Indholdsfortegnelse for November 1994 i Hot Rod

I spent a week in Detroit recently, soaking up all kinds of information, tidbits and rumors that I think you’ll find interesting. Like Pontiac’s mysterious Building 5, for example. I was at Pontiac’s headquarters looking over some engineering “toys"—Firebirds, Bonnevilles and Grand Ams with forced induction—when I was introduced to Jim Mattison. Jim runs Pontiac Historic Services, a neat program that for $25 and your Poncho’s VIN can provide you with a copy of the original factory invoice or billing history, a letter decoding options, a copy of the dealer order form for the year of your car, an official photo of that year Pontiac (if available) and other information specific to that make. It’s a great deal, especially if you’re interested in buying a car and you want to…

UNDER CONSTRUCTION GO ’MAD Adams Rod Shop (ARS) in West Palm Beach, Florida, has another killer machine in the works that should be finished by the time you read this. ARS owner Mike Adams is building this ’57 Go ’Mad for Danny Bryant. It sits on one of Adams’ slick tube chassis complete with ’Vette front and rear independent suspensions, a l1/2-inch angled top chop, a ’90s wraparound dash and one-off Weld wheels. For motor-vation, Adams is again going the wild EFI route with a Kinsler manifold and cross-ram throttle bodies feeding an all-aluminum Bow-Tie 406ci small-block kicking into a 700-R4 automatic. Wagons are hot, and this one just may sizzle a little more than most! We’ll keep you posted on this sweetheart.—-Jeff Smith ST. IGNACE A WET ’N’COOL CRUISE…

Even if you order your engine through the mail, you will most likely want specialized components that are designed for your particular application. Also, mail-order engines often need water pumps, carburetors and other equipment to get them running, and these items are often not included with the basic kits. Listed here are some ideas for you to consider when buying those pieces to get your new engine running. AIR FLOW RESEARCH ALUMINUM STREET HEADS The first company to offer a set of smog-legal small-block Chevy aftermarket aluminum cylinder heads was Air Flow Research back in 1992, and the company is still cranking ’em out. Capable of getting you about 50 more horsepower and the same amount of torque, these heads bolt right on and improve power over the entire rpm…

The rearend is often the last part of the drivetrain to be considered when building a car, and it usually receives attention only after something breaks. With good high-performance rearends available for Ford, GM and Mopar cars, there is no need for your ride to be sitting on a weak rear. In many cases, a stronger rear-axle assembly can simply be bolted in from the same make car. If you need something even stronger, you can swap from another make or model by finding one of the appropriate width and welding on the correct mounting pads. Or, if a Ford 9-inchis what you need, you can purchase a housing custom-remanufactured to fit your car by Currie Enterprises or Moser Engineering. What we aim to do with this article is show…

Big-block Fords have always been famous for maximizing cubic inches, and among the engine builders famous for obese Fords, Jon Kaase (pronounced Kah-zee) is one of the best. His truck-puller and unlimited-displacement race motors now reach into the burly 805ci range! The 600-incher shown here is no pretender. Kaase leaned on this big motor with an out-of-the-box, cast-aluminum SVO intake and a Holley Dominator, and it cranked out 1080 horsepower at 7600 rpm. But wait, there’s more. Kaase then swapped on a fabricated dual-Dominator intake and watched the needle spin to 1205 horsepower at 7800. Ford Motorsport SVO makes this power possible with a 600-inch shortblock kit. To make it really fly, Kaase added a pair of the new Ford 460 Pro Stock wedge heads. These aluminum castings are first…

Any time an event gets really big, people worry that it will change—that the good vibes of the event’s smaller days will be lost forever. The renowned Straits Area Antique Auto Show and Collector Car Festival, as its promoters call it(hot rodders simply call it St. Ignace, for the Michigan town it’s held in), was held for the 19th time this past June and attracted a record number of cars and people. As the event continues to grow, many say it has changed. But it still has the small-town flavor it always did—except that now it has the cars and stars you’d expect at some power-parker show. How many places can you go and see a laundry list of heavy-hitters from the Big Three automakers (like Chevy’s General Manager Jim…

Squeeze, spray, laughing gas, giggle juice, throttle in a bottle—all common pseudonyms for nitrous oxide, that wonder gas that makes ludicrous amounts of horse-power with the simple turn of a knob, flick of a switch and hammer of a throttle. And it’s not just for four-wheeled street machines anymore. As the popularity of custom and hot rod Harleys continues to grow, more and more traditional hot rodding tips and tricks are finding their way onto the Milwaukee throbbers, and nitrous is one of them. Harleys have a reputation, some-times deserved, of being strictly for profiling. If you wanna look cool, you get a Hog. But if you wanna go really, really fast, you check out the latest fiberglass-clad screamers from Japan. That is indeed the case most of the time,…

Building engines is one of those tasks that is made much easier with the right tools. If you plan to spend a lot of time assembling engines, it’s worth the money to invest in the right tools. But for the once-every-10-years engine builder, it doesn’t make sense to purchase a toolbox full of specialized tools that you’ll never use. The benefit of specialized tools, especially measuring tools like micrometers, dial indicators and dial bore gauges, is that you have an ultra-accurate knowledge of the clearances built into your engine. From personal experience, the HOT ROD staff has plenty of horror stories about what happens when the clearances that are supposed to be machined into your engine aren’t what they’re supposed to be. The bottom line is that if you can’t…

MORE WOMEN RODDERS In response to Elaine Morlock’s letter in the August ’94 issue asking about women hot rodders, I would love to see a feature on the cars we ladies have put together. A few years ago, my husband restored and raced a ’69 Dart Swinger. Well, it only took a couple of times at the racetrack for me to realize I wanted my own car. My husband bought me a car, another ’69 Swinger, and together we tore it apart and rebuilt it. The end result is a beautiful car that has won several awards at local car shows. I also race it in a weekly e.t. series, and it turns respectable 14.4s on street tires and a basically stock 340 with a 727 TorqueFlite. (And that’s at…

Editor’s note: You may be wondering why SOGM is heading up our Crate and Mail-Order Engine ’section. Well, nestled betweeen those vintage fenders is an LT1, fresh out of the box. SOGM is a prime example of the potential crate motors offer. When BFGoodrich became the major force behind the creation of Son Of Green Machine, the project was consummated with the understanding that SOGM wouldn’t be a trailer queen but rather a flaming, reaching peoria-parading, Americruising driving machine. This final segment HOT ROD’s multipart series covers SOGM’s2000-plus-mile trip from California Street Rods (the builder of the ’57) to Peoria, Illinois—the site of the second-annual Rod & Custom Americruise. i However, the only fly in the ointment was that your 01’Dad was driving another ’57 Chevy and couldn’t be a…

Jerry Montgomery has a thing for race and Pro Street cars. So when a drag-race veteran came into his hands, he and his friends built the red ’n’ ready Streeter you see here. A welder by trade, Jerry installed the full tube chassis and Art Morrison front end, and he constructed and installed the four-link rear suspension and 12-point cage. The 12-bolt rearend peeking out from under the car has been narrowed 14 inches and loaded with 4.33 gears on a Strange spool to get the power through the Strange axles to the 18.5-inch-wide Mickey Thompsons. Dave Phelps helped Jerry with the chassis work. The whoa comes from Wilwood discs at all corners, and the go comes from a mucho-blown big-block Chevy. Bigger intake valves were installed in the Merlin…

The rearend is one of those glamourless parts of a street machine that usually only gets attention when it breaks. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a common but dangerous and potentially very expensive attitude to take concerning that heavy hunk of iron under the trunk. Being passed by your own rear wheel and a hunk of axle is not the cool way to end a race! The following is a guide to companies that specialize in making rearends live under even the most stressful of conditions, with parts ranging from stock re build components to full-race trickery guaranteed to put the power down instead of going up in 90-weight smoke. AUBURN GEAR An open differential is a piece of equipment that has no business on a high-performance…

In simplest terms, a valve is a device that controls flow through a pas-sage. The valves that control the flow of the intake and exhaust charges in most engines are of the poppet type, which means that they move up and down to open and close the passage. In past “How It Works” stories, we have explained how the cam lifts the tappets, lifting the pushrods and actuating the rocker arms, which push down on the tips of the valves. When this happens, the valves are lifted off their seats and allow either intake or exhaust gases in or out of the combustion chamber. The greatest challenge the valves meet is dealing with the extreme heat generated in the cylinder. The intake valves are cooled by the incoming air/fuel mixture,…

You know you have a good product when your competitors copy it, and the same must be true for events. A half dozen events similar to our Fastest Street Car Shootout, held in conjunction with the National Muscle Car Association (NMCA), have popped up since the first race in 1992. There are probably countless local races and events that we don’t know about as well. We’ve evennoticed that a competing publication has a “fastest streetcar” race and is using a logothat looks amazingly like ours. The idea behind all of these races is the same: Pit street cars against each other in heads-up racing. It’s not meant to be professional racing, but a place any of us can take our seriously fast street cars to and have some fun. The…

HOT ROD magazine’s 44-year involvement with “rod-ject” cars has ensured its place as the rodder’s bible. Nothing closes the credibility gap faster that doin’ it to, in or on your own ride, a hands-on lesson that wasn’t loston the boys from Competition Cams. According to Competition Cams’ Mike Cunningham, “We’re really excited about having California Street Rods do for us what it did for HOT ROD magazine a couple of years ago—assemble a proven combination that mixes semi-high-tech mechanical components with the familiar shape of a ’34 Chevy sedan delivery.” In fact, Comp Cams’ Cam Express is, in reality, a triple-purpose project. First, many of Comp Cams’ employees are avid street rodders and active participants in building, driving and attending various street rodding events. Cam Express will allow the employees…

It should come as no surprise to learn that top racers enjoy performance and custom vehicles when they are not on the track. It’s actually difficult to picture Scott Geoffrion stepping into a Neon or Dale Earnhardt driving a Corsica on the weekends. So it didn’t knock us out when we heard the news that one of this sea-son’s better Indy Car Series drivers, Paul Tracy, owns a tricked-out Softail. What did get our attention, however, is how trick his bike is. What started out as a Troy Lee-painted Harley turned into this full-on custom through the handiwork of Donny Petersen’s Heavy Duty Cycles Limited in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. Paul originally brought the bike to Donny just to have the front end changed, and one thing led to another. Donny…

PRODUCT OF THE MONTH MAY THE CENTRIFORCE BE WITH YOU B&M has jumped into centrifugal supercharging with its own belt-driven blower. Not merely a remake of current designs, the B&M CentriForce is all new with the first bolt-on system intended for the popular injected 5.0L Mustang in a CARB-legal, six-pound-boost configuration. A nine-pound-boost unit is available in an off-highway version, and kits for GM and other Ford applications are to be introduced soon. The B&M CentriForce utilizes a cogged belt-drive mechanism with sealed ceramic bearings that require no lubrication. This allows it to run cooler, which also pumps the power. For more information, contact B&M Racing and Performance Products, Dept. HR11, 9142 Independence Ave., Chatsworth, CA 91311, 818/882-6422. SLOW GO IT JACOBS’ SPEED SAFE Jacobs Electronics introduces Speed Safe, a…

This month’s Readers’ Rides were all shot at the Indy Power Fest. That’s right, here’s yet another reason to go next year. Even if you can’t convince us to shoot a full-boogie feature onyour car, you still have a chance to get the express ticket to Readers’ Rides. TUNNEL-RAM TORINO Taking second-place honors in the Super Street show category was Don McLain’s ’70 Ford Torino, a car he’s owned since 1972. The car has gone through several changes, the latest of which is the small-tired, Super Street persona. The 429 under the hood was lacking in torque, so Don swapped on a set of 460 heads with smaller intake ports. Even with the tunnel-ram and twin Holleys, Don reports the car is very responsive and driveable yet still capable of…

Yep, that car doing the hazy burnout at Los Angeles County Raceway is Super ’Stang, the ’89 Mustang LX project car we’re building in conjunction with Super Shops. In case you haven’t been following the project, our intent is to turn an ordinary 5.0 Mustang into an exciting daily driver—one that’s as fun going in a straight line as it is turning corners. Toward that end, we have built up the 5.0 using a raft of hi-po components, and we’ve tweaked and tuned the chassis and suspension with aftermarket parts as well. If you’re looking to make similar mods to your 5.0, you can find just about every part we’ve used at your local Super Shops store. In this month’s chapter, it’s time to plant the 5.0 in the ’Stang’s…

One of the best performance modifications that can be made to a street machine is a change in rear gears. Going from a stock, economy-minded 2.73:1 ratio to a 4.11:1 performance gear can transform a lethargic loser into a leapin’ leaver. You’ll swear you found another 50 horsepower somewhere. The bad part is that while simple engine bolt-ons can be done by almost anyone with a hammer and a screwdriver, changing a ring-and-pinion gearset is much more involved and requires some dedicated tools that you probably don’t have. This is especially true of the GM 10- and 12-bolt rearends, but we’ve recently run across a few trick tools that make it easier and less expensive to set up the GM rearends at home. The following will show how to install…

In the performance-tire business, legends are made, not born. Way back in 1970, BFGoodrich introduced what was then the first of a new generation of performance tires called radials. Before that time, bias-belted tires ruled the roadway. The radial was radical technology. To prove how good the tire was, BFG raced it in open competition with the now-famous Greenwood I M S A Corvette and two Radial T/A Tire Bird Firebird race cars that competed in Trans-Am against dedicated slick racing tires. In fact, IMSA created the BFGoodrich Radial T/A Challenge that ran from 1972 to 1976, where all the International Sedan cars competed on this same production tire. That was almost 25 years ago, and the Radial T/A has since undergone its fifth and latest redesign. Considering its heritage,…

It’s been 22 years since Car Craft hosted the first Street Machine Nationals in Memphis, Tennessee. This year, CC returned to its roots by hosting the inaugural Car Craft Summer Cruise, which was presented by BFGoodrich Tires and sponsored by Dodge Trucks/Mopar Performance. As was the case more than two decades ago, the beautiful summer weather gave participants and spectators plenty of opportunity to enjoy the weekend. The Cruise wasn’t held in Memphis but at the Missouri State Fairgrounds in Sedalia, where nearly 500 of the Midwest’s finest street machines collected for the show. There was a wide assortment of cars to see, from tubbed and blown Pro Streeters to what were dubbed “real rods": the nicely done—but not overdone—street machines that are driven every day. If the rows of…

Project Freeway Fats is a ’39 Ford Tudor sedan. In this series of build-up stories, we’re detailing the fabrication, restoration and assembly of the car using some of the top builders in the country as sources. Many of the build-up techniques involved are common to all street rods, and many more are common to all types of hot rod projects, regardless of year, make or model. Project Freeway Fatsis designed to draw upon those techniques and illustrate how to build a reliable, durable, daily-driven street rod. Theemphasis is less on flash than on function, and the greatest stress is being placed on the car’s handling, performance and safety. In any project buildup, proper paint is crucial to the appeal of the finished product, and a good paint job begins with…

Making changes to a very popular product line that prides itself on its heritage is an interesting job. The engineers hope to make improvements and create a winner, something that the public will be ordering more of than the company can produce. But at the same time, there’s a long line of history that cannot be disturbed. Looking at the new offerings from Harley-Davidson for the ’95 model year, it’s obvious that there is at least one new winner: the Bad Boy. This bike shows true hot rodding spirit by combining the best parts from other models to make one really cool-looking and comfortable- to-ride motorcycle. There’s also the Dyna Super Glide, which offers an excellent chassis for more spirited riding over nearly any paved terrain. For two-wheeled tourers, Harley…

TWO SHORT Q I have a 230ci six-in-a-row in my ’63 Chevy. It runs great, but I want to get more horsepower out of it. I’m sure you think I’m nuts for wanting to hop-up a six-cylinder, but the truth is that I’m getting a little tired of V8s. Michael ByamWindom, Minnesota A We won’t say that you’re completely nuts tor wanting to hot rod a six banger and, in fact, there is at least one company, Clifford Performance (Dept. HR11, 2330 Pomona-Rincon Rd., Corona, CA 91720, 909/734-3310), that makes quite a few parts for sixes (V6s as well as L6s). Chevrolet straight-sixes have a few drawbacks—such as a head bolt boss through two intake ports—but there is definitely room for improvement over stock. MORE INJECTION Q in the May…