Innehållsförteckning för October 2013 från Hot Rod

This issue exploits women—every issue does, because there are some incredible ones who work at HOT ROD. So in a boldfaced attempt to avert the flaming from readers who typically rage when we use models like those in this month’s stories about man caves, let me tell you about my closest female coworkers. If you’ve been on Power Tour® or Drag Week™, or if you’ve been a guest in our corporate suites at motorsports events, then you know Michelle Turczyn, the loud, funny, upbeat redhead who makes stuf happen. She always sees what’s gonna go wrong and solves it before it does. In 20 years I’ve never seen her do anything badly. She used to babysit my incompetence (like when I constantly lose directions and hotel reservations), but has given…

Harry Saldivar wanted to bring his young son Enzo to car shows in style. His first thought was a custom Radio Flyer wagon, but Harry decided he’d seen too many custom wagons at car shows, so he searched Craigslist for something different and turned up a vintage ’60s stroller. The drop-top stroller uses a matching vintage engine, a Briggs & Stratton 3hp singlecylinder with a custom, polished velocity stack and copper header with megaphone. The chassis is handmade using a go-kart rear axle and front spindles with staggered whitewalls. Harry made a radiator, LED headlights, and the mini keg fuel tank. Next up might be a scalloped paintjob, or a steering wheel instead of the bicycle handlebars that turn the front wheels. Here’s Harry and Enzo at this summer’s Portland…

A member of my car club told me he had a car I should come see. It took me a year to get to his garage, but the payoff was big: The car was a one-owner ’61 Chevy Biscayne with a 350hp 348ci engine and a four-speed. He claimed it was one of 138 made. It hadn’t seen daylight in a few decades. As I walked to the garage, Ed and his wife were there taking stuf of the car. Stop! I told them this was all about fnding untouched cars. They said that if they didn’t move the stuf, you couldn’t tell there was a car under there. Ed told me how, when he ordered the car in 1961, he was not old enough to title it in his…

Drag racer “TV” Tommy Ivo won his first trophy in a Buick, and he went on to put the nailhead engine in everything from T-buckets to quaddragsters. We stopped by his place in Burbank, California, and asked him what he thought of the Rad Rides take on Buick power. “This nifty car looks somewhat like the ’55 Buick I won my first trophies with,” Tommy tells us. “That set the hook for my Buick drag racing days, but I was only adventuresome enough to run two carburetors, not turbos, and I was only brave enough to run one supercharger in my dragster.” He then asked us some questions about the twin-turbo’s horsepower and internals. When he heard the numbers, he started laughing. “Eight hundred! I doubt I made that much…

Model: Bailee Beachy stylist: Mandi Glynn Makeup: andrea Vlaovich Jack Olsen’s garage has garnered a lot of attention since he fist posted a thread on the GarageJournal.com forum in early 2009. The two-car garage, originally built in 1925, is tucked away from the street in the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood of Los Angeles and was “pathologically messy” as Jack puts it, but it was still used for a lot of his projects. When Jack and his wife, writers for film and television, respectively, were affected by the ’07 Writers Guild strike, Jack took the opportunity to focus on renovating his garage. He couldn’t write, so he had the time, but he was also out of work, so he didn’t want to go overboard on the budget. With less than $1,000…

Model: Chelsea Klikunas Stylist: Mandi Glynn Makeup: Andrea Vlaovich In 2007, veteran land-speed racer Ron Main bought a new home. His previous place was a sprawling, 5,000-square-foot tribute to the ’50s, and it was time to downsize. Ron had to break his habit of never throwing anything away and moved only his personal favorites from his collection into the 24x40 garage he built at his new abode. The plan was for the garage to be large enough to house Flatfire, Ron’s record-breaking, fathead-powered streamliner that’s the fastest fathead Ford on Earth with a record of 302.674 mph, and the multiple-record-holding Poteet & Main Speed Demon, the world’s fastest piston car at 439 mph. Fitting the two of them in one garage meant getting rid of a whole lot…

The standing mile. It’s a simple premise, one that’s caught on big lately: From a stop, you accelerate your car to the fastest top speed possible before the 132-foot timing traps at the end of a single mile. It’s a great high, and the East Coast Timing Association has been dealing it since 1994 at Moultrie, Georgia (briefy), and Maxton, North Carolina (from 1995–2011). Afer losing the Maxton venue, the ECTA kicked of races at the Airpark in Wilmington, Ohio, in 2012 and hasn’t looked back, with participation numbers soaring. The ECTA season opener is the site of the HOT ROD Top Speed Challenge each year, and this one went down on the weekend of April 28. Like it did in 2012, the buzzkill of rain loomed, but everything went…

A sleeper is nothing new: loads of power in a granny car. This is that idea, times 10: a 1,300hp, twin-turbo, 402ci V8 in a Chevy Sprint. Yeah, a Chevy Sprint, the predecessor to a Geo Metro, something suitable for a three-cylinder engine, not a high-horsepower Kenny Duttweiler small-block. Owner Bob Brasfield from Charlotte, North Carolina, had an identical-looking Sprint before this one. It had a lower-powered small-block and the original unitized body. It became a parts car after Bob was rear-ended at a stoplight, and the car burned to a shell. Bob says he loves driving the car but doesn’t race it, as it lacks a ’cage or any safety equipment—part of the sleeper look. Here’s how he built this wild Sprint. HOTROD.COM/Jesse-Kiser “If you’re parked beside this at…

One of the most hot rodded engines ever produced is the air-cooled Volkswagen flat four. HOT ROD has danced around them from time to time, but there’s no denying they’re as much a part of the hot rod aftermarket as the small-block Chevy. Now it appears Porsche is developing a four-cylinder version of its current 3.8L six found in the Carrera S—only with two less cylinders. It would be a turbocharged, 2.5L flat four with direct injection. Estimates put horsepower at 350 with 360 lb-ft of torque. Sources say it could be mated to Porsche’s manual sixspeed. Could this be a cool and compact future project engine/trans combo for your next VW sedan, dune buggy, or race car–whatever? HOTROD.COM/Thom-Taylor…

01] EDDIE MOTORSPORTS EddieMotorsports.com; 888.813.1293; Price: $96; PN MS374-75 These aluminum hold-downs are available polished or powdercoated in almost any transparent color. Pictured are the traditional Matte Black and Transparent/Candy Red versions. 02] HOT RODS BY DEAN HotRodsbyDean.com; 800.362.9709; Price: $159.95; PN HR-3001 (without bracket) The Hot Rods by Dean HR-3005 battery tray includes a built-in, key-controlled kill switch (not pictured) and retails for $235. You can order the tray alone without the top bracket, too: PN HR-3001 for $159.95 (pictured). Rather than a hold-down bracket on the top of the battery, this one has a removable front piece that blends into the base and pinches the battery at the bottom, holding it firmly in place. The company also makes a simple aluminum battery box for $64.95 (PN HR-3002). 03]…

HOT ROD reached its 65th anniversary in 2013, and sister publication Rod & Custom is celebrating 60 years. It’s had a crazy life, having been killed and restarted three times, and surviving the 1961 firing of its entire staff for participating in and then writing about skydiving. It’s been published as a monthly, a bi-monthly, an annual, and twice as a quarterly. It was also integrated with HOT ROD—fairly invisibly—for years. R&C was first published in the small digest size, before going to standard magazine dimensions in 1961. It’s made it through six different publishing companies and is now owned by HOT ROD’s mothership, Source Interlink Media. R&C was created in 1953, afer Quinn Publishing decided to turn its HOT ROD–like Hop Up into a new-car magazine like Petersen Publishing’s…

Everyone is talking about rally driver Sebastien Loeb’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fast run up Pikes Peak during the 2013 running of the famous hillclimb. We can’t deny that Loeb’s 8-minute, 13-second run is impressive—after all, it’s more than a minute and a half faster than the 2012 record—but our attention was really focused more on a little yellow Ford than on Loeb’s high-horsepower Peugeot. In an act of hillside redemption, Swedish hillclimb racer Ralf Christensson took the top spot in the Vintage class. The win is especially sweet for the Swede, who was unable to compete in the race in 2012 due to a crash during practice that left his ’67 Mustang with severe frame and body damage and sent Ralf and his ’12 co-driver Magnus home with seatbelt bruises and not…

When it comes to American cars in the muscle-car era, there’s never-ending debate as to which brand had the best-looking oferings in the showroom and which had the best engines—but hands down, Mother Mopar wins in the coolest-decal department. No other automaker even came close. Sure, there were AMC Rebel Machines and the flashy GTO Judge, but Mopar took it to a diferent level. By the late ’60s, Dodge and Plymouth were coming up with a variety of muscle-car models and packages by mixing and matching pieces from the A-body and B-body parts bins and adding new graphics. Today, it would seem a bit odd to market a muscle car with cartoon birds and anthropomorphic insects, but we kinda miss it. Thirty years after Mopar teamed up with Warner Bros.…

Automotive news sources are already buzzing with speculation about the ’15 Mustang, but we don’t think you need to worry about future models to fnd a cool one now. We spent a month with the Mickey Tompson Performance Tires and Wheels ’13 5.0L Mustang GT SEMA show car, which was showroom fresh when we drove it. It was far more fun than any ’15 Mustang forum discussion. The car was built for suspension R&D and to show of Mickey Tompson’s new Enhanced Stance System, which is available now as a set of four wheels and tires made to max out the rubber room on a new GT. It includes the Street Comp fve-spoke wheels in 20x9 and 20x10.5, and the new M/T Street Comp high-performance rubber in 255/35-20…

Model: Morgan Scott Stylist: Mandi Glynn Makeup: andrea Vlaovich HOT ROD wants you to see a real hot rodder’s garage, with all of its clutter and coolness—not one of those homogenized, perfectly polished palaces you see in the Ultimate Garages–type coffee table books. We went to North Hollywood, California, to the late Tommy Sparks’ garage with cameras and Morgan Scott in tow to take in the grease and grime of a garage where cars, engines, and projects of all sorts were started and finished. Sparks was a builder, fabricator, restorer, and hot rodder from the ’40s and ’50s days of hot cars and cool brews. And it was here where the sparks few and oil flung. More recently, Tommy restored many Concours-winning cars, built some screaming fathead Fords,…

Model: Ariel Robinson Stylist: Mandi Glynn Makeup: Andrea Vlaovich If the definition of living the dream is spending hours on end making phone calls from your idling ’48 Chrysler taxi because it’s cheaper to heat in the dead of winter than it is to heat the 10,000-square-foot renovated livery stable that doubles as your home/ofce/shop, then Jay Allen is indeed dreaming. The biker, land-speed racer, consultant, and proprietor of the world’s largest biker bar—the Broken Spoke Saloon (BrokenSpoke.com) in Sturgis, South Dakota—affectionately calls his home the Trophy Garage. It was built in Lowell, Arizona, in 1904, and it’s part of a line of old buildings that Jay and several friends have purchased and are actively renovating into a retro hot rod heaven, much to the chagrin of the…

The most storied of races is the Indianapolis 500. It draws more spectators than any sporting event in the world, and is held at the world’s largest sporting facility. It’s racing’s Super Bowl. On steroids. It’s more than 100 years old. It’s the Indianapolis friggin’ 500. We look upon the legendary drivers and crews as determined and defiant combatants defining that thing the hot rodder in us can relate to: the collective of cars, speed, and risk. We’ve all dreamt about racing there—or at least painting the track in a real Indy race car—so I gladly accepted when HOT ROD friend Bill Akin offered me the ride of my life. You may recall Bill’s name from the story “Topless in Winter” (July ’13), wherein I drove his ’32…

HOTROD.COM/Thom-Taylor Next Month: Lace Painting Contact DENNIS JONES CUSTOM LETTERING AND PINSTRIPING; Whittier, CA; 562.696.4637 THE START TO IT ALL Dennis Jones started pinstriping in high school in the mid-’50s but did not feel proficient enough to charge for his work until 1959. Jones attended L.A. Trade Tech out of high school to learn how to custom letter, but pinstriping was not taught, so he picked it up as he practiced his lettering. MORE TALENT There are a lot of pinstripers plying their trade throughout the world. A great place to find some of Jones’ work, as well as many others is at Pin-HeadLounge.com. Find the Stripe-O-Dex and an alphabetical listing of thousands of stripers should give you plenty of inspiration.…

I raced for a championship on my own dime for years. Building, tuning, and driving took a toll, and the self-induced pressure to win turned me into an over-stressed asshat. My friends and I finally won that championship in 2005 on the last pass at the last race of the season, and as soon as it was over, the stress faded, we drank heartily, and got lost for a few hours, celebrating the accomplishment together. By the next day, we were back at our real jobs, assimilated into our everyday lives, and the world kept on spinning as if nothing special happened that beautiful October night in Bakersfield. I made ugly decisions about time, money, and morality during my quest to beat every last competitor to the top of the…

During our last outing into NAS-CAR country, we stumbled into Clint Bowyer’s dirt late-model garage in Clemmons, North Carolina. The NASCAR star has a small team of dirt late-model cars that he operates when not racing in the Sprint Cup series. One of his drivers is Jared Landers, who had some trouble during the ’12 World 100 at Eldora Speedway, in Eldora, Ohio, when his engine started smoking during a qualifying heat race. After a couple laps, the engine blew. During a post-race inspection, the team pulled off the air cleaner and found a pile of piston pieces inside. Looking down into the carb, they found more aluminum pebbles. The team isn’t sure happened. Johnny Mullin at Clements Racing Engines told us after the piston blew, “It pressurized the crankcase,…

THE COMBO Burbank, California’s Lucian Bartoletti is a proud member of the legendary Road Kings of Burbank car club. Founded in 1952, the club’s been in existence 61 years. Its storied membership rolls have included the likes of Tommy Ivo, Don Prudhomme, and Bob Muravez, among others. Bartoletti built his ’57 Chevy for long-distance cruising with his buddies. A year ago, he dropped in a built, 377ci small-block Chevy with a healthy Comp Cams bumpstick backed up by a World Class T5 five-speed overdrive trans and an original ’57 Chevy dropout third-member rearend equipped with 3.73:1 gears and Positraction. THE PROBLEM From day one, the engine had irritating driveability issues. “After I put the motor in the car in 2012,” Bartoletti relates, “We drove it to Morro Bay to attend…

SEND YOUR PHOTOS To be included in Scene by Readers, send low-rez photos and some information about them to HOTROD@HotRod.com. If we elect to use your photo, we will email back with instructions on how to send us a high-rez photo for publication.…

Ron Dean Daugherty // Pocatello, Idaho Ron won Best Modified Custom at the ’12 Riviera Owners Association International Meet with his ’71 Buick Riviera. He calls it the Pro-455 heartbreaker. Robert F. McGlynn // Oak Forest, Illinois This ’70 Chevelle was rescued from a garage where it had been sitting for a dozen years. It was originally blue, but Robert painted it silver and added the 454 engine.…

We are going to fan the flames within the Drag Week™ community a bit this month by giving the last Drag Week™ Rumors column before the event pops of a full dose of the Eddie Miller show. Who is the controversial Fast Eddie? Eddie’s ’73 Duster laid down the quickest pass ever by a Mopar at Drag Week™, a 7.93 at 177 mph with a big-inch engine on the hose. Eddie can also lay claim to having the quickest average at the rain-abbreviated ’06 installment of Drag Week™, winning the event overall. More importantly, this is the guy who called the Pro Street Naturally Aspirated class “soft” in 2012 and then didn’t show up to back up his claim that he’d take the win. Meanwhile, some have laughably accused HOT…

Buick owners, rejoice. There’s a new bad buck in town. It’s menacing and turbocharged, but it’s not a Grand National: It’s a ’56 Buick Special, the latest vehicle to roll out of the Rad Rides by Troy shop, and it has a few surprises between its portholed fenders. When we frst saw Mark Willman’s Buick at the ’13 Detroit Autorama, we weren’t surprised that the show judges chose it as one of the Great Eight contenders for the Ridler Award. The steely gray coupe stood out among the candy paints of the other competitors like a granite mountain in a fock of peacocks and was treated with appropriate awe by the showgoers who surrounded it all weekend. Nor were we startled to fnd out that it came out…

PERFORMANCE AS TESTED Rear-Wheel Horsepower: 573.6 at 6,800 rpm Rear-Wheel Torque: 514 at 4,000 rpm Time at Streets of Willow: 01:16.65 420-Foot Slalom: 6.48 seconds at 44.19 mph Skidpad: 0.88 lateral g Quarter-Mile: 12.68 at 119.38 60–0 Braking: 122 feet HRM Staf Average Ranking on a Scale of 1–10, 10 Being Best: Competence vs. Purpose: Under-promise, over-deliver. m/T never intended this mustang to be flogged like it was. The suspension is a street system for a decent ride and stance, and the brakes faded quickly at the track, but the car excelled as a nice and fast, hopped-up daily driver that looks cool. and that was the intended purpose. Ranking: 8 Performance vs. Potential: If you wanted a pure track car, you could have a diferent but more jarring suspension…

You wouldn’t think you’d need a big space to build mini engines, but model-motor enthusiast Jim Kipp collects more than pint-sized powerplants. We met Jim when he took apart a Black Widow 1/3-scale V8 for the Mar. ’13 issue, and as soon as we saw his Lake Elsinore, California, man-cave, we knew we’d go back to scope out the rest of his collection. Jim kindly invited us and model Megan Belet (mostly Megan) to spend some time looking through his assorted muscle cars, hot rods, miniature machining tools, and racing memorabilia. Along with showcasing his excellent taste in classic gear, Jim’s garage also gives him a place to work on his scaled-down engines and host slot-car parties, which he does a few times a year. We’re hoping we…

Just when you build the most advanced production Corvette yet, some guy on Facebook sacks the whole thing because he says the rear end looks like a Camaro. Then, a hundred lemmings pile on, adding that 460 hp isn’t that good. Such are the battles the ’14 Corvette Stingray team must fight. One: Ensure the performance is flagship-worthy and unassailable by reasonable people and car journalists. Two: Make sure it looks cool enough to market to people who will never use the performance and just want the image. Then there’s the new biggie, the elephant in the boardroom, the one challenge with an outcome that could determine the long-distant future of the brand: Overcome the stigma of today’s Corvette demographic, folks who were 20 in 1970 when they first…

Imagine you’re at the junkyard and you’ve come across the Holy Grail of speed parts. It’s the numbers-matching RamAirHemiYenkoShelby chingus you’ve longsince given up finding, and it’s just waiting to be plucked from the rusty clutches of its engine bay. The problem is that you didn’t bring your breaker bar, and the parts vultures are circling. Guys with reciprocating saws and impact wrenches have snifed out your score and are just waiting for you to give up on your prize. Your only hope is your backup ½-inch drive ratchet handle and a length of pipe for punishing leverage. Will your ratchet be able to dish out the torque to break the bonds of rusty bolts? We decided to find out, visiting several auto parts stores, a couple of hardware stores,…

Recently, my Challenger was needed for some parts testing, so I swapped cars with AEM tech Paul St. Clair. Paul’s car is a ’94 Audi S4, not as old as the Challenger, but old enough to have a few quirks. Of course, when it’s your car, you never think about the quirks until it’s time to hand the keys to someone else. Our conversation started out with each of us assuring the other that there was nothing weird they needed to know about the cars, followed immediately by something weird that they needed to know. I casually mentioned that if the fuel gauge said empty, it was really empty, and he better be within 60 feet of a gas station. That was after I warned him that the key went…

The ’70 Dodge Challenger and Plymouth Barracuda debuted with all kinds of styling changes new to Chrysler products including sleek inset door handles that all E-body owners dread using, since they are prone to break under the strain of being yanked on to open the heavy doors. What Challenger owners might not know is that the replacement handles sold as “E-Body” are really “Barracuda.” That’s right; although they’ll fit on the Dodge, they aren’t correct. We stopped by Mopar expert Restorations by Julius to see the diference. When placed side by side, one can see that an original Challenger handle has a slight outward kick at the bottom when compared to the flatter side profile of the Plymouth handle. This follows the shape of the Dodge body line, and when…

I am looking to buy a ’69 AMC Rebel with the 290. Parts are hard to find for the motor and car. Can I put 304 parts in the motor to stroke it and give me more horsepower? Where can I get body parts like panels, brake and gas lines, and other parts needed to restore the car? Are there any EFI kits for the engine? As the accompanying tables (page 154) indicate, there are lots of mix-and-match possibilities for American Motors Corporation (AMC)—but there are also some subtile differences that can really bite you on the posterior if you’re not careful. Also don’t overlook the fact that you can still get 290 replacement pistons from Egge under PN L2247. Pistons, complete overhaul kits, and comprehensive suspension parts are…

Here’s a leftover photo from Elana’s HOT ROD Unlimited Episode 32 called “Car Crushing Mayhem!” Visit YouTube.com/MotorTrend. But…it’s numbers matching.—Dave Boyer It’ll buf out.—Chase Peterson I can’t find my bolt.—Dave James This is the before photo of his hot rod—Ben Fulton Empty the gas tank before welding!—Rick Richards Year? Make? Model? A: This is the passenger-side front of a’69 Ford F-100 truck. Name That Doohickey A: Used on flathead straight-six and straight-eight Chrysler engines, it’s called a water distribution tube. It slides inside the water jacket in the block and the slots in the top narrow to direct water into the water jackets in the head. HOT ROD TRIVIA Q: 1 Name five words that mean a car that can have no roof. 2 There are four NHRA Pro Stock…