Innehållsförteckning för October 2018 från Hot Rod

I am becoming a believer that customs and race-car design are getting to the level of fine art. A good example is the recent offering of a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO for $45,000,000 at Sotheby’s in Monterey, California. As postwar art goes, this is in the same league as an original Basquiat or Warhol. Those are some big dollars for something designed to get from A to B—and C on the weekends. But this really isn’t news. The SoCal car-culture industry has made billions of dollars since WWII selling apparel and magazines for the sake of looking at cool stuff—or art, if you will. Now more than ever, cars are treated like a canvas to recreate the look of age or rust, or even the appearance of use by a…

Achieving the perfect mixture of show-stopping craftsmanship and incredible performance is a rare thing. Generally, you get one or the other in a custom-built vehicle, but this 1964 Ford Falcon, built by US12 Speed and Custom for owner Henry Braddock III, elegantly combines equal parts of beauty and beast. To properly explain why this extraordinary car exists, we need to take a look back to what inspired Henry to have it built and how it came to be in the first place. Back in the 1960s, Braddock of Sawyer, Michigan, had just started St. Joe Tool Company. In his spare time, he was racing a bright-red 1966 Chevy II he considered to be a fast car on the street, but no matter what he tried, he couldn’t get the thing…

Nine hundred and fifty rear-wheel horsepower. “That’s how far you can push a stock 6.4L Hemi block before you need to worry,” says Dave Weber from Modern Muscle Xtreme (MMX). You just need to add a few parts for durability. We happened to have access to a 2017 6.4L Hemi crate engine at Westech Performance in Mira Loma, California, so we called Weber for his parts recipe, reassembled the engine in two days, and using the 67mm Comp turbos from our sister magazine Car Craft’s 1971 Demon project car, put together a DIY, real-world, 1,050hp combo that should live forever. The wastegates opened at 16 pounds for this test, so we ended the dyno pull at 5,400 rpm. As you can see, this combo hits 1,000 lb-ft at 4,000 rpm…

On the way home from this year’s Power Tour®, I paid out-of-pocket for an extravagant (for me) seat upgrade on the Dallas to LAX leg of the trip. I was looking forward to three hours in Economy Plus with a luxurious 3 more inches of legroom over the standard, cattle-stockyard seating modern air travel has become. No good deed goes unpunished, however, as I was assaulted with a frenetic verbal barrage from the enthusiastic young boy in the seat next to me from the moment I sat down. The onslaught was continued all the way into the jetway at LAX, broken up only occasionally as he paused to watch a few moments of the Marvel movie he had dialed up on the screen in front of him. I guessed his…

Q: I have a 1971 Torino fastback with a tired 302. I would like to purchase a junkyard 5.0L from a newer model vehicle. I know the oil pan sumps are different. Instead of buying a kit, can I use my pan, pickup, timing cover, harmonic balancer, and flywheel from my original engine? Also, what years and vehicles should I be looking for to get a motor from? I am going to keep the engine carbureted. A: There’s no replacement for displacement. Always! I’m assuming you want to replace your worn-out, two-barrel 302 with a later, more performance-oriented 5.0L engine and run a four-barrel carb—this is, after all, HOT ROD. What’s “best” for performance while minimizing the need for additional, separate bolt-ons? Within these parameters, if you can find one,…

2018 is a year of anniversaries: It’s HOT ROD’s 70th anniversary, Chevrolet is celebrating 100 years of pickup trucks, and it’s also Sta-Bil’s 60th anniversary. It’s only fitting, then, that all three entities joined forces in celebration. Sta-Bil, a long-running sponsor of the HOT ROD Power Tour®, wished to participate in our road trip in a different way—as a participant—and its vehicle of choice was a 1958 Chevrolet Apache. Though the Apache was in really nice shape when we got it, the folks from Sta-Bil wanted to make some improvements, namely disc brakes, an overdrive transmission, upgraded cooling system, and more horsepower in the form of an ultra-efficient LS3 engine. No problem—our industry partners were happy to oblige, and we accomplished the transformation in a week’s time in an operation…

Concerning your rescue of Brian Ferguson’s 1997 5.9L Dodge Ram Truck (HOT ROD, May 2018), I didn’t see the Hughes F1 single-plane EFI intake manifold listed in the “Parts and Prices” list on page 86. Please advise. Bill Staib Carrollton, GA HOT ROD to the Rescue “parts and prices” tables list only those parts needed to fix the vehicle, based on its “as-received” or pre-rescue condition. Brian had already installed the F1 intake on the Ram truck; as the “as-received” part wasn’t a rescue add-on, it’s not included in the pricing. Contact HUGHES ENGINES INC.; Washington, IL; 309.745.9558; HughesEngines.com…

Stealth Gas Tank Aeromotive // 913.647.7300 // Aeromotiveinc.com Not often do bolt-on or plug-and-play parts live up to their claims, but the new Gen II Stealth Tank from Aeromotive truly does. The company does all of the hard work for you with the pump, fuel level sending unit, and the fuel/electrical bulkhead preinstalled. What’s more, all of those components are in the factory location, removing the need for extra straps and/or spacers. There are two configurations: a 200-lph and 340-lph model, depending on what’s required for your application. Aeromotive’s award-winning Phantom Technology comes standard in the Stealth tank, keeping delivery at any fuel level quiet and consistent. Price: $498.33, 200-lph pump; $561.20, 340-lph pump Billet-Aluminum Vent Canister Chassisworks // 800.722.2269 CAchassisworks.com Control vented fluids with this new aluminum vent canister…

Taking the long way home is always the best option, because you never know what you will find along the way. Such was the case when we found Rod’s & Hot Rods in a small town in Alabama. The owner showed us several pallets full of engine blocks—many of them 426 Hemis—then his 1967 GTX, one of 1 of 312 produced with a 426 Hemi and a four-speed transmission. He’s the second owner of the car and has owned it since 1967. The GTX has been sitting since 1983, with less than 65,000 miles on the odometer. CONTACT RYAN! Want Ryan to visit your stash? Drop him a line on the cool stuff you know about, and he might go on an expedition with you! His email is TheAutoArchaeologist@yahoo.com.…

“The crazy esoteric part about hot rodding is how it isn’t always the best choice, it’s your choice.”— David Martin There was a motorcycle coming up behind us, just barely visible in the small silver moon of a sideview mirror on the passenger side. I expected David Martin to look for a place to let it pass, but instead he laid into the throttle and the bike disappeared. We were at the top of the hill and pulled off at a scenic lookout before they caught back up. The rider gave us a thumbs-up and shot a credulous glance at the little 1931 Ford ticking and cooling with a backdrop of Malibu mountains behind it. You could see him thinking, “Did that car just do what I saw it do?”…

The Brass Junkie is a nickname for John Moss, a California native who was born in Long Beach and moved to Huntington when he was 16 years old. The name came from “The Brass Junkie,” an Evo chopper John Moss built to look like a 1940s Knuckle. The traditional build was cutting-edge back when everyone was doing big-tire bikes. Today, John operates out of a corrugated tin shop hidden behind Greer Machinery building objets d’art for high-end clients. If you are a young aspiring artist or a dentist having a midlife crisis, Moss holds a blueprint for a just and pious life. The influences of early punk rock and ’70s surf culture are evident in this space. There is a combination of leather and oiled machinery in the smell and…

With the advent of bolt-on EFI, we knew this day was coming; they didn’t just come for the carburetor to replace it as a fueling system, they came and stole every bit of the carburetor’s retro-cool looks, too. As much as carbs were chosen for their practical strengths, to some folks, their look called back to the right period for many projects. Holley understood this and machined up a throttle-body that took all the technology it has developed with the Terminator and Dominator EFI systems and packed them into a double-pumper doppelgänger. This is where Dale Snoke’s 1964 Mercury Comet—a traditional A/FX Gasser that runs nostalgia races all over SoCal—comes into play. Car Craft readers might recognize Dale’s Comet from the 2016 carburetor test sizing up which cfm of Holley…

THE COMBO Eric Schmiege bought his 1965 Chevy Bel Air for $1,700 back in 2000, a time, he says, “When you could still buy old Chevys for cheap.” As originally built, it had a lowly Chevy straight-six, but over the last 18 years, he and his hot rodding buddies have incrementally upgraded it inside, outside, and under the hood—where big-block Chevy power now resides. “I wanted a big engine with an old-school vibe,” Schmiege says. “So we built a 0.060-over 454 with Edelbrock Performer RPM aluminum heads topped by an old Offy dual-quad manifold, then modded a pair of 600-cfm, vacuum-secondary Holleys to work properly on it. I also put a fairly big flat-tappet hydraulic cam in the motor.” Behind the engine is a TH400 automatic and 2,600- to 2,800-rpm…

Ugh. Tom “The Mongoo$e” McEwen died on June 10 this year, and I can’t get it out of my head. Weird, because I only barely knew McEwen personally. Just when I thought I was a calloused journalist who was getting accustomed to the legends of our sport falling down with regularity, I realized I’m actually just a bone-deep car guy who became that way thanks to inspirations from those folks who came before us. It’s not the HOT ROD magazine Freiburger who really misses the guy. It’s the 10-year-old Freiburger standing at the fence at Pomona, pushing as close to the starting line as possible because burnouts are best, and because Steve Evans just announced that ’Goose is coming to the line in that Corvette Funny Car! You most likely…