Innehållsförteckning för November 2013 från Hot Rod

I miss the absurd. See, I just wrapped a special issue of HOT ROD Deluxe titled Best of the ’60s, an oversize mag loaded with rarely seen archive photos of a time when hot rodding knew no bounds. It goes on sale September 3. In it you’ll see wild Ed Roth show cars, twin-engine dragsters, a Hemi Rambler Marlin, Chrisman’s Comet with the blown-fuel engine racing in B/Dragster at the NHRA Nats, wacky George Barris movie cars, the Turbonique Rocket Drag Axle, and much more. The volume of magnificent crackpot thinking was amazing during this decade. The passions and ingenuity that led to that stuff has been tempered today by logic, engineering, and the desire for social acceptance by having the same stuff as everyone else, only shinier. The hobby…

Did you get a thrill riding your plastic-tired Big Wheel when you were a kid? We’ve seen adults online who’ve been scaling up that fun by drifting fullsize trikes. All they need is a seat, a frame, handlebars, three wheels, and a big hill. There’s a downside, though, because they have to haul the trike up the hill first. Fabricators Chris Harris and August Agner of Lexington, North Carolina, solved that problem with a 6.5hp kart engine—no pedaling required. “Walk it back up the hill? We said, screw that,” says Chris. He and August run SFD Industries (Facebook.com/SfdIndustries) and used their kart parts and fabricating skills to build the motorized trike. They started with a bicycle neck set at 35 degrees on a surface plate and then built a chassis…

This month’s find came from a HOT ROD reader who emailed us to say he had a unique ’70 Dodge Charger that was probably worth a look. His grandmother bought it new in 1970. She went to the local Dodge dealer to look at a Monaco, but saw this Charger, fell in love with it, and bought it on the spot. Unfortunately, she didn’t enjoy the Charger very long, as she passed away in 1973. The car was then handed down through the family, eventually ending up in the possession of our reader. He had plans for a 440 swap (it was a 318 car), but hasn’t completed it yet. I met up with the owner and we drove out to his home. Around the back of his barn he…

Every few years, the Boy Scouts of America holds a jamboree to gather Scout troops from across the nation. One of the traditions from the week-long event is trading patches that troops have made specifically for the jamboree. Troops typically choose topics that represent their home area, and in 2010, Utah’s Great Salt Lakes Council chose land-speed racing for its theme, with 18 cars and motorcycles selected to represent the 18 troops in the Council. These patches proved to be some of the most popular, and complete sets are hard to come by. These belong to Ron Main, who spent some time with Troop 601 at Speed Week 2010.…

PERFORMANCE AS TESTED Rear-Wheel Horsepower: 409 at 6,100 rpm Rear-Wheel Torque: 386 at 4,500 rpm Time on Streets of Willow: 1:43.50 Quarter-Mile: 14.12 at 104.19 mph HRM STAFF AVERAGE RANKING ON A SCALE OF 1-10, 10 BEING BEST: Competence in its intended Purpose: Mitch set out to build his dream car that shows of his talents as a painter, and this is it. Ranking: 10 Performance vs. Potential: Once Mitch gets over his anxiety of thrashing the paint, this car will do much, much better on a road course. While it functioned flawlessly in normal driving, we’ve got to judge based on the numbers it actually put down, and that engine and suspension are capable of a lot more. Ranking: 3 Dares to be Different: modern drivetrain and custom paint…

This article’s opening photos depict what appear to be two identical MSD 6AL ignition boxes. But the one on the right is a fake, one of the most elaborate counterfeit performance product rips so far. “We found it first in the repair department,” reports MSD President Russell Stephens. “It looked so authentic at first glance! But close inspection revealed it wasn’t ours. We ended up giving the customer a real product so they’d tell us where the phony came from. It turned out everything came of the Internet.” Working with the FBI and its attorneys to ID the bad guys, MSD made buys of the phony products. Still an ongoing investigation, so far one Malaysian national was caught, tried, and convicted here in the U.S. But the chain ultimately leads…

Automotive Racing Products (ARP) has been hit by misleading copycats, but not outright counterfeiting. Still, it fought back and won. “We’ve never seen ‘ARP’ stamped on a copycat fastener,” explains ARP’s Chris Raschke. “But we have trademarked ‘ARP 2000’ and the mark ‘2000’ as applied to a fastener. The knock-of products were stamping their bolts just ‘2000.’ The online seller of the Chinese-made product claimed the foreign foundry made the same bolt for us; that we just ‘paid extra’ for getting it stamped ‘ARP.’ “In truth, anything stamped ‘ARP’ is made by us in the U.S. Most products will also show the alloy, as in ‘ARP 8740’ or ‘ARP 2000.’ The quality of the copycat was nowhere near our quality. Although sometimes offshore bolts nearly match the tensile strength and…

HOTROD.COM/Elana-Scherr Next Month: How to Start a Top Fuel Engine Contacts BELL RACING HELMETS; Champaign, IL; 800.237.2700; BellRacing.com COAST AIRBRUSH; Anaheim, California; 714.635.5557; CoastAirbrush.com HOUSE OF KOLOR; Garland, TX; 800.845.2500; HouseofKolor.com IWATA SPRAY GUNS; Hamilton, OH; 800.440.0282; Anestiwata.com SANTINI PAINT; Westminster, California; 714.891.8895; SantiniUSA.com STEVE STANFORD; Huntington Beach, CA; 714.642.1042 HEY, CHEAP GUY! Say you’ve got an old helmet, one with an about-to-expire Snell number, but now that you’ve seen the possibilities, you can’t live another day without a custom-painted helmet of your own. You can do the whole lace-paint process for less than $50 using spray cans from your local auto-parts store. Just look for transparent color. Try Dupli-Color Metalcast over a gold or silver flake. The only place you really can’t skimp is on the tape. Make sure…

Name That Doohickey A: Only Corvair bufs will get this. It’s a ’60–’63 Corvair passenger carrear-engine mount bracket. The same bracket will fit ’61–’63 trucks andvans. Year? Make? Model? A: This is the passenger-side front of a ’56 Ford F-100. The F-series was introduced in 1948, and the second-gen F-series began in 1953, when the F-1, F-2, and F-3 designations became F-100, F-250, and F-350, respectively. HOT ROD TRIVIA Q: 1 What was the 1 first American passenger car that offered a turbocharged V8? 2 When was 2 the first drive-in gas station built and by what company? 3 What was 3 Dale Earnhardt’s first race in the Sprint Cup series? (Called the Winston Cup series at the time.) A: The ’62 Oldsmobile F85 Jetfire, which came with a…

Some hot rod terms are so common that you may not know their origins or even question them. So-called mag wheels are a staple of hot rodding, having been mass-produced for the street—in aluminum—since the early ’60s. But, the term “mag” comes from magnesium, which was the material some of the earliest dedicated racing wheels were made of. Although the first instance of an alloy racing wheel was the aluminum eight-spoke found on Type 35 Bugattis from Italy, the earliest instances of cast wheels on American cars were the magnesium racing versions manufactured by Ted Halibrand for Indy roadsters starting in 1946. In making those wheels, Halibrand applied what he had learned working for the rapidly advancing aircraft manufacturers in Southern California during WWII. Cast magnesium was abundant in aircraft…

Brian McCool //Nebraska Brian and his wife travel the country in an assortment of different pre-’51 rigs, like this ’48 diamond T towing a ’46 Spartan manor camper. Dwayne Peace //Tyler, Texas That’s Jonathan Peach cruising in the ’12 Ridler Award–winning ’55 t-bird. It belongs to Dwayne Peace and features a Gale banks twin-turbo small-block Chevy. Ken Kelley //Denison, Texas This ’72 Plymouth Satellite Sebring Plus is a project for Ken and his son, Kaleb. It currently has a 340, but they are swapping in a 440 soon. Nels Linde //Glendale, Arizona This was Nel’s first attempt at building a hot rod, and we think it’s a pretty cool effort. He said it’s 100 percent his design and scratch-built in his garage. Allison Molina //Los Angeles, California Brian Sloma took…

Hot rodding tends to repeat itself: Wait around long enough and your favorite trend will reappear, or your favorite car will be resurrected or recreated. We can’t decide if this version of the famed Eastwood & Barakat Deuce highboy sedan is the former or the latter. We’ll let you decide for yourself. First, some background. The significance of the E&B is it was the first primered and porous car to appear on a HOT ROD cover (Nov. ’82), and it was pieced together from castoff parts, resulting in a street-legal Deuce that ran in the 11s on the cheap. There was nothing exotic about the construction, components, or talents required to create it. In other words, it was absolutely unspectacular by today’s standards, but in 1982, it served as…

Steve Jarvis, a retired high school teacher and coach, grew up watching Willys coupes race at California’s San Gabriel Raceway, igniting his passion for Gassers. He bought his first Willys in 1968, a $150 coupe that was missing its front clip, and hoped to finish it, but his military service prevented him from ever building the race car he’d long wanted. It wasn’t until his tenure was up at Baldwin Park High School that his truck got underway. Steve bought this ’41 Willys truck in Las Vegas in 1986 and has kept it in his garage in Southern California ever since. The truck was a driver, but the process of shortening the bed had already been started when he purchased it, and the original rear fenders looked like the result…

We won’t ever know who was the first guy to throttle across a dry lakebed in the Southern California desert, or when—though it can be argued that he’s the very first hot rodder. Sure, you can point to the guys who raced stripped-down speedsters on board tracks, public-road courses, and even at the Indianapolis Speedway in the 19-oughts; they were certainly an influence on what would become hot rodding. But sometime in the ’20s, when our man knocked the fenders of his Model T or Chevy four banger and sought top speed on the silt, the real seeds of this entire thing were sown in the hardpacked, dry, level, vast alkali of the Mojave Desert dry lakes. THE HISTORY According to tribal knowledge, the earliest scenes on the lakes…

There are cheap, low-priced, poorly constructed and performing Chinese counterfeits of popular Auto Meter gauges and tachometers floating around. Popular rips include the Sport-Comp II tach (PN 3699), the Carbon Fiber tach (PN 4899), and the Sport-Comp Silver tach (PN 3911). Auto Meter attorney Merritt Blakeslee warns that “different Internet sellers use diferent marketing techniques. Some use an image of the counterfeit, which often contains details revealing the product to be a fake. Other sellers market their fakes by using an image of a genuine Auto Meter product. The only foolproof way for to determine whether the product is counterfeit is price and the reputation of the person whom they are buying from. “The counterfeit tachs sell for 40–80 percent of the retail price of a genuine product. If the…

In a perfect world, we’re all running CNC-ported aluminum heads on our engines, but sometimes, for reasons of budget, restoration, or racing rules, you gotta go with original equipment. For a Mopar big-block, the ’67-only 915 head is the most desirable of all junkyard and swap-meet finds because of its good port design, larger valves, and closed combustion chambers. Earlier heads had the quench-friendly closed chambers, but small valves and ports, and later heads went to an open-chamber design. Here’s what to look for to find your set.…

This past month, I haven’t done much wrenching on the LeMans, but I’ve done quite a bit of driving. It’s become apparent that I either need to get a center console with a cupholder or get power steering, because cranking the wheel with one hand on my In-N-Out cup is no easy task. As the new-to-me-ness wears of, other issues about the car begin to sink in as well, such as the numerous rattles from the windows and the transmission hump that could double as a warming tray. Before any of the suspension or brake upgrades begin, I think the LeMans should go through the slalom, skidpad, and brake tests the next time the edit staff makes a trip to Willow Springs Raceway, although I’m a bit apprehensive of how…

The other day, I accidently drove like a jerk. I was in my lanes-into-one onramps, and I misjudged the speed of the other car—which was slightly ahead of me—and panel of the Polara. To from merging into my sheetmetal, I floored it, swerved slightly onto the shoulder, and roared past my fellow motorist. On the outside! Comin’ in hot! Immediately slamming on the brakes ’cause the freeway is crawling! Yeah, it wasn’t my best good-citizen moment. I felt shame and spent the rest of the drive coming up with the following rules about when it’s allowable to drive like a jerk. 1) There is something wrong with your car. Overheating? Got no brakes? Coil blew up? If you are cutting people off because you’re coasting to the offramp, I say…

THE COMBO For decades Morgantown, Kentucky’s Gary Smrtic and his extended family have owned a whole stable full of Chrysler, Dodge, and Plymouth hot rods. His current daily driver is an ’80 Plymouth Arrow pickup with a swapped-in small-block Mopar 360 equipped with a relatively mild Comp Cams 268H High Energy cam. A Mopar A904 automatic trans transfers the power back to an 8¾-inch Chrysler rearend with big fourpiston calipers and 11-inch rotors. That left the truck with dissimilar front and rear wheel bolt patterns—Arrow six-lug up front, standard Chrysler five-lug at the rear—so Gary swapped out the front hubs and rotors for Toyota truck parts that (even though it’s expressed metrically) have the same bolt-circle as the Chrysler rearend. To control the brakes, Smrtic says he originally…

01] That’s BRYAN RAYMOND’S son inspecting his dad’s S-10. The two of them, along with help from bryan’s brother, have been cramming a small-block into the truck. The guys are from Keene, New Hamp-shire. 02] Here’s ADDISON KEIFFER of Rochester, New York, when she was 15 months old. This is her first hot rod, and it shares space in the garage with her dad’s ’72 dodge demon. 03] LUKASZ MAR-KOWSKI of Wakefield, England, shot this model A at the Silcoates School classic and American show in Wakefield last April. 04] Photographer MICHAEL STILL of StillsLife.com in Fort Collins, Colorado, shot this photo of an abandoned garage on Main Street in Scipio, Utah. 05] MATTHEW BAKER of Lucasville, Ohio, has been working on this ’89 Silverado with a carbureted LQ4 engine…

“For a racing engineer, this is the crown jewel, our Super Bowl, the pinnacle. This is the race with all the history, so it’s a big deal just to be here, and just to finish.” Matt Bejnarowicz, lead engineer for SRT Motorsports and race operations facilitator with Riley Technologies—the North Carolina–based shop tasked with the design and builds of the SRT ALMS and Le Mans Viper GTS-R—is excited. His team has successfully completed the 2013 running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and he’s eager to tell us what it’s like to be responsible for bringing a car through 24 hours of constant racing and inconstant weather. The SRT team fielded two Vipers at Le Mans this year, the first factory Viper effort since 2000. Endurance racing puts a…

It doesn’t have the golf-course greens of Virginia International Raceway or the roller-coaster drop-off of Laguna Seca, but the 21 ⁄2-mile road course at Willow Springs International Raceway (WSIR) in Rosamond, California, has seen its share of well-known riders and drivers. WSIR includes seven racetracks, ranging from skidpad to kart track. The most famous set of turns is the main road course known as “Big Willow,” and people have been racing for its finish line since 1953. The track’s uninterrupted racing seasons and unchanged course map make it one of the oldest continually operating road courses in America. Built against the foothills of the California desert, Big Willow’s challenges include substantial elevation changes and a very tricky, decreasing-radius final turn. The long straightaways and fast corners allow for high average…

Mitch Kelly and his father Tom (owners of Kelly & Son Crazy Painters in Bellfower, California) are stalwart members of the Southern California custom paint scene. Tom has been striping cars since the ’50s, and Mitch began in the ’70s. From iconic full-scale Hot Wheels cars to massive big-rig trailers, there isn’t much Kelly and Son haven’t painted, but Mitch’s customers were driving away with all of his favorite paintjobs. After returning from SEMA ’11, he fnally found a project that he’d paint for himself. A clapped-out ’57 had shown up in the shop next door, practically asking for a custom paintjob. Some horse-trading commenced, and soon Mitch began the lengthy process of restoring/modifying the Chevy to show-winning condition. As the project gathered steam, Mitch invited us to the shop…

Don’t Get Ripped Off By Counterfeit Parts “It started with products that just looked like ours. Now there are products actually marketed and sold with our logo. They’ve even copied our instructions!”—Jesse Powell, Aeromotive If you pay any attention to the “outside world,” you may have occasionally seen mainstream media reports of counterfeit or knock-off fashions, watches, and purses; bootleg movie DVDs and music CDs; and nonauthentic brand-name software and computer programs. No big deal, right? But on a macro scale, it does add up. And the products aren’t just limited to Timex lookalikes, either. Intellectual property theft, counterfeit parts, and poor-quality knockoffs have spread to the point that in some instances public safety and even national security are endangered. People have been sickened by phony brand-name prescription and…

As far as Comp Cams can tell, no retail seller has actually made a full-on counterfeit of its Hi-Tech Stainless Steel roller rocker arm, but there are some copies and knock-offs that look identical, except for Comp’s specific logo on the part. Manufactured offshore and sold domestically by a number of sources, these products are technically legal because they don’t claim to be the real Comp Cams product or feature the Comp Cams logo. However, the cheap copies use inferior materials and poor manufacturing techniques, so they often fail under severe use. Because they resemble Comp’s well-known design, this negatively impacts confidence in the original part. Comp’s solution, says Brian Reese, is to “improve and develop products faster than people can make copies. The day we finish, we will start…

This chronicles the 22-year odyssey of Bo Bertillson’s Deuce coupe buildup. It all started in his homeland of Sweden. In the early ’80s, a friend purchased eight coupes of various years in America. Three would not fit into the shipping container to send to Sweden, so they were cut up. The ’32 five-window Bo purchased was one of those hacked-apart coupes. The ’32 was put aside for years before Bo shipped it to his second home in Huntington Beach, California, in 2003 to finally begin making his dream a reality. Here are his project photos, showing the slow build of his chunky-’flake Deuce. GOT PICS? If you’ve built or restored your car and have documented it in pictures every step of the way, we might be able to use your…

Sometimes also called “piston-to-head” clearance, quench height may be defined as the distance between the flat-top portion of the piston and the cylinder head surface at top dead center (TDC), including the head gasket’s compressed thickness and any positive or negative piston deck height that may exist. Proper quench creates turbulence in the combustion chamber, theoretically pushing the mixture toward the spark plug and reducing the possibility of unburned gases at the completion of the combustion cycle, which can play a significant role in reducing detonation and even exhaust emissions. Quench should be as tight as possible without the piston actually contacting the head. This, in turn, is largely dependent on the type of connecting rods and the engine’s peak rpm. A good rule of thumb is that you can…

Pro-M Racing //336.644.8668 //ProMRacing.com From Pro-M Racing comes a new Universal Racing Engine Management System perfect for retrofitted hot rods or drag cars. It’s offered in many ways: as a management-only computer, as a plug-’n’-play system with a preloaded tune, or as a fully adjustable system with a base tune and the capabilities to adjust almost anything. The system allows you to use your laptop as an expansive scan tool and also allow you to control power-adders, shift points, a two-stage rev limiter, and more. Pro-M also offers complete EFI kits that include all the necessary parts, such as fuel pumps and injectors. The engine management is also offered for a few vehicle-specific applications. Price: $1,945.95 More Oomph for Your Turbodiesel Truck Snow Performance //866.365.2762 SnowPerformance.net Snow Performance, the…