Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2011 i Hot Rod

THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS We have often discussed Rick Dobbertins game-changing, Pro Street Pontiac J2000 that was HOT ROD of the Year in 1986 (and named by us as one of the Top 100 Most Significant Hot Rods of All Time in Jan. ’08), so to rehash the car here is unnecessary. But When thinking about this month’s Where It All Began, in an issue devoted to outrageous engines, one image from the past stood out: the Chevy in Dobbertin’s Pontiac. In a car that took every one of his resources and nearly three years of his life to build, Dobbertin went with by far the wildest engine anyone had ever seen up to that time. In the context of history, we’ll argue it’s still the wildest. An all-aluminum, 350ci small-block…

Fact: copper is hard to weld, and some people are allergic to copper dust. This means handforming the body of a car from sheets of copper is not only cost prohibitive, it’s also grueling on fabricators. Fact number two: Aluminum gets hot when you machine it, which ruins tools if you’re not careful, so building an entire chassis from billet aluminum can be unbelievably expensive, never mind that it takes forever. So why would anyone go to all the trouble and expense of building one car with the sheen of a new penny and another from big chunks of billet aluminum? Fame and fortune, of course. Kirkham Motorsports (KMS; KirkhamMotorsports.com) specializes in building exacting replicas of classic Shelby Cobras, but its attention to detail and envelope-shredding build practices are what…

The next issue of HOT ROD will be overstuffed with readers’ cars from the ’11 HOT ROD Power Tour’, presented by GM Performance Division. If you missed the mass of rods cruising from Cocoa Beach, Florida, to Detroit, Michigan, you can relive it now with coverage at HOTROD.com, then pick up the mag for the deeper story. SEE THIS AND MUCH MORE IN THE OCT ’11 ISSUE OF HOT ROD MAGAZINE On sale August 16, 2011 Meanwhile, Get Your Car Fix at HOTROD.com Facebook.com/HotRodMag And YouTube.com/HotRodMagazine…

UTILITY RODS If you’re a real car guy, every vehicle in your life gets dragged into the addiction. We all have at least one main hot rod or muscle car, but then there’s the daily driver, the parts chaser, and the family stuff. The worst days of my life were when my wife drove a Volvo. It bums me to have to buy a car, register it, insure it, and fix it when it has the appeal of a colonoscopy. I have to at least feel good at the wheel and maintain the delusion of someday hopping it up. These days, my wife and I both have ZJ Grand Cherokees—mundane, yeah, but I’m a four-wheeler in addition to a hot rodder, and those things are about the best-performing off-road SUVs…

It’s a cartoon. We just nutshelled the whole reason you’re seeing this car in these pages. It’s exaggerated, goofy, and bright, and it made us grin from the first moment we saw it on a web site somewhere. You want to nitpick it? OK, sure, many guys think the front-wheel offset kills it. Whatever. The gargantuan meats and ludicrous engine make it. It’s Rat Fink, Hot Wheels, and Muscle Machines, all brought to life. Pro Street meets now. A lost art, reinvigorated. The so-called Nightmare on Any Street project was the brainstorm of Melvin Skinner of Benson, North Carolina’s, which is a big Mustang-tuning joint. Having worked on everything from near stockers to 2,000hp street cars, Melvin has seen it all, and he wanted to create the unexpected. The result…

We wrenched for four days in 100-degree weather, hacked ourselves on jagged rust, dropped a car off a jackstand, rewired brake lights thrice, broke down at least a dozen times, wore gasoline like body wash, nearly parboiled some lady at a gas station when the radiator overflow line blew, spent three times as much as wed planned, and even ran out of Corona once. At no point did this adventure seem like a bad idea. We were reveling in man’s dominion over the automobile, taking a ’66 Buick that hadn’t moved since 1978 and forcing it into a 500-mile trip home. Now the long-form version. I’m tight with Rick Péwé, editor in chief of Petersens 4-Wheel & Off-Road magazine. His mom bought this car when it was a pup and…

For guys competing in unlimited-displacement race classes like IHRA Pro Stock or NHRA Top Sportsman, there really is no replacement for displacement. In these niche worlds with no limits, Sonny’s Racing has long been the mountain motor leader. Founder Sonny Leonard has specialized in big, big-block Chevy-based motors for more than 41 years, building ever larger and more radical combos that in their most advanced incarnations bare only a superficial resemblance to Chevy’s original Rat. And by “big” we don’t just mean a wussy 496, a puny 540, or even a wimpy 572. No, we’re talking giant, megafauna, Pleistocene-epoch massiveness here—you know, 1,000,000 years BC big, 1,000-pound saber-toothed tiger big, 10-foottall beaver big. Sonny’s motors start out around 611 ci and have grown ever larger, with standard production mills now…

CAMARO HOOKUP I have a ’69 Camaro with a Muncie four-speed and stock monoleaf rear suspension. I recently installed a ZZ502 big-block and now need to upgrade the rear suspension. I’m experiencing severe wheelhop, and it feels like the springs are collapsing under hardest acceleration. I’m looking for your recommendation on springs, traction bars, and anything else you think should be considered to handle the new load and stiffen things up. I’d like to be reasonable with dollars, but I want to make smart choices that solve the problem the first round rather than cut corners. Jim Jaeckel Littleton, CO For eliminating wheelhop on a leaf-spring car like the Camaro, you can’t go wrong with Calvert Racing’s CalTracs bars. The bars are a complete bolt-on with no cutting, welding, or…

PHOTO TREASURE TROVE While we were attending the HOT ROD Top Speed Challenge™ for the coverage seen in the last issue, reader Lawson Bilhardt handed us a stack of photos, most of which we’ve reproduced here. They were shot by Lawson in the mid-’60s throughout his home state of Pennsylvania and also at Atco, New Jersey, and Indy. You’ll see many familiar cars here and some unknowns, all of which we love looking at in their natural environments and through the eyes of the fan who was standing there. Snapshots show a different aspect of events than what we see in the HOT ROD archives. If you love this stuff as much as we do, make sure to check out HOT ROD Deluxe on the newsstand. It’s our sister magazine…

You know the 24 Hours of LeMons race series, right? It’s endurance racing for cars that theoretically cost no more than $500, not counting wheels, tires, brakes, and safety equipment. HOT ROD has participated in a few events, and we’ve witnessed firsthand some truly ingenious and hilarious contraptions (as well as outright cheaters) that compete, but most of the cars are small Japanese or European sedans that we’d never care about if they didn’t offer such comedy. Steve and Dave Schaible’s racer, though, is a hot rod through and through, and in the spirit of Ak Miller’s El Caballo de Hierro (The Iron Horse) from the ’50s, it punishes the imports on the racetrack. At first, the Schaibles were sheep running with the herd in an ’84 Volvo four-door with…

They say everything’s big in Texas. Poppycock. When it comes to truck motors, Lake Havasu City, Arizona, puts the Lone Star State to shame. That’s where Big Mike Harrah has his treasure trove of trucks, cars, bikes, helicopters, and airplanes that makes gearheads drool with envy. His under-construction show truck has 36 butterflies in its 12 injector hats. Why? “Because I can,” Harrah says. There’s no reason to take a 24V71 and build an intake manifold that weighs 1,000 pounds and mounts eight 6-71 superchargers on top of four others other than to say: There, take that. Yes, this is a V24 Detroit Diesel two-stroke (normally used to power ships), which is two V12 Detroits joined together nose to nose with splined cranks. It adds up to 1,704 ci. It’s…

We get an understandable amount of flack from readers about doing so much editorial on the GM LS-series engines, but there’s a reason behind our madness: ’They’re the most popular performance engines today and make completely stupid power when you throw boost at them via a supercharger or turbocharger. Internet forums are all atwitter about just how far up the power scale you can go before the LS finally yells “uncle,” but we have yet to see any real proof of its limits. So we decided to find out for ourselves. How much boost can we throw at one, and how much power will it make (and for how long?) before it goes pop in one way or another? Our guinea pig was a 5.3L truck motor, while the punishers…

PROJECT MUSCLE After making its debut on the ’11 HOT ROD Power Tour® presented by GM Performance Division, the Rust-Oleum Road Runner proved a favorite for the Mopar faithful and those enthusiasts interested in Day 2 restorations. The 440 four-barrel four-speed tribute car had been converted from a ’69 Satellite to a Road Runner by its previous owner, and we decided to keep the B5 Blue and add finishing touches to make it show worthy and sound for Power Tour®. Built by the staff at Pure Vision, the Road Runner was purchased on April 27 for Rust-Oleum and was finished in time for our partners at Pilot Transportation to pick up on May 27 for the trip to Port Canaveral, Florida, for the Painless Performance Kick-Off Cruise Night on June…