Innehållsförteckning för September 2019 från Hot Rod

Editor-in-Chief @john.mcgann Never in a million years did I think I would be writing the opening column in HOT ROD when I first set foot in the lobby of the Petersen Building as an employee in 2003. Employee isn’t technically the correct term, either; I was beginning an internship with Motor Trend under the tutelage of MT’s photographer, John Kiewicz. During my time there, I photographed every car in the long-term test fleet, participated in all the “Of the Year” shootouts, and drove a bunch of cool and (a few boring) new cars. They kept me around for five months until the internship ended. Two months later, I managed to land a salaried position with the company as the manager of the photo studio in an off-site location. “Managing the…

When it comes to NASCAR’s “aero warriors,” the Plymouth Superbird is more famous, but Tom Bailey isn’t a Mopar guy. Actually, he isn’t a Ford guy, either. Bailey’s most well-known for building Camaros. Fast ones, with streamlined composite bodies and multiple HOT ROD Drag Week™ wins. So what’s a Bow Tie drag racer doing with a corner-turning Ford Talladega? Well, you won’t be too surprised to hear it started with a Camaro. “I was working on my first Drag Week car—an orange ’69 Camaro called ‘Indian Burial Ground’—at a shop in Wisconsin, and my friend, Jim Plimpton [a well-known Ford racer], pulled up in this white ’69 Talladega,” Bailey says. “I’d never really liked a Ford before, but that thing was cool, and I wanted it.” Bailey told Plimpton that…

Who was the first to bat 1,000? 1,000 horsepower, we mean. Well, the Napier Cub 16-cylinder airplane engine was said to make 1,057 hp in 1920, and land-speed racers went 203.79 mph with the Sunbeam 1000 in 1927, although it made its 900+ ponies with the help of two engines. In the 1940s, we got steam and diesel locomotive engines that could boast the power of more than 1,000 horses, and in airplane design we see the superchargers, turbos, and oxygen-happy fuels that would come to define hot rodding in the years to come. Ask a Top Fuel racer when supercharged, nitro-burning 392 dragsters first boasted 1,000 horses and they’ll shrug and say, “The first time they ran?” From there, it spread like the flame front in an optimized combustion.…

Not all 1,000hp applications require a second mortgage or the selling of a kidney. Late-model engines, especially the LS1 and its Gen III and IV variants, have proved time and again of being capable of supporting 1,000 hp with mostly stock components. You will need some sort of power-adder, but that, head studs, and maybe a forged-piston upgrade should get you pretty close to the 1,000hp mark. Regular contributor Richard Holdener has used that method repeatedly with cheap LS engine combinations. Multiple dyno tests can be found on HOTROD.com. Be sure to check out the Sloppy Mechanics website also. It’s another vault of information on big-power LS combinations.…

Modern Ford enthusiasts will be happy to hear that old-school hot rodding tricks are not dead. Ford has done a fantastic job engineering the 5.0L Coyote engine, which currently makes 460 hp in the 2018 Mustang GT and as much as 480 hp in the Mustang Bullitt, and that’s all from just 302 ci. The slightly larger 5.2L VooDoo engine in the Shelby GT350 produces 526 hp. Common mods for all these models include cold-air intakes, performance tunes, headers, and free-flowing exhaust. Owners of the 2015–2017 5.0L Mustangs can also join in the fun with similar mods that help their Coyotes, too. In fact, swapping a better intake onto a 2015–2017 GT can yield a nice power gain. Recently, we had the chance to tag along with Justin Starkey of…

Q: I will be buying a GM LS376 crate engine, but don’t want power steering. Can the serpentine accessory drive for the new LT-series engines—with electric power steering that has no need for a pump drive—be retrofitted to the LS engine? I’m assuming the LT accessory system has a separate belt for the A/C compressor (which I’d like on my engine). Part numbers would be very much appreciated. My engine will go into a 1936 Buick I’m building for cruising and autocrossing. A: Unfortunately, the new GM LT (Gen V small-block) factory drives don’t fit earlier LS engines. Gen V engines are completely redesigned, and there is little interchange with earlier Gen III and IV “LS”-type small-blocks. Looking at the front engine accessory drive (FEAD) system specifically on Gen V…

Network Content Director @douglas.glad I am in the unique position that my failures are public and therefore have a little more weight than someone blowing it in the privacy of their own home. Ten years ago, we would detonate an engine or forget how to install a part behind the scenes, reset, rebuild, and publish photos, captions, and data of our glorious successes. We’d make it look easy. Now, with social media and the 90-second news cycle, the pressure to get it right or be judged is high. We often hear that failure is not an option. The perception that failure is something to be avoided is the wrong interpretation. Failure is a tool for learning. Try more, fail more, fail fast, and learn from that experience. Fear of failure…

It takes a lot to raise our eyebrows at a first-generation Camaro. We’re not haters of the ponycar icon, we’re just a little burned out, OK? That makes this car all the more special. Because it’s not only a first-gen but a 1969 model—the most done, then redone Camaro on the planet. Yet, against all odds, we looked—and couldn’t stop looking. The team at Detroit Speed, Inc. did it again. They created a car the bridges the gap between timeless Chevy muscle and late-model elegance, and does it in a way that would have the most expensive and sophisticated autobahn missiles green with envy. The latest creation from the suspension specialists turned hot rod house is called “TUX.” Built for Stuart Adams, the team was given three words and one…

HOT ROD attended the NHRA season opener at the Lucas Oil Winternationals at Auto Club Raceway in Pomona, California. There, Top Fuel veteran Clay Millican was kind enough to give us an inside look at his dragster and the entire operation supporting it. Spending the day in Clay’s pit allowed us to witness the massive effort it takes to get this car ready for a race. On a typical winning race day, a Top Fuel crew will rebuild the 500ci engine three times with roughly 40 minutes to tear it completely down and reassemble it between rounds. It’s a Herculean task that takes a dedicated team of skilled individuals and a laundry list of spare parts. Unsurprisingly, the raw power that these engines are capable of producing is hard on…

Strictly defined, a highboy is a fenderless street rod built with a Model A or 1932 Ford Roadster body mounted high in the stock location on top of the framerails. Generally, the frame of choice is the 1932 Ford (or aftermarket equivalent) because it is cleaner-looking and wider than the 1928–1931 Model A frames. Ground clearance is not increased over stock (except for any tire-size differences). Back in the day, standard production cars had ample ground clearance stock compared with modern norms because the roads just plain sucked. The hot rod–style fenderless highboy originated in Southern California back in the late-1930s, thanks to SoCal’s mild year-round climate that was compatible with a topless, fenderless vehicle. The opposite of a highboy is the lowboy, also a fenderless roadster but with the…

LS-series serpentine-belt routing is determined by the balancer and its integral pulley grooves. The FEAD combinations and the listed part numbers discussed on these pages generally assume the use of Corvette-based FEAD systems. They’re the shortest and most compact, and most CPP high-perf engines come with Vette-style harmonic dampeners and corresponding water pumps. But out in the wild, there are actually three different LS production configurations that vary by how far the serpentine belts are spaced forward from the engine block. If you aren’t sure which balancer you have, KWiK says to place a straightedge across the front of the crank pulley and measure the distance from this edge to the front of the engine cover, through one of the crank pulley’s three “windows.” Measurements for the different system offsets…

Jacob Davis Network Editor@jacobrossdavis Make Hot Rodding Great Again What happened to the days where people built cars with their brains instead of their wallets? I’m all for spending money if you have it, but spend your hard-earned cash in an intelligent manner. So many people think money is the solution to crafting a great hot rod when, in reality, it’s making your dollar go further by finding clever solutions and doing a bit of legwork to scrounge up the deals. People used to go as fast as they could with what they had available to them, and it’s that ingenuity that led to some of the greatest advancements the automobile has ever seen. The early legends of hot rodding did things that rebelled against social norms, and sometimes common…

In the early 1960s, brothers Andy, Vince, and Joe Granatelli chose land-speed racing as the public proving ground for a new generation of Paxton superchargers. Their recent purchase of Paxton Products from the McCulloch Motor Co. brought with it a poor reputation for efficiency and reliability of a centrifugal design dating to the 1930s. Stodgy, practical Plymouth Division suffered from reputational problems of its own, at least among enthusiasts shopping for new-car excitement. Plymouth—which was always denied the powerful hemispherical V8s enjoyed by stablemates Dodge, Chrysler, and DeSoto—shared a high-performance engine, at last: 1962’s dual-quad 413 Wedge. The two companies’ mutual rehabilitation project was the twice-blown 1962 Fury photographed on the wrong side of this road by Car Craft associate editor Bud Lang. He explained the makeshift racetrack in Jean,…

Heading north from Alabama, there was a gentleman who had two Mopar Aero Warriors tucked away in his garage, a 1970 Plymouth Superbird and 1969 Dodge Charger 500. The Superbird was a running and driving car, but over the winter, the car is used as a shelf because there is limited space to store items. A 440 car with a four-speed, it had recently returned from the Aero Warrior reunion in Alabama. The Charger 500, however, had been buried for years behind a wall of life’s accoutrements. It took the owner and I a fair bit of time to dig out the front of the car to see what kind of condition it was in; you can see from the pictures the timeline for moving of the pieces, and the…

As Yandro Ulloa eases his Chrome Yellow 1998 SVT Cobra to the line, there’s a wicked cackle of burnt gases spitting from the fender-routed pipes. With the transmission in Second, he cracks the throttle, drops the clutch, and warms the tires with a quick but purposeful burnout. Wasting little time, Ulloa moves up, drops his snake in the beams, floors the gas, and with a flash of the tree, he’s off like a missile. The “Minion” tears from the line with its turbochargers force-feeding the 281-cube V8 that’s producing 1,500 hp worth of rear-wheel thrust and generating more than 2 g of acceleration. With the 4.6 screaming like a 747 on takeoff, Ulloa kicks the clutch and rips the Tremec Magnum into Second gear. The 60-foot clocks whip past in…

One of the greatest things about HOT ROD Drag Week™ is the way racers think up recipes to tackle the bipolar task of the hell week: to go fast as possible while maintaining a semblance of reliability. Drag Week™ challenges builders to find a way to have their cake and eat it, too, as there’s no other option to make it to Friday. With that comes a wealth of innovation in the recipes we’ve seen on track, and a notable shift in the ingredients lately has been in roller-lifter technology. While bushed lifters have been on the market for several years, it was the rise of their usage in Drag Week™ combinations that really caught our attention. The valvetrain is one of the biggest weak points that we’ve come across…

Check it out! This is a new department where we check in on our ongoing projects and some cool builds we hear about through friends in the industry. Let’s kick things off with a couple of Sketchpad builds that are coming to life and an oddball engine build. 1972 PLYMOUTH SCAMP We received a lot of positive feedback about the Sketchpad issue (June 2019), which featured affordable builds you can do at home without the backing of a custom fab shop. ARP’s Bob Florine was so enamored with the Scamp illustration by Eric Brockmeyer that he found this low-mile creampuff and has asked Pure Vision Design’s Steve Strope to build it just like the rendering in the magazine: Air Grabber hood, steel wheels, cranked-down torsion bars and relocated leaf springs,…

Pulleys for the Chevy LT Engine Family Concept ONE // 877.337.0688 C1pulleys.com Concept ONE now produces a complete pulley system (above) for the Chevy LT engine family. The LT Victory Series pulley system is simple and can be tailored for any custom application. The design of the Victory Series system has packaging in mind. Its compact size ensures the LT engine for your project will fit perfectly the first time. A polished SD-7 A/C compressor with billet manifold, Lares Corp. aluminum power-steering pump, exclusive Concept ONE billet-aluminum pump-mounted mini reservoir, and polished 165-amp Powermaster one-wire alternator all surround the Edelbrock cast-aluminum water pump. A high-performance Fluidampr SFI-approved harmonic damper and billet pulleys are included, along with the tensioner, brackets, and hardware to make it all work. Four different finishes are…

Roadkill @davidfreiburger How many cars do you need? The title says it all, where X is the number of cars you need and Y is the number you currently have. Of course, I’m pretty well known for having too many cars, and my count today is between 20 and 25, depending on how you count loose bodies and frames (which is fodder for another editorial entirely). Dreaming about, hunting for, and possessing a glut of projects are symptoms of one of the many metal disorders that define the myriad styles of gearheads you run into—and I’m not really joking about the metal disorder. It’s part hoarding, part fantasy, and many parts procrastination that make up my problem. For others, its radical obsession (like people who collect all Chevelles, for example),…