Innehållsförteckning för May 2016 från Hot Rod

I want you to take a test for me. Think back to when you were in high school. Picture the parking lot the seniors used. Think of the cars that were there, the ones that were important to you. They were the loud ones. The fast ones. The ones owned by the guys you admired. Now look in your driveway, your garage, or even the drawing board in your mind, and I’m betting the vehicle that you saw and wanted when you were in high school is the one you’re driving, working on, or dreaming about right now. It doesn’t matter when you went to high school—I think this test’s results will resonate with all of you. For the luckiest ones amongst us, the car that we had in high…

Considered one of the most significant cars to ever hit NASCAR, the famed K and K Insurance Dodge Daytona Charger looks like it could have come from Mars—even today, almost 50 years after its debut at the 1969 Talladega 500. Bobby Isaac went on to win the NASCAR championship with this car in 1970. K and K Insurance sponsored a string of Chargers in NASCAR over the years, but No. 71 was the most fondly remembered. Originally built by Nichels Engineering in Griffith, Indiana, for Chrysler Engineering to test the lowspeed aerodynamic properties of the Daytona Charger, there were actually two of these 1969 Daytona Chargers in the K and K stable. The team debuted this car at Talladega, which was the longest and most steeply banked track at the…

For the last few years, HOT ROD has paid homage to some of the prominent members of the hot rod fraternity who’ve passed in the previous year, and we always do it with mixed emotions. On one hand, we are thankful for their involvement and contributions—be it through innovation, design, building, racing, or business endeavors. They all have in some way helped to broaden and enrich the hot rod experience for all of us. However, we have known all of these industry titans for years and will miss their participation in the future and the influence and enthusiasm they brought to our industry. But in laying the groundwork in the performance-car arena, they have left a legacy and also a road map for us to follow. So they will continue…

Let the hellfire be unleashed! You knew with 707 hp available in various Hellcat offerings, these 6.2L Gen III Hemi engines would start showing up in projects, and the 2015 SEMA Show in Las Vegas confirmed what we all knew would be a wave of Hellcat awesomeness; we counted four Hellcat conversions, each with unique approaches to their installs. Wild Boar’s six-wheel “Hellhog” Jeep Wrangler and the River Raider/Hauk Hellcat Rubicon Jeep joined the recently completed Roadkill General Mayhem 1968 Charger and Gas Monkey Garage’s 1967 Dart featuring 6.2L of supercharged fury. GENERAL MAYHEM 1968 CHARGER If you watch HOT ROD’s Roadkill episodes on the Motor Trend YouTube channel, you know about the 1968 Charger and its Hellcat install, where Diversified Creations (DiversifiedCreations.com) in Brighton, Michigan, took almost every component…

With the passing of George “King of the Kustomizers” Barris, it’s worth noting what made him stand out from some of the equally talented early customizers like Jimmy Summers and brothers Gil and Al Ayala—in the days way before the Batmobile and Munster Koach. In many ways, he had a lot of the same attributes of contemporaries like Carroll Shelby, Keith Black, or Dean Moon, though they had completely different pursuits. You see, Barris, like them, had pretty much the whole pie. Huh? By “whole pie,” I mean he had more than the talent to create custom cars from pedestrian Fords and Mercurys, which he did with the help of his brother, Sam, and an all-star team of talented craftsmen—guys like Dean Jeffries and Junior Conway. That talent and ability…

My job these days is almost entirely based on the Internet. I don’t use social media for personal stuff at all—much to the annoyance of posters of private messages that I don’t even know how to view. At work, social media has become a huge element of our marketing, and it’s helped me develop a dense callus of indifference to personal attacks (a suspicious statement, I admit, considering I’ve devoted this entire column to exactly that). All I’m asking is that you take a moment to fully read someone’s comments and absorb them before responding. It’s not too much to ask. Rule number two: do not enter an in-screen conversation with the foregone conclusion that the other person you’re conversing with is an idiot. Instead, politely…

The “Mister Luckey” Top Fuel dragster gracing HOT ROD’s Jan. 1970 cover ended up being not so lucky for owner Ray Luckey of Terrell, Texas. It never ran in this configuration, with this livery, or even in this country. It seems the dragster was not Ray’s at all but rather his son’s. Ray owned a Chrysler dealership in Terrell and gave the used-car portion of the enterprise to his son, who quickly started sending large checks to engine builder Ed Pink for a state-of-the-art, no-holds-barred, 225-inch Top Fueler. Besides the all-star triumvirate of Ed Pink, Don Long, and Tom Hanna behind the build, the car was painted by Cerney and lettered by Tom Kelley, who tied the finishing bow on the potent package. Once the elder Luckey saw the used-car…

We don’t mean to get all poetic, but David Meyer’s 1966 Plymouth Belvedere is the exact color of the evening sky at the very last moment of light. In the shadows, it’s a blue so dark you expect to see deep-sea fishes blinking from the quarter-panels, but then the sun hits it and every edge glows like the bright azure spark of an arc welder. What you’ve always thought of as a rather plain body style— the slab-sided mid-1960s Plymouth—is revealed as an elegant architecture of inset panels and ironed-sharp body lines. Revealing the beauty of an oft-overlooked body style would be impressive enough, but this is a Rad Rides by Troy build, and Troy Trepanier never stops the show after just one neat trick. The parachute on the back…

At the 2015 AMSOIL Engine Master Challenge, HOT ROD invited builders to bring out any of the three generations of Hemi V8s to see who could make the most power between 3,000 and 7,000 rpm. The rules were simple: teams could bring any engine displacement they would like, were allowed to use any commercially available cylinder head, and could go absolutely nuts with porting. There were limits, however. The compression ratio could be no more than 11.5:1, magnetos were prohibited, factory-diameter lifters were required, and only Gen I Hemi engines would be allowed to use a fabricated intake to level the playing field. In terms of outright power, the big 426 has the size advantage, as they can easily be built to more than 500ci displacements for the axle-twisting torque…

This particular Sunday started out like any other race Sunday. It was August 1969, and the Super Eliminator showdowns attracted a rowdy crowd to Raceway Park, both in the stands and the pits. As always, this New Jersey dragstrip lured a healthy hoard of the finest high-powered race machines to do battle on Englishtown’s 1,320-foot, two-lane warpath. Bob Ida was there and confidently running what he brung: his supercharged, Hemi-powered Austin Healey known as the “Hemi Healy.” The car had become a staple on the East Coast circuit and a proverbial thorn in everyone’s side. And good old Cheshire-grinned Bob, well, he was like Castor Oil to his competitors—he looked innocuous, but he never went down easy. The Hemi Healy was running well, and the Ida team had been experimenting…

If you love front-engine dragsters, you know there’s a hierarchy to the look of Top Fuel slingshots from the 1960s, and at the top is just about any long-tail, enclosed-chute pack/rollbar, lizard-nose car. Visually these were the darlings of the dragster world in the mid- to late-1960s, whether shrouding a Woody Gilmore (Race Car Engineering), Don Long, Kent Fuller, Roy Fjastad (Speed Products Engineering), Frank Huszar (RCS), or other known or unknown chassis. Aluminum bodies were essentially one-off, handmade affairs handled by an elite group that included California body builders like Tom Hanna, Wayne Ewing, Bob Sorrell, Arnie Roberts, and Don Borth— and guys like Artie Ross in Louisiana with his fiberglass knockoffs. There were different philosophies behind building a Top Fuel dragster, one being that elaborate and costly bodies…

Paging through cam-company catalog listings, you may have noticed that as cams get larger (duration at 0.050-inch tappet lift increases) there’s often a notation to the effect that a hotter high-perf street grind “needs a 9.5:1 or a 10.5:1 compression ratio.” On its face, that’s because bigger cams trade bottom-end response for improved top-end power, and higher compression helps build cylinder pressure to make up for it. Trying to run too big a cam with too low a compression ratio makes for a lazy, nonresponsive motor. But what’s not made clear is that a larger cam often permits raising a pump-gas engine’s static compression ratio to better match the larger cam’s characteristics—without getting into detonation. Larger cams have more overlap and close the intake valve later, bleeding off some low-end…

For more than 90 years, Electrolux has been producing beautifully designed vacuums that stand the test of time and evoke a sense of nostalgia. But none we’ve seen can compare to what Bob Holt from Edwardsville, Kansas, has created. He transformed an Electrolux Model XXX (also known as Model 30) vacuum into a miniature art deco hot rod. Bob tells us he’s a Chevrolet guy, and not only because he’s a General Motors’ retiree, but because his father was a Chevy fanatic who eventually instilled that same passion into him and his brother. Bob grew up loving horses in a small suburban town just west of Kansas City. As the mechanical world began to gain eminence after World War II, Bob and his brother became heavily involved in the go-kart…

Even from a distance, the car looks good. The stance is purposeful and the body and paint look amazing. When it drives by, gripping the road and howling with more than 600 hp, it’s clearly something out of the ordinary. It deserves a better look to see just what it is about the car that sets it apart. We got our first up-close look at the 1962 Chevy bubbletop when Andy Leach, owner of CAL Auto Creations, debuted the car at the Barrett-Jackson Cup during the 2015 Hot August Nights. We had Leach walk us around the car and point out the myriad sheetmetal tweaks, because otherwise we would have missed them. For example, the headlight bezels were cut into a dozen pieces and put back together to fit the…

Each year, the Performance Racing Industry (PRI) Show gathers the top manufacturers of speed parts under one roof. It has become the place to debut hardcore race parts, drag cars, and the machines used to build them. It’s one of our favorite places to talk to the biggest players in the world of horsepower and bench race the newest parts. We spent hours perusing the new products on display while getting distracted by amazing race engines and cars. While there was everything from turbocharged snowmobile engines to all-billet Duramax diesel race engines on display, the following nine products are the ones we see making a big impact in the domestic performance market in years to come. TWIN THROTTLE LS3 CROSS-RAM EDELBROCK EDELBROCK.COM 310.781.2222 Many of us at HOT ROD have…

It was the rare cold day in California where even East Coasters put on a jacket and visiting Canadians look politely disappointed as they stare at gray clouds instead of the promised sunny skies. I’d been working all day on installing a new carpet kit in the Opel, and while my fingers were too numb from the icy wind blowing through the open doors to register any pain, my back and knees were screaming discomfort from hours of crawling around the cramped GT interior. Just as I was about to put the last bolt in the console undertray, I fumbled and watched that little M11 hex bolt tumble down the transmission tunnel and directly into the slot for the headlight actuator handle—that’s an Opel thing—where it lodged sideways,…

Q: I have a 1970 Chevy C20 truck that is my daily driver and occasionally tows a horse trailer. It has a 402ci big-block, which seems to be wiping a cam lobe. If it does turn out the cam is bad, would it be OK to replace that cam with a mild Sig Erson RV cam my dad used in his 1969 396 and then removed? My dad’s cam is nearly new, with only a few thousand miles on it. The lobes and bearing surfaces look good. Can I simply install the Erson cam with new lifters? Is it worth the money to take the risk, or should I just buy a new cam? A: It’s theoretically possible to install a used flattappet performance cam with new lifters. But I…