Innehållsförteckning för December 2020 från Hot Rod

Editor-in-Chief @john.mcgann I do. As a kid, I remember family get-togethers where the guys would inevitably begin talking about cars they owned and wished they still had. Invariably, the eyebrows would raise and admiring glances would be directed at my dad when he spoke about the 1969 Corvette he owned when he and my mom met. It was a Tri-Power 427 with a four-speed and the plaque on the console read “11.0:1 compression and 435HP and 460 lb-ft of torque”. I remember an uncle once saying that driving the car was an intimidating experience and marveling at the gallon of gasoline he saw the carburetors gobble up as the engine was started with the air cleaner off. That prodigious shot of gasoline would have been delicious-smelling Boron, the premium fuel…

Check out this exceptional find, recently exhumed in Tucson, Arizona. This “Fab Five” belonged to Mark Spear, a gearhead with a taste for muscle cars, who passed away last April at the age of 71. His love of cars came from his father who worked at a local Ford dealership in Minneapolis, Minnesota. When Mark turned 21 in 1970, the elder Spear turned his son on to quite a bargain. A customer had traded in a ’68 Shelby GT500 KR, a soon-to-become iconic Mustang equipped with a stout 428ci V8. The KR was rated at 335 hp, although later independent tests reported that the engine made well over 400 hp. Mark had to have it, and so started a lifelong journey with the four-speed car, one of a little over…

Hudsons aren’t cars that most people think of as standard street rodding raw material—which is what makes building one so cool. When we saw this amazing custom Viper-V10 powered 1951 Hudson Wasp at the 2019 Hot August Nights event, it was one of the Elite Reno Five, a finalist for the Hot August Nights Cup, one of hot rodding’s most impressive awards. For all the accolades the Hudson earned in 2019, it wasn’t built to collect trophies. Owner Mike Dennison is a lifelong car enthusiast who owns them to drive them, so from now on, you’re more likely to spot his custom cruising into the local donut shop show than at a big-time event. KRS made a lot of modifications to fine-tune the Wasp body without any extreme cutting or…

The more power you make, the more heat your engine generates. A stock radiator is fine for a stock engine, but add power, and eventually that radiator can’t shed the heat as fast as the engine makes it. Of course, adding a bigger radiator or larger fans to your car can help you tackle the problem, but at some point, it’s limited by the opening on the stock core support. That’s because the opening on the core support was for a stock-sized radiator. There was room for a bigger one, but for factory mills a bigger one wasn’t necessary. Rather than just tackle a bigger radiator AutoRad opted to address the core support as well so they could go as big as possible on the radiator side of the equation.…

King Kong is Alive on Kong Island! “The title sounds like bunk, you say? Well, what would you call a street Vega with a 454-cubic-inch big-block, Aunt Mary? That certainly might be foolhardy, especially behind the wheel; you’d have to whisper because, if the Vega heard, it might get mad and snap your neck at the next traffic light.” With that evocative paragraph, Car Craft magazine’s Ro McGonegal introduced CC readers to a remarkable piece of 1970s engineering: a Vega GT with a big-block transplant courtesy of Joel Rosen and the crew at Motion Performance on Long Island. The Motion team was already converting Vegas to Chevy 350 power, but this car took things to the next level in a big way. The size of the big-block, for instance, meant…

As rusty as it is, and as ugly as it is, there is so much good here,” said Rick Parker as he and his team from Signature Auto Classics, in Columbus, Ohio, were working with pickaxes and shovels to dig out a 1966 Shelby G.T.350-H that had been parked in a backyard for nearly 40 years. The registration on the plate expired in 1981. The entire car had sunk into the mud and might not have been worth the trouble except it was a real Shelby, one of the 936 G.T.350-H models that Shelby-American produced in the Rent-A-Racer program. Most being automatic, these rental cars were once deemed slightly watered down and thus not destined to be as desirable as a basic four-speed 1966 G.T.350. Perhaps the wondrous black-with-gold paint…

It’s the sixth time around for what has become the Quarantine Car Cruise, and so far, it shows no sign of slowing down. Founded by Motor Trend Group tech center manager Jason Scudellari (@week2wickedjason) and Hek Valdez (@hektattoo), it has become a staple for gearheads who want to get out and drive. The pair were cruising their trucks one day when they met Patrick Wagenbrenner, who does social media for Keystone Automotive Operations, a large aftermarket distributor. The three started talking and decided they should post about a cruise to see how many would show up. The first real cruise had a respectable 35 cars, but as the event continued and the weather got better, the turnout skyrocketed. They were even able to get Ken Johnson (@classicsdaily, @boostednova, @ken) involved.…

We spent a couple of days at JMS Racing Engines, in El Monte, California, talking with owner Mike Johnson and his machinists and builders to get the scoop on what makes a successful budget performance-engine build. We’re assuming that you’re starting with an engine that is in good condition and hasn’t had more than one overbore, you plan to reuse as many of the stock components as you can, upgrading to higher-performance pieces as your budget permits, and you do the disassembly and reassembly yourself. As with any complicated process like this there are plenty of myths to bust, and just as many procedures to follow. We’ll break everything down into bite-sized pieces. Devise a Plan We cannot stress this enough—the most important part of any engine build begins with…

Roadkill @davidfreiburger I have owned 175 vehicles, which means I’ve sold or otherwise disposed of 155 of them, because yes, I currently have 20 cars, trucks, and Jeeps. It’s better (or worse?) than my lifetime high of 40 simultaneously. In the past three weeks I’ve shed five, which reminds me of a question that people ask me frequently: What car do I most regret selling? The answer is “virtually all of them,” because at one time or another I’ve sought to replace something that I sold, only to discover that the intervening years have seen the same vehicle become worth ten times as much. I’ll never again buy an El Camino for $400, a Duster for $700, a Squarebody for $1,500, or an early Bronco for $4,500. I’ve been priced…

They say patience is a virtue, and if this is true, Tony Agnello has an abundance of it. The term “barn find” doesn’t mean it had to literally come from a barn; it’s used today any time someone finds a classic car that’s been hidden away or forgotten. Sometimes they are stuffed in garages, but oftentimes they are slowly decomposing in the great outdoors and somewhat sheltered under a tarp. Tony’s 1972 Chevelle Malibu was purchased new on September 25, 1972 from Eddie Hopper Chevrolet in Garden Grove, California. From then until 2000, it belonged to the original owner who spun 54,000 miles onto the odometer before she passed away. During this time it lived under a carport. The Malibu was then passed to her daughter and son-in-law who moved…

We were a bit skeptical of the direct injection (DI) 5.3L L83 engines when they first started showing up in the salvage channels. After all, the 5.3L LM7 was a proven engine-swap powerhouse for those on a budget; this meant the new DI L83 mills had some very capable shoes to fill. The 5.3L LM7, and other LS variants, are currently the go-to choices of the performance world. Although it can be argued that position had as much to do with price and availability as the actual performance. The Gen III and Gen IV 5.3L engines offer impressive performance, especially compared to the small-blocks they replaced at GM. Making them even more desirable was the fact that sizable power gains were just a cam swap and valvespring upgrade away. And…

Trickle-down tech is just about how everything works these days. First the high-end rides get it, and over time it migrates to even the cheaper cars. Remember ABS? It started in the exotics, and now every car has it. The same is true of LED lighting. At first it was on the top-shelf cars, but now it’s commonplace. And for good reason—it just works better than incandescent bulbs. Today, the aftermarket makes it easy to get modern LED lights into your classic car. In general, cars today travel at higher average speeds compared to the good old days, and more speed means people have less time to react to the car in front of them. This makes installing LED lights in a classic car a really good idea.…

Faster is not better when it comes to engine coolant flow rate. The purpose of a radiator is to support heat transfer, which is a time-dependent process. As Flex-A-Lite explains, to move the heat from one medium to another (engine to coolant to radiator to atmosphere), the coolant has to remain in contact with a surface for heat transfer to take place. Moving fluid too quickly through an area can result in laminar flow, where the fluid forms layers. The layer closest to the surface moves slower than layers farther away from the surface. When this occurs, the layers act as insulators and the capacity to transfer heat is diminished. To achieve the right engine coolant flow rate, the experts at Griffin Radiator recommend restrictions in the engine and good…