Innehållsförteckning för June 2021 från Hot Rod

It occurred to me last week that the ECM in my 1993 GMC C1500 is 28 years old, which in itself really isn’t a big deal, but it got me wondering how many other electronic items are still in working condition nearly 30 years after they were made. That’s kind of a loaded question because there are a lot of factors involved in determining the longevity of a product. How well were they made? What conditions were they used in? The operating environment factors in as much as the quality standards. For example, my TV is a hand-me-down from my parents that they bought new in the ’90s, and it still works, but a friend recently had to replace a fancy digital washer and dryer pair that were less than…

Devin Jimenez was born with her grandfather’s interest in hot rods. She owns this 1940 Ford coupe, but her grandfather, William “Buzz” Remai was the young man who bought it in 1953. He had just come back to Fontana, California, after serving in Korea when he purchased the ’40 Ford from an elderly widow. Back then, the car wore faded blue paint and was lowered by the old-time technique of heating the front springs to drop the nose It rolled on ’50 Merc wheels “and the biggest rear tires and the smallest front tires I could get,” Buzz remembers. The 59AB Flathead engine was topped with an Evans manifold and three Stromberg 97 carburetors. The shifter for the ’39 Ford transmission was relocated from the column to the floor to…

When people think of Pro Touring, an image of a car built for the Optima Ultimate Street Car Challenge likely pops into mind—big wheels, big brakes, wide tires, LS engine, and big bucks. That’s just tracing the arc of the movement, though. The phrase first entered the automotive enthusiast’s lexicon after a brainstorming session between former HOT ROD editor Jeff Smith and GM engineer Mark Stielow. Looking for a term to summarize the notion of a domestic muscle car built to perform on a racetrack, Mark and Jeff coined the phrase. Pro Touring is a play off the Pro Street movement of the ’80s. The cars represented a swing of the pendulum away from the Pro Street look. No doubt inspired by the Trans Am race cars of the late…

No engine family in history has played a bigger role in hot rodding life than the small-block Chevy. It’s not necessarily the biggest or the most powerful or the most reliable, but it is the gold standard against which all others are judged. In this sense, the small-block Chevy is to the hot rodder what the U.S. dollar is to the world’s basket of currencies. When evaluating the benefit of a crate engine purchase, the small-block Chevy’s ubiquity means it’s relatively simple to find out if a price quote on a crate engine truly is a good deal, or just hype. If you’ve bothered to start searching for a small-block Chevy crate engine, then you’ve correctly deduced that—for the foreseeable future—you’re going to get the most hp per dollar with…

One of Roadkill’s more popular builds is the Disgustang, a 1969 Mustang brought back from the dead. David Freiburger got it running with a new engine, a Tremec TKO five-speed from American Powertrain, and a 9-inch in the back. At the dragstrip, it ran a best of 12.20 at 112 mph. The engine is a very streetable 410-cubic-inch Windsor stroker with AFR 195 heads and a relatively small hydraulic roller cam—just 218 degrees of duration at 0.050-inch lift. On the engine dyno at Westech Performance Group, this combo was good for 470 hp and 480 lb-ft of torque. That impressive torque figure, combined with hard launches on sticky tires at a sticky dragstrip is a recipe for broken parts, a fact discovered by HOT ROD Garage co-host Lucky Costa as…

There are guys that fall into the whole car thing, and then there are those like Ken Carmon that are born into it. In this case, his was a hardcore Chevy household that embraced the Bow Tie. Being from a small community also had an impact on what he was exposed to. He recalls, “I grew up in the small hamlet of Redwood, New York, with a population of less than 300 inhabitants, and one small Chevrolet-Oldsmobile dealership. It served the community for a 20-mile radius. I used to walk by there on my way to school every day and look in the window to see what they had for sale.” By the time he reached his teenage years, the first ride he had was, of course, Chevy flavored, but…

In a year that hasn’t produced many bright spots, the Southern California Quarantine Cruise has been a very welcome change from the groundhog days most of us have been experiencing. The event that started a year ago just completed cruise number 12 and has seen a rapid swell of interest and attendance, coupled with some exceptional SoCal weather. We caught up with a two of the event’s co-founders, Jason Scudellari and Hek Valdez, for a quick chat about this crazy year. HRM: How do you feel the cruise has affected the community during this year’s trying times? HV: It gave something for people to look forward to—you know, to get out of the house and interact with other like-minded people and check out some cool cars. People were just really…

Muscle Car Restorations (MCR), in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, sees a lot of previously restored cars and, sometimes that previous work was subpar. At least these cars were preserved well enough to still be around for a second round of resto work. Even if a previous restoration was well done, lack of parts availability forced certain compromises. One such compromise was the two-piece replacement trunk floor. Since a one-piece factory-style floor wouldn’t fit through the trunk opening, the only way to put a new trunk floor into the car was to make left and right halves that could fit through the opening and then be joined once inside. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach (the two-piece floor is still available from AMD) if it meets your needs, but MCR…

Roadkill @davidfreiburger I bet everyone reading this knows someone, though perhaps distantly, who has died of this Covid thing. A few of those losses have hit the auto hobby pretty hard, and it got me thinking about all the people who’ve died who I’ve met during my travels in the car world over the past 30-plus years. So many of these people have affected our collective lives that we cosmically “see” them every day within the hobby and the life we’ve all chosen. An old adage says that you’re never really dead until your name is spoken for the last time—so let’s speak some of those names and try and remember what they did for us individually and collectively. All the people I’ve listed here are ones who I’ve known,…

As former HOT ROD editor Drew Hardin explained, “When Chevrolet announced it was replacing its W-series engines with the 396ci Mark IV big-block, Southern California drag racer Tom Sturm was among the first to order one. It took a while for Chevrolet to fill the order; so long, in fact, that Sturm wound up buying a 396 from his local dealer—and the ’65 Impala it came in.” Sturm went through the engine top to bottom, and also modified a ’64 Malibu that would be its eventual home. Car Craft magazine covered both the engine and the car in its September 1965 issue in stories written by the magazine’s technical editor, Bud Lang. Lang described the engine rebuild in granular detail. Among the highlights: The block was bored to 4.250-inch and…

Growing up in a household that embraces the enthusiasm for all things automotive usually has a way of leaving a mark on anyone exposed to it. As a youngster growing up, Kevin Leap was immersed in that type of enthusiasm. “There were usually some performance cars at my house,” he explains. “My brother was always working on one of his projects or was fixing someone else’s car, and my dad would often take us to the local dragstrip.” By the time Kevin started high school in 1973, he had managed to put together a 1964 Impala station wagon with a 409 and four-speed as a daily driver. After his scholastic tour of duty ended, he signed up for another tour of duty in the military and replaced the Chevy wagon…

Steel is almost the perfect material to build a car with. Inexpensive, strong without being brittle, and a modulus of elasticity that allows it to take a beating without permanently changing shape, cold-rolled steel is the material that America was built on. We take it for granted that our car’s frame will always be there, like the Rock of Gibraltar, while other parts of the car get repaired or replaced—sometimes repeatedly. Nevertheless, if your car is a classic, there well may be a day when you must take your pride and joy completely apart for restoration. Don’t be surprised when you disassemble it and find debilitating rust as our man Jesse Kiser recently did with his 1967 Chevy Impala convertible. You may remember this relic from a prior era here…

Ames Performance and Butler Performance offer motor mount adapter brackets for GTOs and Firebirds that allow interchanging early and late Pontiac V8 engine blocks with different numbers of motor mount holes cast into the block (including the Pontiac 301, 326, 350, 389, 400, 421, 428, and 455). For example, the available Pontiac 400 motor mount adapters permit installing an early casting with two mounting bolts per side in a later chassis that required a block with three bolts per side. This was once popular when two-bolt-hole 1960s high-performance Ram Air engines were plentiful. You can also go the other way: Brackets are available to install late 1970s blocks that have three mounting bolts per side into those earlier chassis set up for two-bolt mounts. So which blocks have which number…

When superchargers and turbochargers compress air, that air is heated, resulting in a rise in inlet air temperature. On a turbocharger, the exhaust-driven turbine side additionally transfers added heat into the compressor. Higher charge temperatures reduce max boost potential due to a greater likelihood of in-cylinder detonation. The solution is a heat exchanger, also known as a charge air cooler, or—for short—an intercooler. Given a charge-air cooler sufficiently sized to be 70 percent efficient for the overall combination, and even accounting for parasitic drag-flow losses through the ducting, one would expect at least a 30-percent power improvement compared to not running an intercooler. Traditionally, heat exchangers—including charge-air coolers, oil coolers, and engine coolant radiators—have been marketed as an integrated assembly where the core, tanks, inlets, and outlets are permanently welded…