Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2019 i Hot Rod

Network Content Director @douglas.glad The photo above has to be one of my favorites. It’s Tom Bailey’s 6-second, Unlimited-class, steel-body “VIN” Camaro sheltering in a parking lot during a downpour somewhere on the Drag Week™ route. The cardboard boxes over the open engine bay are from the trash heap in the background. The driver and co-pilot could be seen loitering under an awning lit by a glowing yellow Dollar General monolith. This one photo says it all. Drag Week™ is a test of all the strengths that make up a car guy. You must be willing and able to build a drag car that wants to only go straight for a few seconds at a time, then try to make it steer, cool, and be durable enough to handle hours…

Troy Ladd doesn’t look like Sherlock Holmes. He’s broad-shouldered and ruddy-cheeked, not thin and sallow like that fictional detective, and he’s far more comfortable in a T-shirt and cuffed jeans than he would be in a deerstalker hat and Victorian cape. All the same, he’s got a mystery on his hands and he’s determined to figure out the clues. It started with a rescue. Ladd heard of a collection of forgotten cars on an estate in Pasadena, California. Most were unremarkable, but one—a 1932 Ford three-window coupe that was customized sometime in the late-1950s—stood out as a perfect example of the exact kind of hot rod that has inspired Ladd’s own work at his custom shop, Hollywood Hot Rods. Now he wants to find out more about the man who…

Holley/MSD // 888.258.3835 // Holley.com With only four wiring connections required, Holley’s new Sniper EFI Quadrajet™ throttle-body is the first bolt-on spread bore electronic fuel-injected throttle-body system that eliminates the need for additional sealing plates, adapters, or intake manifold swaps. Enhanced with proven capabilities for classic Chevrolets, GMCs, Oldsmobiles, Pontiacs, and Buicks, it features the same winning architecture as Holley’s 4150 Sniper, including a 31/2-inch full-color touchscreen, onboard timing control, and several fuel inlet configurations for a stock appearance. Designed to fit most stock Quadrajet air cleaners, it has four 100-lb/hr injectors to support naturally aspirated engines that make up to 500 hp. The kits also come with a universal throttle and transmission kickdown bracket. Wilwood // 805.388.1188 // Wilwood.com To ensure your brakes are performing at the optimal level,…

Q: I have a 355 small-block Chevy in my 1971 Nova and just swapped on a set of used aluminum heads. I was told the heads have 180cc intake runners, 64cc chambers, 65cc exhaust ports, and 2.02/1.60-inch valves. I also put a new 750-cfm Holley vacuum-secondary carb on it. Prior to my changes, it had iron 76cc heads; an Erson cam with 0.496/0.521-inch valve lift with 1.6:1-ratio rockers and 0.224/0.234 degrees duration at 0.050-inch tappet lift; headers with 2.5-inch dual exhaust; and a Holley dual-plane intake with a 600-cfm Holley carb. With the old setup, I would pull 14 to 15 in-hg of vacuum at idle. It ran pretty well with 12 degrees base timing and no vacuum advance. The vacuum advance had caused a stumble off idle, which sounded…

Phillip Thomas Staff Editor @texasthomas What a Good Racing Family Teaches You In racing families, there’s nothing more important than the unerring effort for open communication—it’s the most unspoken element. Drag Weekers get this, and it’s one of the reasons why it’s critical that a driver and co-pilot are dialed in to the mission of the two-lane blacktop. For them, it’s a matter of not just finishing the race but navigating a sea of broken parts and wrong turns, each adding their own weight to the situation. And when communication breaks down, the finish line will outrun you every time. Bob Lutz, in charge of new-product development for machines like the original Dodge Viper and late-model Pontiac GTO and G8, understood this when he wrote the “Bob Lutz Motto” in…

Executive Editor @john.mcgann In an attempt to fix a spongy brake pedal in my 1993 GMC Sierra, I bought a new master cylinder last week at the local parts store. Wouldn’t you know it leaked worse than the one I was trying to replace? I shouldn’t be surprised; I’ve been burned before. This master cylinder is just the latest in a growing list of remanufactured parts I’ve installed in the last few years that didn’t work. Prior to the master cylinder was a power-steering pump, also for the GMC. The replacement pump had a faulty bypass valve. It was as if there was no assist at all. The pump made a bunch of noise and fluid churned about in the reservoir, but there was absolutely no power assist. When I…

Metal Union Speed Shop in Lilburn, Georgia, might not be the oldest shop around, but while taking a walk through its impressive facility, one would never know the company has been in business less than 10 years. Even though the shop is young, owner Field Farrar is no rookie and has amassed a collection of tools and equipment that makes this custom shop one of the most capable in the Southeast. After starting in a small building he shared with a motorcycle shop, Field moved the business to his current building. It has three times the room, polished concrete floors, and eight designated build slots with storage for each project’s parts against the wall right behind it. The place is immaculate and very well-designed, which helps the company build its…

The disc brake as we know it was first patented in 1902, but it failed to gain acceptance in the U.S. until the early 1960s, when vacuum-assist power brakes made the pedal effort acceptable for the American driving public. European automakers had adopted disc brakes in the 1950s, rapidly following Jaguar’s dominance in the 1953 24 Hours of Le Mans race, thanks in no small part to the car’s four-wheel disc-brake system. Disc-brake systems can be divided into two key components: the friction side, which is the hub/rotor and caliper clamping system, and the apply side, which includes the pedal, pushrod, booster (if any), master cylinder, and hydraulic lines. In more modern vehicles, a third system has been introduced: electro-mechanical controls like antilock braking systems (ABS). Originally, ABS was developed…

Kustoms are all about styling—taking an original body, chopping it up, and redesigning it to fit the vision in your head. That is one of the things that makes building cars so much fun: you never know what you are going to see next. When you have an art deco model, such as this 1941 Lincoln Continental, much of the original styling is already beautiful—just a few tweaks here and there to make it yours—but there’s one area that was a major failure: the windshield frame. Unlike the rest of the body, which has bold curves and swoopy lines, the windshield frame is plain and boring. In all honesty, it looks like it belongs on a VW Thing or a Jeep, as opposed to one of the most beautiful art…

To keep the piston from melting down, heat must be transferred out through the piston rings to the cylinder walls and ultimately into the cooling jacket. Today’s engines tend to run hotter than earlier engines, but even if the amount of heat generated by the pistons remains unchanged, the thinner rings used today for many modern production engines as well as high-tech hot rod and racing engines will see elevated temperatures because there’s less overall surface area available for transferring the heat out of the piston. On some modern, advanced, high-performance OE motors, the problem is directly attacked by positively cooling the piston via piston oil squirters, but for most of us, the tried-and-true solution is still increasing the piston-ring endgaps. For baseline moderate performance usage, traditionally about 0.003 inch…

Roadkill @davidfreiburger At some time—nearly instantaneously, for me—driving your car to local cruise-ins and car shows gets boring. I appreciate that many people thrive on telling people about their cars from atop a lawn-chair thrown, but to me, cars were meant for mobile adventure. HOT ROD has enlivened this with 1,000-plus-mile driving events like Power Tour and Drag Week, but I also encourage going solo. Nothing, even the mechanical build-up process, can bond you to a vehicle like a road trip—or preferably many of them. But where should you go? Some folks get trapped in the feeling that they can do nothing if it’s not an ideal bucket-list trek, like to the Bonneville Speed Week, the Indy 500, or the Garlits Museum, to name a few. But you can create…

Drag racing’s long-dead Modified Roadster and Competition Coupe classes produced countless creative combinations, though none more innovative nor entertaining than the so-called “Driverless T.” Liberal early rules required little beyond a factory-production body attached—somewhere—to the chassis of choice. Engine type and location were similarly unrestricted. St. Louis buddies Don Mitchell and Jack Karg went with a not-uncommon union of 1923 Ford body on 1932 rails, but a blown 1951 Chrysler Hemi swapped places with the driver in their unique A/MR. Mitchell sat super-low (note bellypan) and surprisingly upright in the vacated engine compartment, peering through a clear-plastic insert in the 1932 grille shell. The few negatives on file in the company archive all came from the 1958 National Drags and NHRA’s accompanying rod- and-custom show in downtown Oklahoma City. None…

Multiple-time HOT ROD Power Tour® participant Bill Ackerman tipped us off to this unique car stuck in a garage, an original 1966 Ford 7-Litre Galaxie. Bill’s friend had started the car as a restoration project, but as time went on, the Galaxie got pushed to the back burner. Now buried in the garage after many years, its parts are everywhere after the attempted restoration. The 7-Litre wasn’t the only project he had: there was another Galaxie parts car outside under the cover and a 1950s Ford Fairlane 500. CONTACT RYAN! Want Ryan to visit your stash? Drop him a line on the cool stuff you know about, and he might go on an expedition with you! His email is TheAutoArchaeologist@yahoo.com.…

If you were born in the 1970s, you likely observed the roadside world through the windows of a station wagon. Before minivans and SUVs, the people mover of choice was a rolling bench-seat bungalow with more square inches of glass around the occupants than cubic inches under the hood. These suburban family appliances were long, low, and boring. But the wagon’s utility can’t be overlooked. The generous interior proportions and versatile seating configurations make them great for hauling lots of humans and gear. Since many rear-wheel-drive wagon platforms are shared with some of our favorite muscle cars, wagons are low-hanging fruit for hot rodding. Enthusiasts run the most successful firms in the automotive aftermarket industry, and Holley Performance Products is no exception. To demonstrate the possibilities of the company’s wares,…

Our recently installed Holley Sniper fuel-injection system worked great right out of the box, but we wanted to enable ignition timing control to get the most out of the engine. We had an MSD billet distributor in the engine that could have been modified to work with the Sniper, but Holley beat us to the punch by introducing a new line of Sniper-compatible distributors called HyperSpark. These new HyperSpark distributors are a locked design without any advance mechanism. The only thing inside the HyperSpark distributor is a shutter wheel with eight slots to trigger the Hall effect sensor. The Sniper takes care of the ignition timing once it gets the signal from the sensor in the distributor. The mechanical distributor that was previously in our engine worked fine for racing,…

Not everyone can turn wrenches. Be it skill or circumstance, life is an infinite cornucopia of hindrances that keep us out of the garage, away from the project cars that so desperately need our attention. That’s where professional builders come in; they have the time, the knowhow, and the tools to make dream cars a reality. But it’s a sacred and fragile bond linking shop and car owner, one that hinges entirely on trust. To us, cars aren’t appliances needing service, like a vacuum with a meatball-clogged intake. They are extremely personal canvases with deep emotional connections. When a gearhead hands over a car to a shop, it is not done so lightly. When Arthur Ingraham left his 1968 Firebird at a shop outside Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 2009, it…

Disguise Your LS Engine With Classic Valve Covers Trans Dapt // 562.921.0404 // Hedman.com Whether we like it or not, the popularity of the LS swap isn’t dwindling. These engines are finding their way into countless vehicles of all makes and models, so helping them blend in to fit with the overall theme of a build can’t hurt. Though they are great engines, they aren’t much to look at. With these laser-cut steel adapters from Trans Dapt, you’ll be able to spice up your engine bay by installing classic Ford or early Chevy valve covers and disguise the modern powerplant. Price: Starting at $260.96 Flexible Gear Oil Packaging AMSOIL // 800.777.8491 Amsoil.com Changing differential oil is not a complicated process, but dealing with an inconvenient filler location and an awkward…