Innehållsförteckning för March 2011 från Hot Rod

THE BROTHERHOOD Hot rodders tend to look out for each other. We see it and have reported on it frequently on Power Tour(r) and Drag Week™. When a car pulls over to the side of the road, there are always five or six other participants stacked up behind it, offering help, a ride, or just moral support. (Of course, sometimes that car is just pulled over to go empty a bladder in the roadside bushes, but the cars still pull over to find out if help is needed.) Try to get that kind of help with a Camry. But nowhere is that fraternity bigger than among the online community, mostly the hundreds of automotive message boards we all live on. Case in point: Troy Ladd of Hollywood Hot Rods recently…

MULHOLLAND DRIVE Hit the video page of HOTROD.com right now and you'll find a short review of the Shelby Super Snake with Kinnan driving it on Los Angeles' impromptu road-race track, Mulholland Drive. While that twisty hilltop road is famed for ‘70s street racing (like Sunset Boulevard, it has a Dead Man's Curve), it was also dotted with the “inspiration point” date locales of the ‘50s. Here, HOT ROD's Eric Rickman was perhaps enjoying extracurricular activities when he snapped this shot looking east to Hollywood in April 1957. We've placed an arrow at the famous Capital Records building; other shapes nearby are the historic Taft and Laemmle buildings (at Hollywood and Vine), and closer to the camera are the 1926 El Capitan and better-known Chinese theaters. The main streets, from…

The 427 Shelby Cobra instills every car guy with pure lust, and in fact is what got some people looking at cars in the first place, this author included. The original's aluminum body, complete lack of frill, and take-no-prisoners powerplant combined with a look and stance that say, “I will hunt you down and eat you for lunch,” make for one of the most wicked cars of all time. And it's not just a domestic fascination. The Cobra's reach is global, and it caught the attention of a 7-year-old in Sweden named Magnus Jinstrand as he flipped through a car magazine. As he grew into adulthood, Magnus ventured into the world of fast cars—some of them American muscle and many of them European sports cars—but the image of that Cobra…

Even by the late ‘60s, hot rodders still showed a competitive spirit that knew no bounds of mechanical or social stigma. That meant racers who were into drag and circle-track racing were almost necessarily also into boats, hillclimbs, rallies, and even off-road racing. When the National Off-Road Racing Association hosted the first few runnings of the Mexican 1000, which would soon be known as the Baja 1000 under Mickey Thompson's SCORE sanctioning body, it drew names such as Ak Miller, Bill Stroppe, Parnelli Jones, Danny Ongias, Don Prudhomme, Jim Garner, and Steve McQueen. HOT ROD, Car Craft, and Motor Trend all sponsored cars, trucks, and Broncos. Our archive photos even show typical hot rodding faces such as Ed Iskenderian and Linda Vaughn in attendance. We're talking about the years 1967…

Our domes are on fire thanks to one seemingly simple idea we had for a great story. We wanted to go undercover at five different performance tuning facilities and test each of their chassis dynos using the same car in a short period of time. We hoped to uncover bogus numbers. We wanted to find the root of the problem for so many skeptical hot rodders who don't trust dynos as far as they can throw them. We were looking for a smoking gun or two. After hours of testing and days spent studying the data, we ended up with more questions than answers and decided we could write a book about the differences between dynos, test facilities, and data interpretation, and at the end of it all, wed still…

Hot rodding's pioneers had to be self reliant, making stuff for themselves. Today, just about everything is available out of a catalog … at least for mainstream engines. But what if you have an oddball engine or are just plain bored with cookie-cutter parts combos? For those who dare to work on an engine for which there is little or no aftermarket support, the only solution is a back-to-basics approach, adapting parts from other engine makes, returning to original machining techniques, and even custom-fabricating stuff from scratch. Here, we'll take a look at some of these old-school techniques using by way of illustration a unique Buick ‘64 to ‘67 300 V8-based stroker assembled by Dave Nelson at Joe Sherman Racing engines. We'll also examine exotic overhead-cam conversions pioneered by home…

KNOW WHERE YOU’VE BEEN I hate being sick, mostly because it’s a waste of time. As I write this I’m barely coming down from eight days in a virtual coma from the flu. I’d hoped to rot at home in a Nyquil-induced stupor cranking out a few editorial columns or something, but instead I spent the time moaning about how, if I was really going to be off work for a week, I could have gotten my Mustang running or maybe taken a machete and blazed a path through my earthquake scene of a garage. When I finally did become mildly productive, I revitalized a project that’s gotten dusty in the face of my schedule. That project is maps. I love maps, and in my life they will never be…

Jeff Schwartz builds nice cars for a living. His company, Schwartz Performance in Woodstock, Illinois, is known for its high-end Pro Touring machines. The Vega featured here? He threw it together from shop debris in his spare time—just for fun, an almost tongue-in-cheek project. But it seems Jeff can't build a POS even when he tries: The low-buck bomber is a hit wherever it goes, including the Holley LS Fest and the Chicagoland Goodguys show. Everyone who sees this car falls in love with it. And rightly so—it's a slick little unit. And he's got only $10,000 in it. Jeff started with a ‘72 Vega notchback coupe he scored for $1,500. A buddy had been sitting on it, planning to install an LT-1, but that never happened and he managed…

The Nevada landscape streamed past my passenger-side window like a roll of newspaper off a printing press. It wasn’t an actual window, but a mesh safety net. A concoction of sage, powder-fine dust, racing fuel, and fresh paint burning off the headers permeated the air. The smell was sweet, of victory from another era. Within my helmet, every chuckhole, divot, and boulder launched a symphony of thuds, rattles, and clanks. Approaching a sweeping bend in the canyon, the driver lifted his right foot slightly from the throttle, slid his left over the brake, slowed to about 50 mph, and threw the car into a slight drift. He held the car in perfect symmetry to the arc of the turn, his feet dancing over the pedals. Every movement was that of…

Pete Aardema specializes in what could be the ultimate dare to be different, street-driven head conversion: changing American domestic pushrod engines to overhead cam configurations. The two main approaches used by Aardema: for single overhead cam (SOHC) conversions, fabricating a custom cam box that bolts to the existing pushrod-type head; for dual overhead cam (DOHC) changeovers, bolting on a DOHC head from a foreign engine. For a DOHC conversion, the idea is to adapt a head from an engine family that has similar cylinder bore spacing to the pushrod engine you're working on. A Nissan Infiniti V8 is close to a small-block Chevy; a six-cylinder Subaru, a 4.3L Chevy 90-degree V6; a V8 Porsche, a big-block Chevy. Scope out swap possibilities by comparing head gaskets from different engines. It helps…

FUEL COOLER Design Engineering Inc. 800/264-9472 DesignEngineering.com It's hot under the hood of your hot rod, and heat is the enemy of power production. There are many ways to increase the power output of your engine, and keeping the fuel supply cool is one of them. According to DEI, the CryO2 Fuel Chiller System helps reduce the temperature and increases the density of fuel. Denser fuel promotes better and more efficient burning of the fuel—consequently generating more power and greater fuel efficiency. The CryO2 Fuel Chiller System uses the cryogenic properties of liquid CO2 to charge a series of internal cryogenic chambers surrounding the center fuel chamber. As the fuel passes through the center chamber, the cryogenic-charged chamber cools the fuel by maximizing the thermal transfer process, thereby removing heat.…

It's been a long while since HOT ROD had a swimsuit issue. And it will be a long while more, but next month we are going girl crazy, giving you a glam-load of old archive photos featuring trophy gals and dragstrip girls of the ‘50s and ‘60s. We'll spruce that up with a few pinups of today and have a family-friendly good time of it all. This sample from a club show in 1956 is just the start. Come back for the ladies of hot rodding, the next step of our E-Rod Camaro buildup, a story about the weak points of late-model Mustangs, and lots more. On sale February 15, 2011 Meanwhile, Get Your Car Fix at HOTROD.com…

SEND STUFF IN:EMAIL: HOTROD@HOTROD.com MAIL: HOT ROD, 831 S. Douglas St., El Segundo, CA 90245 PHOTO REQUIREMENTS: Minimum size 1,600 x 1,200 pixels MESSAGE BOARD: HOTROD.com NEVER BEFORESEEN! JAMES DEAN IN ACTION, 1955 Few photographs taken of James Dean during his brief life (Feb. 8, 1931—Sept. 30, 1955) remain unpublished, but Source Interlink Media archivist Thomas Voehringer may have stumbled upon not one, but four such images. It's possible that these black-and-white action shots have gone unseen since Bob D'Olivo processed and filed his Motor Trend film from a March 1955 SCCA race in Palm Springs, California. Ironically, because none of his three films had yet been released, Dean was better known outside Hollywood as an up-and-coming road racer than as an occasional television actor trying to break into motion…

Those of us who didn’t grow up in Southern California in the ’60s really missed out. The car and racing culture during that point in the Golden State’s history was off the hook, and it’s no surprise how deeply the lust of speed is rooted in the natives. Ryan Vanderhook was one of those impressionable young boys. He grew up with a car-guy father who first took him to Lions Drag Strip in 1962, when he was 14. For many kids of the era, and nearly all of us since, the cars of Stone-Woods-Cook, Big John Mazmanian, and the other straight-axle Gassers stirred his teenage soul. “I always told myself, One of these days”, Ryan says. Decades later he found a ’41 Willys street car from New Hampshire with primer,…

In the Jan. ‘10 issue we introduced our new project car, a ‘79 Camaro Z28, and last month we installed its centerpiece, the GM Performance Parts smog-legal E-Rod engine package. When it came time to paint the car, we hit the jackpot. EDAG Inc. of Auburn Hills, Michigan, agreed to do the job. One of the leading automotive engineering firms in the world with a home office in Germany, EDAG provides every type of technical support to the global OEs, including concept car construction and paint. Many factory show cars you see at the SEMA show and elsewhere were painted by EDAG. The team at EDAG responsible for the E-Rod's paint—Chuck Cox, Bill Wilson, Jeff Hanley, Matt Ayers, and Cory Niemitalo, to thank them individually—have been at it long enough…

Ever wonder how a manufacturer builds a shock to elicit a great ride and handling characteristics when it's installed into a specific car? We assume lots of road testing is the key. RideTech showed us that was just part of the equation. The secret to its shock development comes from road testing, sure, but the company also employs a system developed by NASA that measures the frequency of movement felt by astronauts during space shuttle launches. A variant of that device now helps RideTech improve the valving of its shocks. The ride meter is a small box placed on the floor of a hot rod directly beneath the driver seat, and the data it records during a road test provides instant feedback that can turn into a smoother ride and…

If all this fabrication and adoption just looks like way too much effort, there's an additional tried-and-true path towarc more power: Add a supercharger, turbocharger, or nitrous oxide system. Probably the easiest power-adder to adapt is a universal plate nitrous oxide system that fits under the carb. Moving up the food chain, there may not be a ready-made supercharger kit for your engine. If that's the case, for the Roots (GMC) blower, you'll need a custom intake and drive setup; big blower specialty shops such as BDS can, on a special-order basis, machine custom drives and pulleys as well as modify existing standard intake manifolds to fit. A centrifugal supercharger is another alternative. You'll have to figure out how to mount a centrifugal on the front of the engine, but…

MR. GASKET CALCULATOR FOR GEARHEADS The Hot Rod CaIc is the engine builder and tuner's best friend. It has a stew of built-in math functions, which are useful for planning your next engine build. Not only that, but if you need help tuning your engine at the racetrack, just punch in a few we at her parameters and this tool will predict your car's et and mph. The Hot Rod Calc will also tell you what rear axle gear ratio to run and how much power the engine is producing (based onet. and weight calculations). We've yet to use it at the racetrack to verify the accuracy of its et. prediction capabilities, but we have had fun planning out dream engine builds at our desks with it You can find…