Innehållsförteckning för November 2016 från Hot Rod

As gearheads, we are accustomed to things not working. In fact, we are one of the few, semi-sane, hobbyist collectives that actively seek out problems. We buy cars with crippling rust, blown-up motors, and with hoards of vital components completely missing without so much as batting an eye; the likes of which would give a normal person a financial panic attack. It is one of our greatest strong suits and quite possibly the reason our species has survived so long. For with these self-inflicted automotive ailments comes a unique opportunity to problem-solve. I was forcibly reminded of this fact while installing a serpentine drive kit on my 1971 C10. Because the truck is equipped with a blower, the process required rerouting fuel lines, lathing pulley registers, reengineering a tensioner to…

I worry about the next generation of gearheads, but David Kruk is the future of the hobby. A 1968 Dodge Super Bee, a 1969 Road Runner, and his daily driver, a 1970 yellow and black Coronet, are in his backyard. A true car guy, David agreed to show me some of the barn finds he knew of in his neck of the woods. We pulled up to a farmstead outside of town and the owner let us see what was there. Through a broken window in the red barn, we could see a Sublime Green 1970 Dodge Super Bee! While not a rare hemi or 440 Six Pack car, a 383 engine still makes it quite the find. However, time and greedy hands have significantly eroded the car. The front-end…

The second we got in the car with Adrienne Peters, we knew it was going to be a good road trip. Peters pulled up in a black 2016 Camaro SS, and because she’s the marketing manager for Chevrolet’s performance parts division, the car was lowered with a white spear stripe on the side and carbon-fiber accents inside and out. Adrienne leaned over, waved a walkie-talkie in our direction, and very seriously asked what our code name should be. “One of the best parts of this is that we get to have call signs like in Smokey and the Bandit,” she said, and we rejected Thelma and Louise in favor of “Lemonade,” a hat-tip to the Beyoncé album we ended up listening to on repeat. A good stereo and a V8…

On a sleepy street corner in Strong City, Kansas, one building stands out. It’s not brightly colored, crumbling, or of a peculiar design, but it magnetically catches the eyes of any passerby with even the slightest inkling of a passion for cars. Under the shadow of a restored Standard Gas sign, sprawled out across the oil-stained property, is an epic offering to the gods of speed matched in both stature and range. As the HOT ROD crew passed through, en route to the Wichita leg of Power Tour® 2016, the familiar sound of roaring V8s echoed down Main Street as the faint smell of tire rubber wafted on the breeze. This was a phenomenon we had become used to over the course of the week: enthusiastic local hot rodders lining…

Let’s start this story on the side of the highway somewhere in Texas. We’d had a bit of an incident with our Chevelle and weren’t going anywhere in a hurry. Along comes a tall man with a trailer and the calm demeanor of an old cowboy, and he hooks us up and tows us into town. As if that’s not enough of a mitzvah, he then invites us to a BBQ at his shop. “I have a car I think you’ll like,” he says. We’ve rarely met a car we didn’t like, and we’ve definitely never met a BBQ we didn’t like, so a big gang of us HOT ROD and Chevy Performance folks piled into a truck and rolled along a backroad in Dickinson, Texas, until we saw quartet…

Nothing happens for hours, and then everything happens at once. The crew of the No. 68 and No. 69 Ford GTs was scattered around the pit boxes under the Le Mans grandstands. They were not exactly relaxed, but in a state of half sleep. Bodies were slung haphazardly across folding chairs and discarded tires, but ratchets and air guns sat at the ready in solider-straight lines on the toolbox tops. It took just a crackle from the radio and the entire force of both teams was up and in position as the leading No. 68 came down pit lane. In seconds, it was up in the air, turned 90 degrees, and backed into the pit stall. This wasn’t a refuel and four tires—there was something wrong. The car was completely…

Streamlining any race car is an enticing exercise you’ll find in everything from drag racing to Formula 1, and it seduces its fair share of luminaries as well as backyard racers. For years in the 1960s and early 1970s there were rumors “Big Daddy” Don Garlits was putting together a streamlined dragster based off of a fiberglass body made by Jocko Johnson, with a chassis by Connie Swingle. While this shot was taken in May 1972, it wasn’t until a year later that the “Wynns-Liner” made its debut at the 1973 AHRA Grand American meet at Orange County International Raceway. Interestingly, there was another streamlined dragster at the 1973 Grand American, this one from “Big” Jim Dunn that ran both as a rear-engine Funny Car, and then with its body…

One of the cornerstones of performance enthusiasts everywhere is celebrating 50 years of mostly uninterrupted Chevrolet pony power. Yes, HOT ROD has had more red Camaros on its cover than we can count and, yes, we hot rodders did have to endure a few years of Camaro-less blues in the early 2000s, but what a ride it’s been before and definitely since its triumphant return in 2009. From COPOs to Z/28s, the Camaro covers every enthusiast’s desires, whether it’s from a collector or a straight-line or twisty standpoint. We’ve gathered a nice group of vibrating Camaros from each era, along with some brief background behind each generation. THE ORIGINAL Though late to the ponycar segment—with the Mustang dropping like a bomb in April 1964—when Chevy entered with the 1967 Camaro,…

When Randy Weaver’s 1970 Barracuda rolls by, you might notice the asymmetrical cutouts in the hood and get a hint of something wicked and weird, but it’s not until the car accelerates away— belching a cloud of sooty exhaust smoke—that you’ll know for sure. That ’Cuda is diesel-powered! Randy and Sydney Weaver run Weaver Customs in West Jordan, Utah, and they are no strangers to diesel hot rods. After building a 12-valve Cummins F-100 in 2015, Randy got a customer request for a wild Plymouth, and he decided to forgo gas in favor of a 2010 6.7L diesel powerplant. “After the 5.9L truck, I wanted to try something more computer-controlled to be a little quieter,” Randy said. “I wanted people to be unsure of what they were hearing until they…

Hot rod builder Nick Weber and his dad, Nick Sr., have fabricated some nifty street brawlers in their family garage space, but when Nick picked up a 1969 Chevelle from an online auction, he decided the Chevy would be his best build to date. When the Webers bought the Chevelle, it was powered by a 396 big-block and TH400 combo, which didn’t last long under his care. Right off the bat, the younger Nick pulled the drivetrain and installed 540 inches of Chevy big-block power backed by a 4L80E trans. Some suspension upgrades were added to the mix of speed parts, and the car was brought down to the ground as much as humanly possible. Over time, Nick got interested in building an autocross car. As the all-important suspension upgrades…

There’s a reason why hot rodders have always liked stripped-down cars. Not only are they light and ready to race, they have less stuff on them to go wrong. Start adding options and it gives your gremlins more places to hide. My 1969 Dodge Polara isn’t exactly what you’d consider fully loaded—I mean, we’re not talking Monaco here—but it does have a few options, just enough to make tracking down a recent electrical issue rather baffling. I’d been traveling a ton, so the Dodge had been sitting at the airport parking. One or two days? Not a problem. Three days or more, totally dead, not even a click. Guess whose boyfriend doesn’t appreciate a 2 a.m., “Please come jump the car at the airport,” phone call. After the second jump,…

If all the passenger-side lifters on a traditional Pontiac V8 engine are clattering but the driver-side lifters are quiet, the block is likely missing a critical oil galley plug. Pontiac V8s have an additional hidden recessed internal passenger-side cam oil gallery passage plug located underneath the externally visible plug on the back of the block. Machine shops often remove the plug when they hot-tank the block and don’t replace it, causing an internal oil leak that causes the passenger-side lifters to clatter like crazy and eventual cam-lobe failure. This problem won’t be detected by the oil pressure gauge, which continues to show normal oil pump output pressure (not the actual line pressure-drop).…

I came to welding late in life. For most of my earthly days, it seemed like there was nothing between the voodoo art executed by an upper echelon of car builders and the boogerfest of stickwelding badness seen on farm equipment. Regular guys didn’t own welders, and the magazine editors I worked for turned that into a self-fulfilling prophecy; I recall many times we’d pass up tech stories that involved welding because the belief was that it was an immediate turnoff to any shade-tree mechanic. We didn’t want to talk down to the audience, and hence, we never taught them—or ourselves—to weld. There’s been a huge cultural shift over the simple act of melting metal together. These days, many hot rodders are peer pressured to feel like chumps if…

Ask any Power Tour® veteran what makes the event so memorable and they’ll likely have a list of reasons: the old friends you see every year, the new friends you’ll meet, the amazing views you find only on the backroads, the great BBQ places you found, being greeted with open arms in every town the route passes through, getting a chance to put your project car to the test on the dragstrip, having a network of gearheads willing to help out if your recently assembled project car wasn’t as dragstrip-worthy as you’d thought, and so on. Looking back at some of our favorite photos from Power Tour® tells only some of the thousands of individual stories of personal experiences that happened each of the route’s 1,300 miles as it wound…

Few racers have stacked the deck so high against themselves to just qualify—never mind win the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing”— that the real story is not the race but how they got there in the first place. What makes this effort even more compelling is this merry band of drag racers qualified for the 1982 Indy 500 and walked away with a reputation for building a race car far exceeding anything ever seen at the Speedway. The three principals were Top Fuel chassis builder Lil’ John Buttera, Top Fuel crew chief Ronnie Capps (not the Funny Car driver Ron Capps), and Viking Racing Super Vee team owner Bob Varnberg. Buttera was a gifted builder of Top Fuel dragsters, Funny Cars, hot rods, and more in the late-1960s until his death…

Describing why you like the styling of a certain car can be like explaining what chocolate tastes like. It’s especially not easy figuring why we like a lesspopular car, but sometimes we know what sparked the outcast attraction. It might be your older brother had one, or someone down the street who roared past your house each day. Maybe your dad bought one new or you used to spy it in your high school parking lot, and something about it sang to you. For me, the original 1966 Dodge Charger is one of those cars. As a child, my father took me to the Pan Pacific auditorium in Los Angeles for the yearly new-car show, and in 1965, my eyes fell on what I thought was the most beautiful car…

Q: I have a 2000 Monte Carlo SS. I believe the factory sold later models of this car with a supercharger. This would be my first attempt at putting on a supercharger. I’d prefer a complete donor car so I can see how everything comes off, making it easier to install the parts on my SS. I looked on eBay and there were different pieces here and there, but I would like to get all the parts in one try. Do I need to get different pulleys, a bigger radiator, or change the computer? Any advice would be welcome. A: The Buick-designed, 3.8L, 3800 V6 Series II engine first appeared in 1996 and continued in production as late as 2005 in some chassis. Most, like your Monte Carlo V6, were…