Innehållsförteckning för August 2019 från Hot Rod

Network Content Director @douglas.glad Paint is expensive. Bodywork, too. Those grim facts have spawned a world of wraps and patina while elevating a truly beautiful paintjob to the level of myth. When I was the editor of Car Craft for 10 glorious years, the top-selling issues were always about paint and body. At the time, we were hands-on guys at a hands-on magazine, so we painted the cars ourselves in “the shop,” our gritty warehouse in the nearby DMZ. Not for the love of these things, but for the challenge. Classics included the $999 paintjob and the more terrifying $499 paintjob. With lots of free time, and the help of John McGann (flip the page), the gang painted a couple of decent street machines and created a lot of fun…

Joseph Solch vividly remembers the first time he hopped into the driver seat of his 1967 Pontiac GTO. He was seven years old and unable to see over the steering wheel. The car had been sitting in his uncle’s barn in Circleville, Ohio, since 1986. Without realizing that the ignition had not been properly mounted to the dash, Joseph attempted to start the car. Key in hand, he dislodged the ignition, pushing it into the dash. Terrified he had broken the car, Joseph ran back inside his uncle’s house, never to tell a soul. “That’s why the ignition isn’t mounted in the car and never will be. I still have the same key and ignition, and I have to hold it from the back every time I go to start…

Mankind has always been fascinated with exploring the unknown and making it known. Once discovered, a new challenge comes to the forefront: making it accessible to new explorers. Many of these once-wild locations can’t be reached by a strip of asphalt—due to a raging river or deep chasm standing in the way—but that’s where ingenuity comes into play, and a bridge is built to span the gap. Ever since Henry Ford made the car readily available to the American public in 1908, the infrastructure of roads has continually been developed to reach more of the nation’s outlying corners. Whether it be a stately suspension bridge forged from steel, a quaint covered bridge hewn from trees, or a simple yet elegant arch bridge molded out of concrete, these incredible pieces of…

One of the most overlooked areas within the valvetrain for a performance engine is pushrod length. Veteran enthusiasts may scoff at this because, back in the day, you dropped in a set of stock pushrods, set the lash on that solid cam, and went out and made noise. But the performance world has evolved: Power numbers are escalating, engine speed continues to climb, and spring rates are growing, which all adds to valvetrain stress. One way to make life better for the valvetrain is to idealize its operating geometry, and it’s easier than you’d think. If you were to watch a rocker arm from the side as it traversed through a complete lift cycle, the tip of the rocker arm does not travel straight up and down, but instead scribes…

Q: Doesn’t the horsepower requirement to reach a given speed actually increase with the square of the velocity, not the cube, as you indicated in a Feb. 2019 Pit Stop answer to Paul Simmons (“Why Is my 1989 Mustang Engine So Noisy?”)? A: Nope. Sorry, but this is a common misconception, if only because at hundreds of mph, the huge power increase needed to get there is pretty hard to wrap your head around. Nevertheless, here’s the deal: Critical aero forces go up with the square of the speed, but the horsepower required to reach a given speed does, in fact, go up with the cube of the velocity. Let’s start at the beginning: Aerodynamic forces acting on a vehicle become a major factor above 120 mph, so they don’t…

Executive Editor @john.mcgann Continuing with Doug’s theme from the previous page, I agree that patina has become elevated and almost fetishized lately because of “paintophobia,” or the fear of paint job. There are a number of reasons car owners would fear having their car painted. The costs are extraordinary, for one, and there are a variety of reasons for that, with material cost being primary among them. The cost of paint has increased quite a bit since the days of lacquer and enamel. That’s a good thing, though, because modern coatings are much brighter and more durable, plus there is a nearly infinite range of colors and finishes, from low-gloss flat and satin to a shimmering, three-stage glossy pearl. Of course, a paint job is much more than just the…

“The 1969 Chevrolet Camaro looks good from any angle. The body lines make the car appear to be in motion, even when it is sitting still.” So spoke Danny Cruz when describing his dream car. The 33-year-old from Camarillo, California, has always been into muscle cars, and it wasn’t until four years ago that he decided to turn his hobby of building and restoring classics into a side business. He now owns his own shop, Muscle Mechanix, where he works on an assortment of projects, including his own 1969 Camaro, nicknamed the “Slayer Camaro.” The Camaro’s powerplant was sourced from a 2006 Chevrolet Silverado. Danny pulled out the 5.3L engine and had it machined by legendary engine builder Kenny Duttweiler at his nearby shop. While the engine was apart, Danny…

In a famous scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a character drags a cart full of bodies as the town crier proclaims, “Bring out your dead!” But instead of Black Plague victims, in our remake, we’re looting dead carburetors. The cart might be piled high with old Rochester 4GCs, Carter WCFBs, and Solexs. What won’t be found in the lifeless pile is a brand-new line of performance carburetors from Fuel Systems Technology (FST). This shiny, new company has just introduced a line of carburetors that merely reinforces that the carburetor has evolved from a calibrated fuel leak to a sophisticated fuel mixer. The carburetor is not dead. It may seem odd in this day of high-tech electronic control that there would be a brand-new player building carburetors with…

Jacob Davis Network Editor @jacobrossdavis Road-Trip Mixtape Ever since cars have been around, musicians have been putting lyrics to paper with the automobile as a central theme. There have been odes to Route 66, ballads of building cars one piece at a time, and tunes about little deuce coupes. Cars and music go together like baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie. I think this is partly because cars are more than just pieces of metal, they make us feel something. Much like the powerful lyrics or rising score in a song, our cars elicit an emotional response when we think about all the hours poured into them or the places we’ve gone with them. Anyone who has ever taken a long trip in a car has a playlist they love…

Sixty years ago, with just two weeks to go before the 1959 Bonneville Nationals, the world’s first four-engine race car was ready to run. All that drag-racer Mickey Thompson lacked was enough flat earth to accelerate, then safely slow, nearly 5,000 pounds of man and machine. General Curtis LeMay, vice chief of staff of the entire U.S. Air Force and racer of Allard sports cars, offered up an historic runway for a day. The former Rogers dry lake had been closed to hot rodders since the outbreak of World War II, but this exception was made in the name of patriotism: The 394.19-mph land-speed record (LSR) that this young American determined to break belonged to Englishman John Cobb, the latest of the wealthy Europeans who’d dominated 20th-century “record racing.” The…

Dan from Detroit said he knew a guy who had a salvage yard with some new vehicles and a bunch of classics, so I went to check it out. Not wanting to let those classics get crushed, the owner puts them out the way to store as future projects or to pass on to someone. In one corner was a first-generation Mustang, and a few spots down was a 1967 Camaro. There was even a burnt-out 1969 Plymouth Fury and a rusty Checker taxicab. The most peculiar piece was the ultimate towing system: an RV with a fifth-wheel, pull-along camper behind it.…

Rock stars, they’ve got the life. They go out, play some gigs, and do famous-people stuff with other famous people, all the while making themselves more famous. That fame also allows them the opportunity to buy or build their dream rides. That brings us here, to this 1930 Ford Model A, a bare-metal street rod formally owned by bassist Dale Stewart of the band Seether. As the story goes, Dale was no stranger to performance automobiles, having owned quite a few sport and exotic cars along with his share of custom motorcycles. In the latter part of 2016, he contacted Noah Alexander, the owner of Classic Car Studio (CCS) in St. Louis, about building a one-off special. This was not going to be a typical restomod or flat-out speed machine,…

The nervous system of a car is the wiring that snakes its way through the chassis, delivering electrical signals to different systems and control modules. These wires needs to be reliable, consistent, and resistant to years of use in harsh conditions (think repeated sun exposure, rain, dust, and dirt). This mass of wires, connectors, and their wiring loom also have a weight penalty. A typical OEM wiring harness can weigh more than 70 pounds, and that weight is a serious detriment to a vehicle like a race car that’s trying to stick to a diet. The thickness of standard wiring looms can also be a factor when space is at a minimum or if tidiness and hiding the wiring is desired, as in a show car. It’s clear that wiring…

I’ve been answering readers’ Pit Stop tech questions for decades, explaining how to improve performance, troubleshoot pesky problems, or recommend a better combination. Yet rarely do any of these problem-solving requests include information on the problem combo’s vacuum reading. That’s unfortunate, as vacuum can tell you a heck of a lot about an engine’s condition, without the need to invest in a bunch of high-tech diagnostic tools. So what’s the deal on vacuum? Consider an internal-combustion engine as basically a giant air pump that operates under the principles of pressure differential. The difference between normal atmospheric pressure (14.7 psi at sea level at standard temperature and pressure) and how hard this “pump” sucks under various operating conditions and states of tune creates vacuum (usually expressed in inches of mercury, or…

Roadkill @davidfreiburger Top Fuelers and Funny Cars running four across! I had never been to a four-wide drag race until I attended the second-ever NHRA Denso Auto Parts Four-Wide Nationals at The Strip in Las Vegas in April. It’s amazing and you should experience it, but my big takeaway was that it’s far more entertaining when you understand exactly how it works and what makes it challenging for the crews and teams. I’m here to explain. Comparatively few people have even seen a live four-wide race. They weren’t uncommon at a few tracks during the early- to late-1960s and perhaps into the early-1970s, but it was never sanctioned by the National Hot Rod Association until March 2010 at zMax Dragway in Charlotte (I’m watching the 2019 running at zMax on…