriented. Is there one way that is better than the other, or should I just pick one of the service manuals and go with it? Brian BollingPort Townsend, WA Assuming correct piston and ring manufacturing tolerances, cylinder wall honing, and component assembly techniques, under operating conditions the rings actually rotate in the ring groove from their original installed position, so their exact orientation during assembly isn’t critical. Just be sure to stagger (offset) all the ring…

CAR VS. THE ENVIRONMENT: DEMAND TRUTH By now you know about the so-called cash for clunkers program. The law is actually named the Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Program, though the government website (www.cars.gov) calls it the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS). The simple version is that taxpayers will pay consumers a bonus of $3,500 to $4,500 for trading in an ’85-or-newer car that gets an EPA-estimated average of 18 mpg or less and buying a brand-new car that gets an EPA average of 22 mpg or more (which means no Mustangs, no Camaros, no Challengers, no Corvettes, no G8s). All the cars that are traded in are required to be destroyed, and no parts of the engine may be salvaged. It’s based on similar programs in socialist Europe,…

The best thing about this car is that it evades description. We’re labelers by nature and by vocation—Pro Street, Pro Touring, Gasser, all those—but nothing’s more exciting than when someone builds a car that escapes all the clichés. Before we’d ever slapped an eyeball across this particular creation, a guy said to us, “Have you seen that Peterbilt rat rod thing?” Rat? It sure ain’t that. It draws on that low-buck trend for its basic bobber-truck stance but takes it way above and beyond. As well as this thing ducks categorization, it may also confound you on make and model: It’s a ’56 Peterbilt semitruck cab artfully reconfigured by James Crosby Designs in Ontario, California. James is a long time fabricator whose dad actually crewed on the Summers Bros. Goldenrod.…

Mike Moran is a man possessed. There is no other reason he would spend five years of his life chasing 0.300 of a second. This story is a follow-up to the one titled “I Will Run 5s” in the Oct. ’04 issue of HOT ROD (page 54), which cataloged Mike’s racing life up to that point and his chase to pilot the first turbocharged door-slammer through the quarter-mile in 5 seconds. At that time, Mike’s car had run 6.27 seconds in the quarter and he felt close enough to the record to talk about it in HOT ROD. To cut to the chase, Mike recently achieved his goal: piloting his 3,700hp, twin-turbo, 572ci Monte Carlo door-slammer through the traps at the Spring Open at Valdosta Drag way in Valdosta, Georgia,…

This isn’t intended to be a sad story. And if you were looking for a handy metaphor for the current problems facing the Detroit Three, you won’t find one here. The auto plants depicted here ceased production decades ago, some more than half a century ago, long before the most recent troubles. They were shut down and abandoned in the greatest days of the Motor City, when it was the world’s largest producer of automobiles and the keystone of the greatest industrial power the world has ever seen. This is a simple look back, nothing more. How Detroit became the Motor City is a fact of geography: Situated on a wide, calm river at the dead center of the Great Lakes, the city was perfectly located to gather iron ore…

By now you have probably seen at least one of the many stories about how ethanol and gasoline-blended fuel, such as E85, is excellent for performance applications. HOT ROD likes to show the outer limits of performance applications, so we tracked down flex fuel pioneer White Racing & Marine in Warren, Michigan, to find out more about the system it has developed that allows hot rodders to fuel their vehicles on gasoline, ethanol, race gas, or a combination of all the above, on electronic fuel-injected (EFI) cars. We learned that White Racing’s multi fuel kit is a simple way to make sick levels of horsepower in fully streetable cars—and who wouldn’t want to make more power and be able to enjoy it on demand? THE MULTIFUEL KIT White Racing started…

SEND STUFF IN:EMAIL: HOTROD@HOTROD.com MAIL: HOT ROD, 6420 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90048 PHOTO REQUIREMENTS: Minimum size 1,600 x 1,200 pixels MESSAGE BOARD:HOTROD.com THE CRASH OF THE CHICKEN HAWK When Ted larbit started racing his ’51 Studebaker Commander Starlight in the fall of 1961, he never dreamed he’d still be doing it nearly five decades later. The Chicken Hawk [!OT ROD, Aug. ’07), as it came to be known, dominated the NIRA K/Stock class in 1962, 1964, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, and 1972. But once that class was eliminated in 1973, the car steadily progressed over the decades from time slips in the mid-teens down into the single digits thanks to twin turbos on a 299ci Studebaker. Unfortunately, all that came to an end on May 9 at…

“THE FIRST RUN EVER ON THE CAR WAS 243 MPH ON THE SHORT COURSE. THE PARACHUTE RELEASE FAILED AND I HAD TO USE THE CARBONFIBER BRAKES. THEY REALLY WORKED WELL.”—SETH HAMMOND Gray Baskerville got it right back in 1975 when he wrote, “Seth Hammond is slightly eccentric…” Thus began the feature on Seth’s Frontenac-headed Model T in the Sept. ’75 issue of HOT ROD. Seth and his buddies built the car in a few weeks, with Seth building the chassis, Steve Davis bending the aluminum body panels, and a crew of guys building the banger with a ’26 Model T block and that ultrarare, four-valve Fronty head. “It sounds like an Offy’ our Old Dad told the readers. Seth killed the record at the now-defunct Signal Hill (California) hillclimb event,…

“Wrapping kicks ass.”—Loren Traister We’re constantly on the hunt for new ideas in gearhead land, but with this one, we may have been a little slow on the uptake. After all, we’ve seen it on the Power Tour(r) bus for like five years, not to mention on fleet vehicles, NASCAR race cars, Funny Cars, and plenty more. But it finally hit us: why not do a vinyl wrap instead of a paint job on a regular ol’ street machine? We decided to investigate the pros and cons along with 13-year vinyl-wrap veteran Loren Traister of Canby Graphics, who executed the design and the wrap on the HOT ROD Mustang that Editor Rob Kinnan raced in the Ford Racing Mustang Challenge series last year. Traister also wrapped our ’67 Impala for…

WEBER EFI Inglese 866/450-8089 www.inglese.com Inglese’s new EFI systems have all the flash of classic Weber induction but provide far more advanced tuning capabilities and can support up to 1,000 hp thanks to FAST’s advanced XFI electronics, dual-sync distributors, and GM LS7-style injectors integrated into cast-aluminum 50mm IDA throttle bodies. To custom-design the Inglese EFI system for your engine follow four simple steps: Choose the base kit determined by your engine, pick the correct injector size based on the targeted horsepower, select the size and finish of the velocity stacks, and choose the proper fuel pump kit. Inglese EFI induction systems can also be purchased without the FAST XFI engine controls and distributors. Price: Base system with XFI starts at $4,734.67 BELTDRIVE PULLEY SYSTEMS Miller speed 310/408-8798 www.millerspeed.com Tired of…