Indholdsfortegnelse for October 1993 i Hot Rod

DREAM RIDE Anthony Pittari of Staten Island, New York, was restoring his ’68 Chevelle in 1990, dreaming about someday showing it, when he learned that he had cancer. Determination and the love of hot rodding saw him through those rough times. Thanks to help from friends, his slick machine features an ’86 H.O. 305 engine with a Spectra braided-hose kit and a Rochester four-barrel carb. It’s mated to a 71 TH350 tranny and a ’69 Pontiac GTO 10-bolt with 3.73 gears. Anthony removed the stock front drum brakes and replaced them with 71 Monte Carlo power discs. Painted Night Watch blue and riding on Cragar Pro Star wheels, Anthony’s Chevelle took third place at a Staten Island show in August 1991. Anthony would ride on to nine more awards in…

GETTIN’ SLIDEWAYS Most amateur throttle-jockeys would kill for a ride in a Sprint Car, perhaps the most gutsy of all racing experiences. Now you can do it! Dirt Track Racing Workshops has a program to let you get sideways in one of three Gambler Sprint Cars powered by an alky-injected, 355-inch, 600hp small-block Chevy. There’s no throttle stop or rev limiter, so you’re allowed to drive to your safe limit. The workshop is held at Lincoln Park Speedway’s demile clay oval in Putnamville, Indiana, about 40 miles from Indy, and it’s instructed by ’92 Indiana Sprint Week champion Kevin Thomas. You pay $395 for two 10-lap sessions, and we promise that the thrill factor will be high. Premium Video Productions will be on hand to tape all the action, and…

There’s a group of them in every town—the guys who are known by their cars rather than their names. “Here comes the guy with the gear-drive ’69 Camaro.” “The one with the vacuum leak?” “No, the one that beat that Mustang last week.” If the guy does have a name, it usually describes his place on the street circuit: “Screwy Louie,” “Butch Jeff,” “Hemi Bob” or “Nitrous Nick.” The subculture of hot rodding and some of the baddest street cars ever were born with these nocturnal masters of deception. Their roots can be traced back to well before C.J. “Pappy” Hart gave them a legal place to race by opening the first organized dragstrip at California’s Orange County Airport in 1950. Professional racing eventually weeded “no rules” heads-up racers off…

“Hello, Sam?” “Yea.” “I wanna go 8s.” “Will that be cash, check or charge?” Well, okay, so building an 8-second street car isn’t as easy as that—but Sam Gianino can get you close. The problem is that most 8-second racers are pretty tightlipped about their speed secrets. That’s why we were surprised when Danny Scott told us that his 8-second, 3445-pound ’67 Camaro was powered by an out-of-the-box Gianino Racing Engines 543 Rat motor at last year’s Fastest Street Car Shootout. And once we visited Sam Gianino at Gianino Racing Engines, we were more surprised that the thumper Rat wasn’t as exotic or as expensive as we expected, either. But the fact is that you have to write the check to run the number, and Gianino has an engine package…

Hold onto your leathers, helmets, flight wigs, cycle boots and paste-on tattoos: Lil’ John Buttera, the billet monster of high tech, has seemingly gone hog mild. We say “seemingly” because Lil’s “Speedsters” are Harleys in style but not in substance. In reality, the two Speedsters shown on this spread are phantoms—bikes that never were. They’re actually Lil’ John’s version of the company-backed racing motorcycles that dominated Class C competition during the ’50s and ’60s. Lil’ John’s V-twins, Ron Craft’s white No. 1 and Bill Simpson’s near-identical “blue” boy, are Harleys in so far as they were built around the dimensions of a ’93 Softail and contain Milwaukee-manufactured engines and transmissions, plus Lil’ John-modified White Bros, front forks, Fournales gas-filled rear s’hocks and Avon tires. Moreover, he’s currently working on an…

When we last left the Performer Pickup project, it was still in the paint booth receiving Chromabase clothing, Taylor graphics and gallons of clearcoat—all lovingly applied by Mike Paradis at Cars, Trucks & Concepts in Van Nuys, California. The original plan for last month’s installment was to show you what went on with not just the bodywork phase of the project, but also the Tony Nancy/Bobby Griffey interior. As you may recall, time got the better of us and we could only show the body and the undetailed paint work. Hence, this month was devoted to trimming the cab. Murphy’s Law as it relates to project vehicles is applying in spades here, so we’re still not done. But, man, we’re close. While Paradis was finishing some details on the Chevy,…

Mike Prince of Jacksonville, Florida, is no stranger to Pro Street cars. He’s owned a Pro Street Corvette, a Pro Street Buick and he and wife Lisa now lay claim to this sterling ProStreet T-Bird. Mike originally built the car as a Pro Stock entry with a small wing, but then he painted it and converted it to the Pro Mod look. It’s still a dependable reacher that gets about 17 mpg, has seen 40,000 miles click onto the odometer since its completion and is driven to all shows, including the Street Machine Nationals in Tampa, Florida, where we photographed it. The ’Bird rides on a custom frame built from 2x3-inch square tubing by Nat Jackson. The 9-inch Ford rearend is controlled by ladder bars and a set of Carrera…

TURBO VALVE CONTROLLER HKS recently received an Executive Order (E.O.) declaring its Electronic Valve Controller (EVC) 50-state legal on all ’93-and-older turbocharged vehicles. The EVC is a 64K, eight-bit, 16MHz microprocessor that controls boost pressure on any wastegate-equipped turbo car. According to HKS, the EVC can provide increases in boost pressure up to 200 percent higher than the factory wastegate setting. It’s also said to widen the powerband and outperform all commonly available mechanical boost controls. For more information, contact HKS USA, Inc., Dept. HR 10, 20312 Gramercy PL, Torrance, CA 90501, 310/328-8100.…

PRICE REDUCTION I’m 13 years old and own a 1959 HOT ROD magazine. think that you should sell your magazine at $.35 a copy for the 45th anniversary. I’m sure you will sell more. I’ve loved HOT ROD since was 4. Keep up the good work. Jeffrey Smith Calumet City, Illinois We’d love to charge you only $.35 for HOT ROD. In fact, we’d even like to go down to our original cost of $.25 per copy. And we’ll do it just os soon as housing prices, transportation costs and other economic variables are also reduced to 1948 rates. MORE DATA, PLEASE You cover nice street cars in your magazine, but you never give what horsepower or torque their engines make. What kind of rpm do these motors turn? Also,…

READERS’ CARS POSIE’S PICK Each issue, Ken “Posie” Fenical selects one young reader’s well-built hot rod for inclusion in Roddin At Random. Posie makes his selection from a group of vehicles built and submitted by rodders under the age of 25, and his pick for October is Tara Baukus’ ’32 Ford pickup. Tara is 22 and built the pickup with her father after he hooked her on street rodding with a ride in his ’29 Ford sedan delivery. While she relied on dad for expertise and guidance, she did much of the work—particularly the body mods—with her own two hands. They began the project in mid-’9O and completed it in March of ’92. The Ford carries the orginal steel cab with a repop steel bed, running boards and ’glass fenders.…

Let’s face it: Hot rodders are scroungers. Very few of us have the luxury of purchasing everything we need brand new for our hot rods. While recycling has become politically correct these days, hot rodders were perhaps the first recyclers with the credo “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” Previously owned parts offer a tremendous advantage in price, but you must know what you’re buying. That’s where skill and talent come into play. You will often run across an on-the-spot, cash-right-now deal of the century. But that also requires instant decisions based on your knowledge of what you need, what you want and, most important, what fits and what doesn’t. After all, how good a deal is it if the disc-brake conversion you just…

In January of this year we showed you what the new Camaro and Firebird look like. Now we’re going to show you what they can do. We didn’t include a performance test in our introduction because we felt that the prototype cars we were allowed to drive and photograph may not have performed the same as the cars you’ll find at your local dealership. Since then, we’ve had a chance to put some hard miles on the three V8-powered F-bodies: the Z28 Camaro, the Formula Firebird and the Trans Am. All three were equipped with Borg-Warner T56 six-speed transmissions (which was fine with us). Our seat-of-the-pants evaluation was that the cars are fun to drive. That may seem like a very obvious and very simple statement, but when we step…

There are a number of advantages to serpentine-belt systems compared to conventional V-belt accessory drives. Serpentine drives require less belt tension due to their larger contact area, which reduces total power required to drive the accessories. Plus, you rarely hear of a belt-tossing problem with serpentine systems. Underdrive pulleys have become common for most of the popular performance applications. and if nothing else, the simple belt tensioner makes changing a belt an absolute breeze. If there is a down side, it’s that these systems are somewhat expensive. A replacement belt alone can cost over $50 retail. If you’re interested in converting your small-block Chevy over to a serpentine-belt-drive system, the least expensive avenue would be to try to find a used 4.3-liter GM V6, since that engine is essentially a…

It happens every year. The last weekend of June subjects the city of DuQuoin, Illinois, to a convergence of cars—a hullabaloo of hot rods, if you will. The normally tranquil burg, situated close to (but comfortably distant from) St. Louis is transformed into a hotbed of action as it is overrun with hot rods and street machines of all brands, colors and personal statements. It’s the car guy’s equivalent of a pilgrimage to Mecca: The Street Machine Nationals has come to town. This year marked the 17th year of the Nats. The official attendance came in at 3781 participant vehicles (up slightly over last year) and a hefty 106,025 spectators over the whole weekend. The highlights for ’93 were certainly plentiful and included Todd Jupiter’s beautiful Mike Adams-built ’65 Corvette,…

Every once in a while you have to do something a little bit different. Tim Sousamian of Trader’s Truck Accessories in Whittier, California, is the man behind many of the trick late-model Chevy and GMC pickups scouring the streets these days. But it was the mundane ’72 Chevy pickup that had been languishing in Trader Tim’s shop for months that finally beck-oned him to light off his torch. The first order of business was to hack away at the stock frame to fit the much-modified Art Morrison coil-over four-link suspending a Chevy 12-bolt Posi rear and a JAZ plastic fuel cell. Trader’s also added a set of Bell Tech front spindles and coil springs to slam this puppy flat on the pavement. Completing the rolling chassis is a set of…

Too often, people get way too involved with their cars and give them up to salvage their sanity. That could have been the case with Doug and Ruthie Blocker and their beautiful black ’57 Chevrolet. Luckily for us, they decided to persevere and finish the project. After using the Chevy as a daily driver for 9 years, Doug got bit by the Pro Street bug, and things haven’t quite been the same since. His intent was to build a very streetable Pro Streeter with an uncompromised back seat, no rollbar, classic styling and the capability to turn a respectable quarter-mile time. The Blockers met these goals, but not exactly the way they expected. The car was back-halved using 2x3- and 2x4-inch tubing. A Ford 9-inch was hung between the framerails…

A zapper aftermarket ignition is one of the best smog-legal mods you can make, despite the hot rodder’s typical aversion to anything with wires hanging off it. We called MSD to clear un some common Questions about installing an MSD 6AL with the integral rev limiter, but the information presented here is typical of aftermarket capacitor-discharge ignition such as the Jacobs Energy Pak and the Mallory HyFire. WILL IT WORK ON MY CAR? Most aftermarket cd ignition will work with stock or aftermarket point or electronic distributors or crank triggers. The MSD 6AL can be wired to work with electronic or optical ignition conversions from ACCEL, Allison, Chrysler, Mallory, Motorola, Perlux, Prestolite or Stinger. However, make sure that the ignition is on the car and running before attempting installation of…

See if any of these scenarios sound familiar: Every morning when you start your car, a small cloud of blue smoke erupts from the tailpipe. Or, even though your engine doesn’t leak oil and apparently doesn’t burn oil, you still have to add a quart every 800 to 1000 miles. Or, no matter how often you remove your spark plugs, there’s always a coating of oil on the threads. If any of these situations have a familiar ring, you can blame it on leaking valve-guide seals. The function of a valve-guide seal is to control oil flow to the valve guides. It’s especially critical on the intake valve, since the seal is subjected to vacuum from the intake stroke virtually the entire time the intake valve is open. That vacuum…

REAL TOYS RACING COLLECTIBLES The Legends of Drag Racing Series of die-cast l:64-scale collectibles is now available from Racing Collectables. The first release features Don Nicholson’s ’63 Chevy. Later additions will include a ’63 Ford, a ’62 Pontiac, a ’64 Dodge and a ’91 Oldsmobile. For more information, contact Racing Collectables, Inc., Dept. HR10, 6600 Highlands Pky., Suite B, Smyrna, GA 30082, 800/952-0708. LONG REACH EXTENDED ANVIL IMPACT WRENCH The IR2131-2 Impact Wrench from Ingersoll-Rand features identical performance to the company’s standard 1/2-inch-drive impact wrench, except for an extended anvil. The 2-inch extension is designed to make tire changing and other tasks requiring a little more length easier. For more information, contact your local Ingersoll-Rand dealer. CLASSIC VITAL SIGNS INSTRUMENT KIT Dakota Digital now offers a kit for ’55-’56 Chevrolet…

POWER UP Whether you are building a GM-powered street rod, race car or street car, GM Performance Parts offers two different, complete wiring harnesses to meet your 12-volt/negative-ground electrical needs. Both harnesses feature GM color-coded UL-listed, 105-degree-Celsius wire, fuses, flashers, relays, fusible link, a large assortment of terminals and easy to follow instructions and schematics. The Custom Series 12 circuit wiring assembly (part No. 12355691) has a factory-assembled, completely terminated fuse block with circuits for air conditioning and heat, backup lights, cruise control, coil (including an antitheft feature), dome light, electric fan, emergency flashers, dash instruments, headlights, horn, radio, turn signals and wipers. The Ultimate Series 18 wiring assembly (part No. 12355693) adds brake lights, a cigarette lighter, an electric fuel pump, power windows and power door locks. The Ultimate…

Nothing is as irritating as wind noise in a car. The windows are up, the doors are closed tightly and the car is whistling Lynard Skynard’s “They Call Me the Breeze.” It’s time to do something about that cracked, rotten and missing weather stripping. Acquiring replacement rubber seals for most cars isn’t a problem. The Big Three still list some pieces for cars 20 years old or newer, and reproduction firms such as Dennis Carpenter (who specializes in Ford vehicles) and A&M SoffSeal carry just about everything else. For older cars and trucks, RB’s Obsolete Automotive shows a cross-sectional view of each seal with measurements in its catalog for most cars dating back to the 1920s. Using that information, you could create a custom seal on cars for which reproduction…