Indholdsfortegnelse for August 1995 i Hot Rod

In case you missed all the fun and excitement of our Power Festival in Norwalk, Ohio, you still have another chance to get in on the action this summer. Our second Power Fest of the year will be held August 25-27 at the Atlanta Dragway in Commerce, Georgia. As with the Norwalk Fest, the Atlanta show is being presented by BFGoodrich, sponsored by Chevrolet and co-sponsored by Kicker, all folks who are invaluable in bringing these events to you. We’re excited about coming down to Georgia. It gives us a chance to visit with our readers from the Southeast in a more leisurely atmosphere than, say, the NMCA Finals in Memphis. It also allows us to check out cars we don’t normally see during our many trips to the Midwest.…

MIGHTY FORTY-NINER Bob Blase’s Cheap Thrills come in the form of this ’49 Chevy | Fleetline, which he built for roughly five grand, total. In the four years that he’s owned it, Blase and his son Thomas have put it through several stages of modification, currently powering it with a 400 small-block, a TH350 trans and a 10-bolt posi rearend. They did all the mechanical work themselves, thus the budget-minded bottom line. But when it came to the bodywork, they were smart enough to let a pro do it, and selected ’93 Cadillac Garnet Red for the color. If you’re going to the Rod & Custom Americruise in Lincoln, Nebraska, you’ll probably sec the ’49, as the fairgrounds are only a few miles from Biases Polk, Nebraska home. STEPPIN’ UP…

Having been involved with the film industry for a number of years, it was “especially thrilling” for writer/filmmaker Dick Wallen to obtain this ’40 Mercury as a project car. since the Tudor had been used by Universal Studios—and not too kindly, if the photos are any indication. Wallen’s plans for the Merc, penned by automotive designer Pete Brock, called for extensive customizing, which is currently being done by Ron Batson. Batson is channeling the car 4 inches, raising the fenders 315 inches, removing the running boards, revising the fenders and piecutting the hood, among other things. Also note that the sedan’s roof is being replaced by a Carson top, and a onepiece windshield will be used instead of the stock split ’shield. The Merc will also have an all-new interior,…

What separates the men from the boys isn’t the size of their toys, it’s the bitchingness of their toys! Take this hand-formed, all-aluminum, ’A-scale midget, for example. It and its Ron Fournier-fashioned brothers epitomize the term. Ron, a metal-massaging veteran who has worked for Penske and Holman-Moody, has a thing for historical racing cars, which has led him to create a limited number of repli-cool, ’47 Frank Kurtis-produced midgets. Fournier’s 16-inch-long, 6-inch-tall, fully detailed, 4 ¾-pound models come in two basic styles—Offy or V8-60 powered—and five colors—red, white, medium blue, yellow, black or bare aluminum. Better yet, there is a track roadster in the planning stages as well. Getting nervous? Contact Ron Fournier, Dept. HR08, 1850 Thunderbird St., Troy Ml 48048-5428, 810/362-3722, 810/362-2866 (fax) and have him ship you a…

Seventeen-year-old Bill Craig of Fontana, California, transformed a six-cylinder ’63 Ranchero into a cool, V8-powered hauler. Bill built the 10:1 289 with a Comp Cams camshaft, an Edelbrock Performer RPM intake manifold, a Holley 650 double-pumper, Mallory ignition and Hooker headers with Flowmaster mufflers. Inside the truck, Bill sits on seats pulled from an ’85 Camaro, monitors the 289 with Auto Meter gauges and listens to a Pioneer sound system. If you’re under 25 and think your car is a potential Posie’s Pick, send clear color photos and a description of the mods you’ve made to Posie’s Picks, Dept. HR08, 217 N. Duke St., Hummelstown, PA 17036.…

What is it about the electrical system in a car that will make an otherwise intrepid hot rodder shudder with fear when confronted with an electrical problem? Whatever the phobia, most hot rodders make lousy electricians. Fortunately, many electrical problems are quite easy to solve if you know how to diagnose the problem or prevent it from occurring. Preventive maintenance is always the best approach, especially with electrical systems. It only takes one electrical fire or a failed charging system that’s left you on the side of the road to make you a believer in preventing those problems before they leave you stranded. We’ll take a look at a number of common problems and how to avoid them with some simple tips and procedures that are guaranteed to eliminate most…

As a professional photographer, Steve Penrod knows all about color as it relates to film and print reproduction. That’s why he wasn’t too shocked when we told him there’s no way we’d photograph his black ’68 Camaro. Great detail and 9-second e.t.’s are fantastic, but black just ain’t happenin’ from a magazine standpoint. He took our comments to heart—and into the paint booth—and the next time we saw the car it was wearing a much more magazine-friendly yellow coat. It may pain some purists, but this tubbed and caged Camaro started life as an RS/SS/big-block car. It has been raced since day one, though, and currently runs low nines courtesy of a 509-inch Rat motor with a Crower cam and valvetrain, Brodix heads, MSD ignition, an electric CSI water pump…

We receive nearly 250 letters a month addressed to Pit Stop requesting technical help to build your car. Reading those letters requires a large amount of time, but because of this we feel we have a pretty firm and accurate grip on what you want to know. We get a good portion of our story ideas from this mailbag, and hopefully we provide you with the information you need. It’s unfortunate that we don’t have the time or the resources to answer every letter, but we at least read and consider every one. This grouping of 20 letters represents some of the most commonly asked questions we have received over the last two years. They cover everything from engine tech to suspension how tos and treat more than just Chevrolets.…

There is an old adage that says there is no replacement for displacement, Well, there is one: nitrous oxide. There are those who will argue with this, but we’ll bet by the time you get to the end of this article, you’ll be a believer, too. To show what nitrous can do, we bolted a Nitrous Oxide Systems (NOS) plate system onto a car, took it the track, and used over 45 pounds of nitrous going through the steps that you should follow to get the most from your nitrous system. Our goal was to lower our e.t. as much as possible, but also to be superconservative to avoid hurting any engine parts. Let’s face it, with all the explosive action you’ve seen on these pages associated with nitrous use,…

Every hot rodder’s plan is to build something “a little bit different.” But Danny Bryant wanted to go stark raving ’Mad. He had this ’57 Nomad and wanted to transform it into something a little bit more lunatic than your average two-door station wagon. To do this, he needed someone who is equally hip to the mad side of things—Mike Adams. Adams’ Rod Shop (ARS) in West Palm Beach, Florida, has been the home of many fine street machines and rods. That’s where the transformation from staid wagon to madcap motor bus began. While this all sounds certifiable, the plan is actually a conservative blend of one-third image-enhancing “I want it to look bitchin’” custom tricks, and two-thirds reality-based “but it’d better drive like a stocker with some beans.” This…

Some bikes are built for the thrill of discovery, the magic of metalworking, or the therapy that comes in crafting something different. And some are built purely for profit, to be sold before the paint even dries. Mike Corbin’s new Sportster is a combination of both. It’s a testbed/development mule for some of his company’s newest parts, but it’s also a source of pride and quality workmanship. You see, Corbin is the owner of the company that shares his name, the maker of motorcycle seats, body parts and so on, and this bike was the prototype for the Warbird body kit. But simply regarding it as a tool does the bike an injustice. Even though it was an exercise in parts design and marketing, this bike was also a two-wheeled…

The HOT ROD road show is coming soon to a car event near you! As part of our drive to bring our pages to life to more and more of our readers, Petersen Publishing’s Automotive Performance Group will be attending more than 35 car shows and events in 1995 with our new custom transporter. Thanks to sponsors BFGoodrich Tires, Chevrolet, Kicker and Trader’s Truck Accessories, we’ll be bringing magazine cars and other special displays to street rod, street machine and other shows across the country. The transporter, staffed and operated by California Street Rods, will be a featured part of our own Special Events series—and in fact it debuted on our Power Tour to the Power Festival in Norwalk, Ohio. But it will make appearances at other, non-Petersen shows as…

Jeff “Woodman” Hobgood is still chipping away. His latest creation is a near-perfect, 25-inch-long, cherry-bodied replica of the famed Pebble, Pulp and Chef Gasser, better known as the Stone, Woods and Cook AA/GS Willys. According to Hobgood, “The A/Gasser features an oak chassis, leaf springs, ladder bars and a quick-change rearend in addition to cherry shocks, engine and cylinders, while the blower, magneto, pulleys, and wheels are made of maple and poplar. Moreover, the Moon fuel tank is made of box elder and the valve covers and radiator are made from wenge, an African wood. Lastly the interior has a cherry bench seat with a pine rollcage and shifter. Even a mandatory NHRA fire extinguisher is included.” Hobgood is also planning an encore…something beeching that hauls ash. You can contact…

More and more Mopar fans have become bored with correct-chalk-mark restorations. As a result, two well-known Southern California shops are making wild MoRacers that turn historic Pentostar racing concepts into a wild new trend: Street/FX. Mosher’s Muscle Cars specializes in ’62-’65 B-bodies and has been making a habit out of converting Stockers into clones of Hemi and Max Wedge cars. The latest project is Curt Stimpson’s 500-inch Hemi-powered altered-wheelbase ’65 Coronet. This wild red AWB Dodge is street driven, and it has been converted to mechanical fuel injection with foot-high stacks since this photo was taken. Mosher’s Muscle Cars can be reached at Dept. HR08, 11930 Sheldon St., Sun Valley, CA 91352, 818/504-9010. More wild rides are blooming from the shop of J&D Collections. This shop is known for beautiful…

Choosing the Ten Best anything is a thankless task, but narrowing down the wide spectrum of street machines into a select group of 10 is next to impossible. What kind of parameters do I you put on the process? Do you choose the most significant? The fastest? The wildest? And how do you define street machine? I The most logical definition of street machine would start with a ’ model-year cutoff, say 1949 and later. And by virtue of the label, we can rule out pure race cars, although street-legal, driveable race cars are an exception. In sorting through all the issues of HOT ROD, we verified the suspicion that street machines by our definition didn’t really exist, at least not in the magazine, until the early ’70s. What we…

It’s amazing how much power and driveability can be realized through relentless tuning of a car. And, compared to changing intakes, carbs or headers, tuning is extremely cheap to do. Most of the time, the only cost is your time to test and tweak on the car. Ignition timing constitutes a major portion of the tuning commonly done to engines, but before making haphazard changes to your timing, you should understand exactly what it affects. WHAT IS TIMING? The ignition in your car ignites the air/fuel ratio in the combustion chamber. In simplest terms, the mixture is lit off when the piston is at top dead center (TDC). However, the entire air/fuel charge doesn’t actually ignite at once, and nearly all engines need the mixture to begin burning slightly before…

What happens when you mix enough orchid-color paint to cover a ’56 F-100 pickup housing 392 inches of Rootsblown Hemi? You get loads of…flower power. A casual perusal of Jerry Anderson’s tech sheet is like taking a step back in time. “I had,” writes the 52-year-old Anderson, “a hot F-100 pickup while I was in high school (in Millbrae, California) and raced it at Half Moon Bay dragstrip. And I’ve enjoyed ’romancing’ the ’92 Chryslers from the late ’50s to the present time. About five years ago I bought a blown alcohol Hemi that once ran in Top Fuel and alcohol Funny Cars back in the ’70s.” Obviously Flower Power is a presently past project. But when team Anderson—Jerry’s sons Clark and Sean joined in on the fun—finalized its plans…

In the valvetrain of your typical pushrod engine, the rocker arm is a critical component that also is an excellent tuning device. To properly tune with rocker arms, though, you need to understand how they work, what types of rockers are available and how to use them to make more power. All that info is provided here to give you another method for extracting that last ounce of power from your engine. Rocker arms are levers used in overhead-valve, cam-in-block engines to transform and multiply the motion of the lifter riding on the cam lobe to open and close the valve. Rockers increase the lift of the cam by having unequal lengths from the pushrod cup to the fulcrum and from the tip of the valve stem. This ratio is…

Building street rods from the ground up is a very satisfying experience, but driving them is definitely what the sweat and the toil are all about. This month, we are debuting the finished Speedway Motors’ ’34 Club Cab Eord pickup and covering the last few details of the buildup before the truck happily hauls down the road on the Power Tour with the HOT ROD crew. In the last two issues, we have fitted the drivetrain, suspension, brakes, steering, interior components and body to the frame before disassembling the whole deal and sending the parts off to be polished, powdercoated, painted or plated. This is the standard method for building street rods, because while most street rod components are quality pieces, each application requires a little different approach. So each…

When you walk up to your bike does the front end look spindly? Would you like your ride to be a full-figured Wide Glide? Well, you can give your bike the gift of girth. We wanted our ’92 Dyna Glide Custom to be a little broader up front, so we took the bike to Street Bike Services in Ukiah, California, where Steve Daniels performed the conversion. After checking out several kits, we selected one from Custom Chrome, Inc. (CCI). CCI has three complete kits available to convert a stock, narrow fork to the wide look. The different kits cover 77 to present FX, FXR and XL models. The Dyna Glide Custom has a dual disc brake system, so we also ordered a disc spacer kit (part No. 13-156) to move…

TRUCK PROJECT COMPARO To my surprise, your Speedway Motors pickup project (“Phantom ’34,” Roddin At Random, March ’95) is the same as mine, though the choice of direction in my mind is not a hard one. As you can see from the photo, my almost finished ’34 was a “Sixties” choice. In addition to that, I consider it a junkyard rod, because most of my parts came from there. The taillights are from a Gremlin grille, the antenna rests in a taillight from a ’48 or ’49 Buick, the suspension is handmade, the engine is a ’56 Buick 322 with a Dyna-Flow tranny, power steering comes from a ’62 Cutlass, the tilt wheel is from a Ford and the power windows come from a T-Bird. I have yet to finish…

Everybody knows that nostalgia is hot, and right now older Corvettes, like the ’57, are desirable rides. The problem is that those older ’Vettes ride and handle more like a Conestoga wagon than their ’90s namesake. Chassis builder Paul Newman (no relation to the Hollywood version) has created the ultimate solution. Just jack up the body and slip a whole new chassis underneath! Newman has created the very slick, round-tube chassis you see here, complete with new front and rear Corvette suspension trimmings (and including the ’Vette’s now-famous independent rear suspension). This particular chassis is fitted with a late-model, 300-horse LT1 small-block and a six-speed. The only negative to this whole concept is that you have to cloak this tubular work of art with a body. Newman says there are…

NHRA drivers John Force, K.C. Spurlock, Lori Johns and Mike Dunn teamed up with four athletes from Georgia Special Olympics for a number of games and activities prior to the AlliedSignal FRAM Nationals at the Atlanta Drag way in Commerce, Georgia. The AlliedSignal FRAM/Georgia Special Olympics paired the drag racers with Special Olympians for a filter toss, a relay race, tug-of-war and a mini drag race. At the end of the games, John Force and his teammate Bobby Cahn (pictured) took first place. In a tie for second were Lori Johns and teammate Celeste Banda, and Mike Dunn and his teammate Georgette Davis. K.C. Spurlock and George Davis came in third.…

Looking for a way to get your kids into hot rodding? Pick up the latest copy of HOT ROD Junior.Petersen’s newest magazine is targeted at readers from seven to 15, and it’s a great way to pass on the spirit of hot rodding. The latest issue includes interviews with drag race champs Eddie and Ercie Hill, information on how to get into karting and quarter midgets, and hands-on activities that include building a Pine Wood Derby car and putting together a kid-sized workbench. Junior also goes off pavement with features on Baja racers and tips on how to select an all-terrain vehicle. The latest issue of HOT ROD Junior will be on newsstands until September 4. If you can’t find a copy, you can purchase an issue by calling 213/782-2492.…

The ignition system is one of the most crucial links in the performance chain of a strong engine. High-flow heads, lightweight pistons and a trick exhaust system don’t mean squat if you’re using a weak, mistimed spark to light the fire. Poor ignition selection can mean reductions in performance and gas mileage at best, and at worst, major engine damage. So high-quality ignition components are a prerequisite for those wanting serious horsepower. For those seeking the ultimate burn, this guide features some of the most advanced ignition technology available. From control boxes smart enough to run a small business, to wires and plugs designed for maximum flame, these products offer the latest in competent combustion. RAPIDFIRE Introduced in early ’95, AC Rapidfire is a new performance spark plug featuring a…

No, there’s no typographical error in this story’s title. It’s the idea behind the buildup of John Morden’s bigblock Nova out of Port Huron, Michigan. John’s car left the factory a very different animal; it was originally a brown ’71 with a straight-six engine. John knew the original owner—he helped her wash and wax the car for about a year—and he saw the potential the low-mileage grocery getter offered. After he persuaded her to sell the car to him, he had every intention of repainting and rebuilding it. But six years passed before he began the project. John knew he wanted a big-block Nova, but it took him a while to come up with the final plan. “Over the years I had read about a car dealer named Don Yenko,…

It’s about time somebody applied state-of-the-art engine design to a really humongous motor. The Max-12 could be considered a distant descendant of the Chevy Rat motor, but with 12 big-bore cylinders in a 60-degree vee configuration. It also boasts four-valve, Ferrari-type pentroof combustion chambers, four overhead cams, individual tuned intake runners and a 24-injector staged Haltech EFI system from Enjectec. In full-tilt, set-to-kill trim, the 1002ci Batten Max-12 will power Bob Norwood’s 300mph A-12 street-legal supercar project with 1700 naturally aspirated horsepower on gasoline—and make it look easy. EVOLUTION OF A BRUTE Almost 10 years ago, Detroit engine wizard C.J. Batten designed a B-4 conversion kit that mounts twin-cam, four-valveper-cylinder, pentroof heads on Donovan, Arias and Rodeck bigblocks. The B-4 design is so good that naturally aspirated, Batten-equipped V8s have…

Last month we compared the internal and external elements that constitute a snull-block Choy with those parts and piners that make up a ’32 to ’53 l oni V&better known as a flat head. The plan this month is to show how one of these ancient boilers rs assembled. ’Ihr readers will also mite that a vast majority of the parts used are either original or factory replacements rather than after arket components, which again is why building even a streetdocile flathead can cost two to three times as much as a comparable Chevy V8. H. Bob McKray spent a day mocking up one of these ancients for us, and flathead freak “Speedy” Bill Smith, the owner of Speedway Motors, shared his insight with us as well. Unfortunately space limitations…

You’d never know it from the photos, but Jim Perella’s Fat Boy was totaled in a crash just two weeks before he was to deliver it to Rick’s American Cycle in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for a major buildup. (Jim, fortunately, was not seriously hurt.) Four months later, the one-time wreck was back on the road and in awesome shape, thanks to Rick Pascuzzi, Dave Keeler, Nick Pastura, Jim Libonetti and others working at American Cycle. The Harley’s frame was repaired but basically left stock, except for the fitting of a big-tire kit. Up front, Bad Boy handlebars on 4-inch risers direct polished Wide Glide forks that were modified with Ness tubes and triple trees. The 16-inch Fat Boy front rim was polished, painted by Pastura, and wrapped by a Metzler tire;…

The O.E.M.s have gone through tremendous pains in the last 10 to 20 years to improve every aspect of an engine’s efficiency, covering every point from before the butterflies to the tip of the tailpipe. Better mileage, lower emissions and a longer life span are great selling points for new-car customers, but all three are now also government-mandated, so Detroit has been busting butt to get the most cost-effective improvements in combustion to improve the efficiency bottom line. That’s one of the reasons that you may have noticed a handful of new, trick spark plugs coming to the market. All sorts of new ideas are surfacing that improve the plugs’ ability to get the fire burning, and on as many compression strokes as possible. The latest in spark plugs is…