Innehållsförteckning för June 2020 från Hot Rod

Editor-in-Chief @john.mcgann Anyone who grew up with a factory-style air cleaner on a carbureted car knows what I’m talking about. I remember the enlightening moment when a friend imparted the knowledge upon me as a lad. We were looking under the hood of my 1986 Chevrolet Caprice when he advised me to flip the air cleaner lid over. “Why would I want to do that?” I mused. “So you can hear the carb when you get on it!” he said, sparing me the implied “dumbass” he likely meant to punctuate his reply with. He flipped the lid over, I drove home, and of course, I “got on it” to see what it was all about. The vacuum doors to the secondaries on my Quadrajet carburetor slammed open and emitted it’s…

It wasn’t that long ago that the idea of a muscle car that handled was ridiculous. You might cobble together stiffer springs and thicker sway bars for your classic machine, but it was a roll of the dice whether it would actually improve how the car handled. Then John Hotchkis came along in the early 1990s, established Hotchkis Sport Suspension in Santa Fe Springs, California, and took a systematic approach to refining the handling of American metal never designed to aggressively get around a corner. While his company made its bones tuning domestics, Hotchkis started his career in road racing. The cars he drove most often were Porsches—hardcore race machines like the 911 RSR and the legendary 962, often driving in IMSA endurance events alongside his father. In business, Hotchkis…

In a world where manufacturer-commissioned project cars are flawless trailer queens, Holley Performance Products in Bowling Green, Kentucky, wanted to build a car worthy of the average enthusiast. Sure, they have built their fair share of spotlessly clean muscle machines—but Holley’s horsepower honcho Tom Tomlinson and Engineering Director Tim Grillot figured their next project should be, as Grillot describes, “more obtainable.” Tomlinson and Grillot browsed the market and settled on this 1977 Oldsmobile Omega from Arizona. It ticked the right boxes: cheap, rust-free, and quirky. Tomlinson set a few ground rules: it needed to use an aluminum-block L33 5.3 engine, use an overdrive auto trans, have air conditioning, and run 10s. Oh, and it had to be done in three weeks—in time for Holley LS Fest. Tomlinson unleashed Grillot and…

›There it sat, alone and forgotten, open to the elements, enduring endless dust and rainstorms, and without so much as a valve cover, oil pan, or intake for protection. Such was the fate of our 5.7L Hemi, or at least the remaining part of what was once the proud and powerful motivational force for a 2006 Dodge Ram 1500 truck. So long had it sat, we forgot its original purpose, or even why it was lacking such a vast array of critical components. Had this Hemi been relegated to donor duty? Was it a prior Dulcich test engine? Perhaps it was picked over to provide the necessary components to complete other, more important builds? Our orphaned engine began life under the hood of a 2006 Ram truck, but we can’t…

In all but the most mild engine builds, taking extra time to check piston-to-valve clearance is good insurance. In any four-cycle gasoline engine, there is one point in the combustion event where the piston and valves can be very close to each other—at top dead center (TDC) of the exhaust stroke. At that point, the exhaust valve is closing while the intake valve is just starting to open in what’s known as the overlap phase of the cam timing. Depending on cam timing, valve lift, rocker-arm ratio, combustion chamber shape and piston crown design, it’s possible that the valves can touch the top of the piston as it reaches TDC on the intake stroke. In this automotive version of clash of the titans, the valves will almost always lose. If…

The 62nd running of the Daytona 500 was held on February 16 and 17, 2020, finishing on Monday because of a rain delay. Denny Hamlin won in a photo finish, crossing the finish line 0.014-seconds ahead of Ryan Blaney; the second closest margin of victory in the history of the race. On February 22, 1959, the very first Daytona 500 victory was decided in a photo finish also, but there were no sophisticated electronics or GPS data to help decide the win. Lee Petty (car 42) and Johnny Beauchamp (car 73) had been battling each other for the lead throughout the last 30 laps of the race. They crossed the finish line shoulder to shoulder. Beauchamp was declared the unofficial winner and directed to the victory lane for the post-race…

It’s no easy task, building a car from scratch. The sheer amount of designing, measuring, cutting and fabricating, combined with the plumbing and wiring is just too big of an undertaking for most. Brett Hankins however, isn’t most folks, and his hot rod isn’t just some car. It’s the world’s only road-legal and titled all-aluminum 1941 Willys. This street bruiser was the dream of one man and took more than four years to accomplish. For Brett, the idea was to construct something never before seen while still keeping the concept of the road-going race car alive for future generations to understand and appreciate. “When I saw a chance to own a 1941 Willys that was all aluminum, I couldn’t pass it up. In fact, I sold a Mercedes-Benz and then…

South Georgia Motorsports Park in Adel, Georgia, lived up to its reputation of being the home of the flying cars yet again after last weekend’s running of the 11th Annual Lights Out small-tire drag radial race. With a class lineup that includes: Radial vs. the World, X275, Limited Drag Radial, and Ultra Street; cars were flying, and not just down the track, but through the air as well. Most of the classes racing in the event don’t permit wheelie bars, so bumper-scraping wheel stands and cars going airborne are always a possibility as the drivers are putting upward of 4,000 horsepower to the ground through 315, 275, or even 235mm radial drag racing tires. Racing ran past 3:00 a.m. on Sunday morning in order to complete all the classes before…

Byron Walker at Modern Muscle Xtreme (MMX) built a 14.0:1 compression, 7,000-rpm, 454-inch Gen III Hemi screamer that makes 800 hp. The platform for this build is a standard SRT block that can be sourced from any wrecking yard or online seller. The remainder of the parts carry numbers you can find on the Internet. Nothing exotic, handmade, or unobtainable was used to put this together. It isn’t cheap, but Hemi builds seldom are. As proof of concept, the team at MMX dropped it into a 1971 Dart to compete in the 2019 HOT ROD Drag Week. The Hemi has all the standard speed tricks applied to a killer foundation. The result speaks for itself: 685 lb-ft at 5,200 and 814 hp at 6,988 rpm. Dyno racing is fun, but…

Q: Marlan, I have a 1971 Datsun 240Z with the LS3-based 6.2L, LS376/480 crate engine in it [current version GM PN 19370411; 495 hp at 6,200 rpm, 473 lb-ft at 5,000 rpm—Editor]. I live in Tucson, Arizona, where it regularly gets up to 105-110 degrees F in the summer. I have a really good aluminum radiator in it with a SPAL 11-inch dual fan-and-shroud puller assembly (SPAL PN 30102052) rated at 2,750 cfm. The radiator size is about 24-inches wide x 16-inches high, and I can’t go any larger due to the frontal dimensions of the car. As long as I’m going at least 35 mph the engine temperature stays around 190 degrees (the thermostat is a 180-degree unit), which indicates to me that the radiator by itself is adequate. But…

it has been about a decade since we first glimpsed Murray Pfaff’s radical vision named Imperial Speedster. It first appeared in the May 2010 issue of HOT ROD as part of a project cars issue theme, and the subsequent 10 years have done nothing to diminish the dazzling impression of its bold design statement. In fact, the car’s category-bending execution—it is part street rod, part custom, part resto-mod and part ’50s show car—contributes to a timelessness that’s undefined by the era or prevailing build trends in which it was constructed. It has helped that Pfaff has continued to refine the car over the years, including a complete color change and new wheels in the past year or so, which has contemporized a car not otherwise bound by the expectations of…

In the five decades since Ford’s “Lima” series V8 first debuted with 460 cubic inches under the hood of the 1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III, the mighty canted-valve big-block has earned a solid reputation for durability and ease of modification. Though factory high-performance development maxed out in 1971 with the 370hp 429 CJ-R, you don’t need a rare muscle car core engine to get plenty of power. Ford 429 and 460 blocks share the same 4.36-inch bore diameter but juggled stroke to get 429 (3.59-inch stroke) or 460 (3.85-inch stroke) cubic inches. Any healthy 429 or 460 block can be made into our 501 with a 0.0305-inch overbore and 4.3905-inch bore diameter. That said, be aware that Ford 429/460 blocks come in three different deck heights: 10.3000 (1968–1970½), 10.3100 (1970½–1971)…

The rules in some racing classes restrict competitors to running hydraulic valve lifters. Cheaters have been known to run hydraulic lifters on a mechanical (solid) cam profile. Solid cam profiles don’t have “quiet” lash ramps off the lobe base circle as is the case with a typical hydraulic grind, so some racers claim this makes for a better race profile then a hydraulic lifter on a hydraulic cam. Hydraulic lifters on a solid profile generally run better than they would on a roughly equivalent hydraulic profile, generating more area under the curve. Hydraulic cams in general, are quicker in low-lift, low-rpm, high-endurance applications—but a pure race motor doesn’t care about vacuum and throttle response; they care about area and rpm. Running hydraulic lifters on a solid grind raises the rpm…

Roadkill@davidfreiburger I’m going to need everyone to conform to my morals when it comes to automotive artifacts, ok? This rant is a followup to my last column in which I described a road trip I recently executed upon old Route 66. Dozens of glorious ruins of America’s roadside history were spotted, but one of them hit me extra hard. It was just an old sign. In Carthage, Missouri, lies a shambled building with the hand painted name G&E Tire Co. ghosted through the bricks, and at the building’s corner at Oak Street and McGregor Boulevard there’s a fascinating protuberance: a simple brown, metal fabrication with remnants of neon tubes and lettering that says De Soto Plymouth. My online research reveals that the business began, probably as a service station, as…