Innholdsfortegnelse for Volume 2, Issue 17 - May 2022 i All Chevy Performance

Some of my earliest childhood memories include there always being an El Camino in our garage,” Dana Pruhs remembers. “We lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, and they were my father’s daily drivers, and over a 20-year period he had four of them and would replace them every four or five years. Dana looks at the Elco as the original crossover vehicle. “My dad used them for work, took us to school, filled the bed with trash and hit the dump, went on hunting trips, and even used them to tow our boats and snowmobile trailers,” Dana says. “They were rugged enough to handle Alaska’s extreme weather conditions–60 degrees below 0 in the winter and 80 degrees in the summer. I took my driver’s test in Dad’s El Camino, and in the…

Cars were meant to be driven. David Whitmer’s ’72 Nova with the ultrarare Sky Roof option is no exception. Whitmer restored the car after high school by rebuilding all the mechanical bits, replacing multiple rotten panels, and lovingly blocking the body on which he sprayed the paint. The Nova has garnered plenty of street miles since its restoration, now with Whitmer’s wife and young daughter in tow. With even more family outings planned, more road miles to be earned, and considerably more precious cargo, it was time to up the reliability, driveability, and fun factor of the car once again. That process entailed a switch to modern, electronic fuel injection. The Nova’s engine is the factory-equipped 350ci small-block, which was treated to a bore, hone, oversized cast pistons, and a…

Joe Tavellas’s story starts out like many of us in the automotive hobby. As he tells it: “My background on cars and fixing stuff goes back a long way. I’ve been working on my own projects since I was around 10 years old. Minibikes, dirt bikes, and quads were first on the list. A few years later, I was ready for my first car.” Of course, there was a major “influencer” in the house, and that was his father, Joe Sr; a jack-of-all-trades and an all-around car guy. “I learned a lot from my dad growing up and was always interested in what he was working on at the time. And it was usually a Chevy,” Joe states. However, as he got into his teens, his preferences changed. “Oddly enough,…

The Grand National Roadster Show (GNRS) is one of those events we mark on our calendar a year ahead as a “must-attend.” The GNRS is held the final weekend in January at the Pomona Fairplex in Southern California. The venue has a long history of hot rodding as it is also home to the NHRA Winternationals, which began in 1961, and World Finals since 1984, the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum, as well as the highly popular Pomona Swap Meet & Classic Car Show. Needless to say, the Pomona Fairplex is hallowed ground for hot rodding, drag racing, and pretty much anything automotive related. Started in 1950, the National Roadster Show called various Northern California locations home over the years (in 1963 “Grand” was added to the name), when the…

Making horsepower requires a special skill set, which includes attention to detail inside the engine. The outside of the engine doesn’t affect horsepower, but it can set your car apart from the others at the local cruise night. During a recent project, we gave an outdated big-block Chevy a new look, while also improving its performance capabilities. We started with a crusty 396 and didn’t make many substantial horsepower improvements, but we did help its curb appeal without spending a tremendous amount of money on dress-up items. Many of the parts and pieces that we installed were intended to bring the engine into the modern era of performance, but those components also gave it a fresh appearance. So we combined that with cleaning and painting to create a nice-looking package…

Let’s pretend you’re watching The Twilight Zone and Rod Serling says, “Imagine, if you will, in 1972, at the age of 17 you could buy a ’63 fuelie Corvette for $1,200 as your first car.” If you think that sounds like science fiction, Butch Szollosy will tell you that was science fact. Back then, C2 Corvettes could be snapped up on the cheap. While that C2 was his first ride, it was only in his possession for a short eight months—it “nickel and dimed” him to death with blown engines. As a result, it was sent to a new home and a ’69 Nova with a warmed-over 302 small-block took its place. That managed to stay with him for about two years until the urge for a Corvette returned, enticing…

The world is full of compromises. What we’d really like to run in our next Chevelle Pro Touring project is a GM eight-speed automatic with a paddle shifter behind a killer all-aluminum 427 LS engine cranking 700 normally aspirated horsepower. That’s what we’d really like to do. But the harsh reality of life points to a powertrain that must be a bit more conservative that includes a carbureted small-block Chevy and a basic, 30-spline, 700-R4 four-speed automatic. The overdrive trans promised decent street performance after a freshening but we were hesitant to employ it after witnessing a string of poor experiences with TV cable snafus on two different friends’ cars. That’s when our auto trans builder Jimmy Galante of RaceTrans in Sun Valley, California, suggested that he’d had great luck…

If you were alive in the ’70s, you’ll remember the so-called “van craze.” Around 1974 former hot rodders, car magazine editors, and car people in general realized that Detroit was having an identity crisis over the combined threats of an energy crisis and an upswing in sales of fuel-efficient foreign and domestic compact and sub-compact cars. Though traditional hot rodding carried on, those interested in obtaining pre-assembled factory hot rods had little to choose from. Understanding that eye appeal was just as important to these folks as brute power, vans started to look pretty good as a “vehicle” for self-expression. And thus, folks embraced domestic vans as their blank canvasses upon which to strut their stuff. The main features of this new show were custom murals, (usually) fake side pipes,…

I first worked with Hot Rods and Hobbies on their 2018 America’s Most Beautiful Roadster award-winning ’31 Ford. If a shop can build an AMBR-winning vehicle, they can handle pretty much anything. That’s important because one of their latest projects is a ’56 Nomad injected with some Ferrari DNA. On the outside the modifications won’t be in your face. Tightly tucked bumpers, custom trim, and Schott SL65 wheels will set the stage. A somewhat stealthy rear diffuser has been integrated into the rear bumper with a quad exhaust as well. Breathing through that exhaust is an LS engine topped with Edelbrock’s Cross Ram EFI intake. That intake will be modified to look a little more Italian with raised F56 lettering. Custom sheetmetal work will be abundant underhood, to say the least.…

There are many avenues one can travel to find the road to hot rodding. The typical path happens in one’s formative years—not grade-school age, but more so the high school years—the time when the cranium awakens to the sound of a V-8 as it violates the brain and is readily accepted by the heart. Yeah, it sounds medically complicated but it’s really quite simple. Gearheads respond to the sound of horsepower, while others consider the rumble an outright annoyance. Tom Eckholdt is one of those who responds. The retired machine shop owner has been that way his whole life and remembers sneaking in Car Craft, Rod & Custom, Honk!, Hop Up, and pretty much all the “little” mags into his high school classes. Hiding hot rod magazines between the pages…

Braking systems changed a lot during the ’60s. It was common to see drum brakes and single-pot master cylinders well into the muscle car era, but dual master cylinders were made mandatory by 1967. It can be argued that these early systems were adequate for the time, but we can all agree that trusting your life with a single-reservoir master cylinder is not advised on today’s highways. Drum brakes aren’t quite as dangerous, but they’re not nearly as capable as disc brakes, which weren’t standardized until several years later. For our ’66 Chevy II it was right on the cusp of the dual master cylinder mandate. Even after all these years, it was still using its original single-pot master cylinder and drum brakes. We knew an upgrade was needed to…

Hot rod, muscle car, and custom-loving fiends alike in the Phoenix vicinity know Dean Livermore’s name all too well. Hot Rods by Dean (HRBD) has proven to be the go-to shop in the region, and with 60 years of combined experience between Livermore and his team of talented fabricators and builders, there’s no doubt that these guys can handle any job on any car. Luckily for Bryan Oates, also a Phoenix native, he didn’t have to take his project car far to have it checked into HRBD for a full overhaul and more. Luckily for the guys at the shop, Bryan’s car just happened to be one of their collective favorite platforms: a ’69 Camaro. In the world of classic American muscle cars, it doesn’t get much sweeter than this.…