Innehållsförteckning för August 2020 från Hot Rod

Editor-in-Chief @john.mcgann Last month, I wrote about ways people can cope under a quarantine situation, and it’s my hope that all who read this are safe and well. This is a very difficult time, and it’s impossible to see what the outcome will be. Personally, I’ve tried to distance myself from much of the back-and-forth squabbling in the media about the politics of the current situation. Bickering won’t help. We will have to assess the outcome as people start to reemerge from isolation and adjust our behavior accordingly. I’m fortunate enough to have a job that allows me to work from home (or basically anywhere with decent internet access), so this situation is more of an inconvenience for me. I feel for those who have lost their jobs, and I…

Despite hundreds of hours on television driving like a hero, catching fire, blowing up, then jumping out of a roof hatch for the interview, Jack Beckman is a regular guy with an amazing life story, and he’s just plain likable. The story of “Fast Jack” and his El Camino goes back to his days as a baseball-playing, skateboarding, skinny kid from California’s San Fernando Valley in the early 1980s. Hooked on drag racing at age 7 while hanging on the fence at historic digs like Orange County International Raceway and later the high-desert LACR, Jack saw a fuzzy vision of what he could become. But first, he had to toil and suffer. The 1968 El Camino came from Jack’s dad as a second-owner SS396 originally purchased at Rancho Chevrolet in…

Flat out land speed racing is a whole different world requiring special attention to the subject of aerodynamics to be a successful competitor in the impressive LSR (Land Speed Record or Land Speed Racing) streamliner class. This story is an overview about wheel-driven class LSR cars, where they’ve been, where they are today, and where they may be headed in the future. The concepts presented here could be the technology basis for the next generation of wheel-driven class LSR streamliners. •Background The exciting world of land speed racing at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah became popularized by the Brits in 1935 after speed-run attempts at Daytona Beach, Florida, were abandoned. At the time, there was little interest by the Americans in that form of racing until after WWII when…

Q: I have a low-mileage, showroom condition 1985 Ford F-250 two-wheel-drive pickup that has water in the oil and has been diagnosed as DOA. It has been sitting in a garage since 1990. The engine is a 6.9L diesel that I would like to replace with a gasoline engine. Do you have a suggestion that will bolt up to the four-speed manual transmission? I would like to go simple—carburetor, distributor—just a good old engine that I can install and work on and keep running. The truck would be a fun driver, so it does not have to be a workhorse hauler or pull trailers, etc. A: Possible Ford engine choices to replace the original International Harvester-built 6.9L diesel engine in your 1985 Ford F-250 pickup include Ford’s 300 inline six-cylinder…

john_gilbert@motortrend.com I love fiberglass—it’s easy to work with and it smells really good. I’m okay as a steel fabricator, but when it comes to gluing a car together, my experience goes back to 1960 when I was 8 years old and built AMT’s 1⁄25 scale 1932 Ford 3-in-1 kit as a fenderless highboy with a blown 392 Chrysler for power—Hemi Firepower that is. I still have a memento from building that Deuce roadster. I received a deep cut on my right index finger while cutting parts off the plastic trees, and it left a deep, enduring scar. The ’32 Ford has always been the ultimate hot rod to me and HOT ROD the ultimate car magazine. I’ve owned more than 200 cars in my life and worked for more than…

Jerry Breznicky followed a hot rodding trail that led him to his first job right after high school. “I attended vocational school, majoring in auto mechanics, and at that time I was driving my brother’s hand-me-down Road Runner,” he says. “I luckily landed a job at my local Plymouth dealership right after graduation. It was a dream come true.” At the dealership, Jerry got the chance to work alongside Ted Robinson, a longtime Plymouth employee who oozed Pentastar knowledge. “From the start, Ted taught me the right way to work on these cars,” Jerry says. “Though he was a great teacher, Ted was quiet and didn’t talk about himself much.” One day, when Jerry decided to add some new gears to his Road Runner for drag racing, Ted gave the…

To recap the build of our Gen. III Hemi, this is a 5.7 liter engine out of a Ram pickup that had been sitting in the shop. We cleaned it up, and got it running in stock condition, then hit it with a shot of nitrous. In “Homeless Hemi, Part 2” (July ’20), we changed the cam and valvesprings, picking up 67 horsepower in the process. At that point, we decided to test the Hooker long-tube headers we have been using against OE cast-iron manifolds to see how much power they were contributing. As it turns out, they added a lot. We set up our 5.7 Hemi with the Comp’s HRT Stage 2 cam (220/230 degrees of duration at 0.050 inch tappet lift, 0.596/0.582 inch valve lift, 113-degree LSA) and…

When Street Rodder magazine introduced the Road Tour program in 1996, the goal was to prove a street rod built almost exclusively with aftermarket components could be fun to drive as well as safe and reliable. Lobeck’s Hot Rod Shop in Cleveland, Ohio built the car for that first event. It was a blue 1934 Ford three-window coupe with white racing stripes and came to be known as The Skunk. The coupe racked up more than 24,000 miles in its first summer on the road. Since that inaugural event, a new Road Tour car has been built each year with total mileage now in excess of 500,000 miles, proving our original premise was valid. For the 2020 Lokar/Street Rodder Road Tour, a program now in its 25th year, we returned…

As this is written, we are all stuck at home, hiding out from the coronavirus, and if there is an upside to be found in all this, it’s that we have some extra time to work on personal projects. Being a garage-dweller, your author has taken advantage of the quarantine to knock out some jobs that have been put on hold. We took on a door-hinge repair on Project Jake, our 1993 GMC C1500; pedals and a new brake system in Truck Norris, our 1967 C10; and made some progress on some engine builds. Door Hinge Rebuild A common problem with GMT400 (1988 to 1998) Chevrolet and GMC pickups and SUVs, when the doors sag it causes difficulty closing the doors, wind and water leaks, rattles, and misalignment of the…

This was an exciting time, as the speed-equipment aftermarket’s penetration of Motor City really began to take off. The classic example is Hurst, whose floor-shift-conversion business exploded after Pontiac anointed the four-speed shifter as standard equipment on 1961 Super Duty Catalinas. Not coincidentally, cofounder George Hurst worked harder at self-promotion, and was better at it than any of his peers. Frequently, the only identifiable background signage in images of 1960s racetracks and show floors is the Pennsylvania company’s signature H-pattern logo. While the Jaws of Life tool would become George’s greatest contribution to society, his most crowd-pleasing invention remains the giant handle-and-knob assembly rising above some convertible’s trunk. The accompanying Miss Hurst Performance rose well above any trophy girl on the same premises, both literally and figuratively. (George invited countless…

Nick Weber fell in love with the first-generation Corvette design back when he was a kid. “I saw a ’58 Corvette at a house where I was helping my dad redo a kitchen. I was around 12 or 13, I think. That’s when I fell for this body style,” he says. Nick and his father, Nick, Sr., are Chevy guys through and through, so it’s only natural that, since then, there has been a constant parade of Bowtie builds in and out of the family garage. One of Nick’s builds, the killer unibody Chevelle, was featured in the November, 2016 issue of HOT ROD. It showed that Nick had further solidified his propensity for doing things outside the box, all while working inside “The Box”, his dad’s one-bay garage where…

Sometime in the early ’50s, inside a dimly lit mechanic’s garage, a pushrod was rolled between grease-stained fingers. “I’ll be darned,” was uttered through seasoned lips as a technological advance that would soon carry through the 21st century was observed for the first time: the pushrod. Today, we’re spoiled by overhead valves that move huge breaths of air and tickle 8,000-plus rpm with relative ease, but when the standard performance hardware of the day was a flathead engine, that simple, effective pushrod had to seem like a wild leap into internal combustion future. Cadillac’s first entry into the overhead valve world was a 331ci V8 launched in 1949, and it was a huge leap in automotive innovation. Those 331 cubic inches quickly grew to 365ci, and then 390ci as America’s…

It is possible to run solid flat tappets on a hydraulic flat tappet cam and even mechanical roller lifters on a hydraulic roller cam. Putting solid lifters on a hydraulic cam will gain about 500 rpm on the top end over hydraulic lifters due to the solid lifters’ improved valvetrain control—unlike the hydraulic, solids have no bleed-down/pump-up problems. Some hydraulic roller cams—particularly smaller grinds with 220–240 degrees duration at 0.050—are quick off the seat, but this tends to cause more instability on top. Using solid lifters, even with the existing hydraulic springs, enhances top-end stability and fights the onset of valve float. Successfully running solid lifters on a hydraulic profile requires some amount of valve lash (a solid lifter cannot run at zero lash or be preloaded). This lash effectively…

Roadkill @davidfreiburger I’ve slogged out well more than 300 editorial columns in my day and I don’t think I’ve ever done one like this. It’s a quiz, where you see a list of historic and cool racing nicknames on top and try to match them up with the driver name in the list on the bottom. This was born of my admiration for great nicknames, my desire to complete a top-ten list of them, and my inability to be decisive enough to narrow them to ten. Most are not household names like “Big Daddy” Don Garlits, so it’s a little tough. As a hint, they are all from drag racing. Here goes! 1. Hand Grenade __ 2. Thunderlungs __ 3. Michigan Madman __ 4. The Thrill __ 5. Lawman __…