Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2010 i Hot Rod

It is a theme we saw in 2005 when Ford redesigned the Mustang with a retro look: Specialty Camaros are hitting the streets, and they are coming from some familiar names and some new players. One new entry into the market is a partnership with Denooyer Chevrolet (Albany, New York) and the popular late-model GM performance shop Redline Motorsports (Schenectady, New York). The dealership formed Denooyer Performance Division to serve the growing demand for high-performance GM vehicles such as Corvette ZR1s, Caddy CTS-Vs, and Camaros. The crown jewels of the dealership showroom are specialty Camaro versions built by Redline, which are dubbed the HTR series. The HTR series has three levels: HTR-525, HTR-600, and HTR-750. While the HTR-750 is certainly a beast in performance and looks, some people aren’t too…

It’s just like a race car driver to pick an engine and then worry about what car to build around it. Of course, when you are four-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Champion Jimmie Johnson, you can do just about whatever you want with your cars. This ’67 Camaro just happens to be a tribute to fallen engine builder Randy Dorton, and it’s powered by a real-deal Cup motor right out of the Hendrick Motorsports shop. The project began when Hendrick Motor-sports decided to auction off a Cup motor to benefit the family of Randy Dorton, Hendrick’s longtime engine builder who died in a plane crash in 2004. Jimmie was the high bidder and was convinced that a ’67 Camaro would be a good idea. But after the first build of the…

Brian McCool is our kind of hot rodder: eclectic. Boundaries don’t really work for him. He and his wife, Kim, collect, restore, and take their vacations in vintage-era travel trailers. One of their tow vehicles for these expeditions is a ’47 Pontiac convertible street rod, while other recent interests include a classic wooden speedboat and a Diamond T pickup. Brian hasn’t hot-rodded a diesel-electric locomotive or a Waco biplane, but that’s probably only because he hasn’t gotten around to them yet. His latest creation is not just unique; it also puts the lie to a couple of timeworn myths: first, that only certain Ford body styles make top-notch hot rods. He started with a lowly ’36 Tudor trunk sedan—pretty close to the bottom of the barrel for desirability among the…

HOTTEST COMPETITION EVENTS Fads come and go. Other blips in the culture of hot rodding have lasting impact. This story is loaded with both of those as seen in the actions, words, and products of many hero builders and manufacturers. HOT ROD is in the unique position of knowing those guys and therefore getting hooked in to a number of facets of the marketplace. We are always considering what the next big thing may be, or even the cool little things, and we take note of what’s hot. When we report on those trends, as we have done here, some readers think we are trying to cram styles and products down their throats. Back off that notion and take this for what it is—an industry overview of what’s going on…

Chip Foose became a household name thanks to the Overhaulin’ TV series, but the reason he got that gig was because of his extensive background in hot rod building and design. He’s definitely not an overnight success story. Chip started out working with his dad, Sam, a noted customizer in his own right, and for 15 years he learned every aspect of paint and body. Always gifted with an eye for design, he was accepted to the highly respected Pasadena Art Center and graduated with honors. Next, Chip was hired into the Asha Corp., where he quickly climbed to the position of director of design, handling design and prototyping for car manufacturers. Like those buttons on your car’s visor that open your garage door? Chip designed one of the first…

Jordan Graham knew very little about building hot rods. He was interested in cars and knew how to weld but didn’t have the fabrication and design skills necessary to create the traditional hot rods that appealed to him. He realized that the older generation of rodders who started it all were dying off and that it was up to his generation to make sure their knowledge lived on. To learn the skills, Jordan hung out with local metal masters, learning as much as he could and volunteering at shops such as Steve Sellers’ trading work for training. His dedication and skill earned him a place as a fabricator on Robby Gordon’s off-road team. Jordan highly recommends dirt sports as an entry for new guys since the demand for quality workmanship…

UNIVERSAL PARTS FTW! Every car guy has an opinion on to days troubles with the Big Three. Layoffs, closures, brand suicide, bailouts, bankruptcies, cash for clunkers, politics—all can agree that it’s a mess. And it’s sad. It’s also the result of so many tangled troubles that there is no one person with all the answers. I’m not that guy, either, but I do have a solid suggestion for the future. As a devotee of simplicity, I think car manufacturers can save a lot of time and money by making ancillary parts universal. I’m not sure how carmaking ever got to the point where the industry demanded so many hundreds of variations of air, oil, and fuel filters or the many new spark plug architectures. There are even too many batteries,…

THESMOGGERTRI-FIVES In this issue, we have the announcement of the E-Rod engines from GM Performance Parts, a crate engine series with up to 550 hp that is smog-legal for cars ’95 and older. It’s a breakthrough for smog-legal engine swapping, making far more power than the pathetic attempts of long ago. HOT ROD upper management pushed an unwilling magazine staff into the smog realm in the early ’90s, most notably with the Green Machine ’55 Chevy, seen here in an outtake from the Dec. ’91 cover shoot. The car wheezed with a smog-legal 350 with a whole 288 hp, and that’s before dual cats were offered. The editors didn’t understand why we were making a statement with a smog-exempt car, but that didn’t slow down the program. The next two…

You’ve probably seen bullet-nose Studebakers with sharks’ teeth nose art on the fenders, an attempt to recognize the WWII airplane-inspired design of the car, but Doug Hodak of Darien, Illinois, went much further than that, building his ’50 Champion Starlight coupe to resemble a Lockheed P-38 Lightning “as close as the Illinois Department of Transportation would allow” Doug gave instructions to the body shop to, in his words, “make the body shine like the underside of a pop can” Once that was done, he painstakingly researched the correct P-38 graphics, which he then applied to the car along with 750 rivets. The drivetrain is stock Studie, including the flathead six, but it’s not the power that draws stares.…

John Foti of Sanford, Florida, bought this ’56 minus its drivetrain for $550 way back in 1986 but couldn’t afford to build it until years later. And he did it the smart way, making sure to stay hands-on during the build but also getting out of the way when his hired guns had work to do. The car, having lived its entire life in Texas, was a rust-free, original-paint car, so hardly any sheetmetal needed to be replaced. However, Dave Gault of Gault Auto Body and Restoration in Pompano Beach, Florida, spent a lot of hours making the body straight as an arrow before laying on the flawless paint. Little John at LJ Race Cars (Davie, Florida) and Ben Diener of Dienerbuilt Corp. put together the chassis with Heidt’s 2-inch-dropped…

As manager of a fleet of450 trucks, Bodie Stroud had a well-paying career that allowed him to build a few impressive hot rods on his own time, and one was featured in Custom Classic Trucks. Two and a half years ago, Bodie’s comp-nay downsized him out of a job. His experience managing people and large operations could have led him to lucrative positions in other sectors, but what he really wanted was his own hot rod shop. He had votes of confidence in his work from recognized builders but needed to decide if he had enough in himself. Thanks to living below his means, saving, and wise investing, Bodie had a significant nest egg to get his shop rolling. A friend of a friend gave him a good deal on…

There’s never a good time to have a crappy job. Why pursue a career in catering if what you’d rather be doing is cooking up engines? Why work as a forensics technician when the only chalk lines that interest you are the ones on the garage floor laying out a new lakester? What’s the point of going to law school when in your heart of hearts you know you’d rather be fabricating race cars than alibis? If you’re a hot rodder, then your job ought to be hot rodding. The hard part in establishing a hot rodding career is busting through and getting a job in the racket. Go to the SEMA or PRI shows and the business of high performance can seem huge and daunting. But it’s really a…

First we have some semantics to get out of the way. The folks at Ford Motor Co. would rather you didn’t call their new Mustang V-8 the Coyote—even though the name, which you’ve no doubt seen plastered all over the Internet as well as in the pages of HOT ROD, originated within the company Turns out Coyote was only a temporary code name, an alias to protect the engine’s identity and critical specs against the inevitable leaks while it was still in development. (The name, selected in an employee contest, is a tribute to Ford hero A.J. Foyt, who called his IndyCars Coyotes.) Now that production is spooling up, the company asserts that henceforth, this engine shall be known as the 5.0L Ti-VCT. Since that name doesn’t exactly slide off…

Yes, you’re looking at a street rod with a beam axle on a road course. The hot rod is a Model A roadster pickup built by Hollywood Hot Rods for owner Tom Lee (you may remember him as the owner of the ’32 roadster and ’55 Kurtis sports car we road-tripped in the June ’08 issue). That’s Troy Ladd behind the ’wheel at the Optima Invitational (Roddin’ At Random, Mar. ’10) where the truck was a bit out of its element but a blast to watch anyway. Originally built for the La Carrera Panamericana race, the RPU runs a 300hp, Ardun-headed flathead and a full-tube chassis built by Hollywood Hot Rods. Watch fora full feature on it next month. SEE THIS AND MUCH MORE IN THE MAY ’10 HOT ROD…

GENE BURKLAND 1936-2009 One of the most respected and likable individuals on the Salt, Gene Burkland became a member of the coveted Bonneville 200 MPH Club in 1978 by piloting his radically chopped Studebaker Competition coupe to an average speed of 255.863 mph. He was known as a master welder and innovator, and his profound skills led to the fabrication of the legendary 411 Burkland Streamliner. Gene, along with his wife, Betty, and their eldest son, Tom, successfully designed, built, and campaigned the twin-Hemi, earth-shaking, all-wheel-drive, chute-snapping streamliner. At the ’04 World Finals, they set the current SCTA AA/Blown Fuel Streamliner record at 417.020 mph. At the Mike Cook Shootout in 2008, they established an impressive new FIA world record of415.896 mph and broke Al Teague’s longstanding flying-mile FIA world…

Welcome to the Hot Rods section of the mag, where all the car features live. Know of a great ride that should be here? Got killer photos of cars in action along with details about them? Tip us off: email HOTROD@hotrod.com or mail to HOT ROD Hot Rods, 831 S. Douglas St., El Segundo, CA 90245. This rod looks like a totally traditional, ’50s-flavored ’34 three-window, doesn’t it? But hold on: First looks, as they say, can be deceiving. Under the period detailing, this is all 21st century hardware. The coupe belongs to Kurt Kurtenbach of Experimetal Inc. (EMI) in Sterling Heights, Michigan. A specialist in prototyping and short-run stampings for the Detroit OEs, EMI is also the manufacturing force behind a number of the all-new, all steel bodies exploding…

Nestled in the hills southeast of Morro Bay, California, lies the quaint town of Paso Robles — and the pride and joy of Jimmy DeBrauwere. “It’s a ’67 Divco milk truck I picked up on eBay for $1,000,” Jimmy reports. “The guy I bought it from in Oregon said it needed a bit of firewall repair, but otherwise it was in great shape.” Half of that turned out to be true: the firewall did need a little work. “However, the rest was basically crap,” Jimmy says. With preliminary frame-off work done in Oregon, Jimmy hauled the derelict truck down to its new home in Paso. With a bit of TLC and another $24,000, Jimmy transformed this former dairy truck into a working transport for his local photography business. It now…

When Chip Foose debuts a new car, it rarely receives anything other than praise and adulation. As a matter of fact, the cars that have come out of the Huntington Beach, California-based Foose Design in the last 10 years have become the standard by which the hobby is judged, at least by the world at large. There’s a reason he’s a household name—and it’s not just all the TV shows. Well, Chip has done it again and pulled another ace out of his deck with a muscle car flair. You are looking at Terracuda, a ’70 Plymouth Barracuda built for a car collector. Darren Metropoulos is a car guy, but in the I-have-a-’67-Shelby-Cobra-with-2,200-miles-built-out-of-titanium sort of way. Darren is the kind of guy we all wish we could be: the kind…

At least once in your life you’ve had the universal car-guy daydream of running your own shop. The evil occupation that’s been stealing time away from hot rodding could be out of the way for good; all day, every day, could be spent designing and building cool cars. Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? While there are plenty of good things about combining your passion and your job and being your own boss, the allure of running a hot rod shop doesn’t often jibe with stark realities. But right now is a unique time in America, with many people reconsidering their careers—either forced by layoff or just looking for something different. It may be the perfect time to reevaluate where you are versus where you’d like to be and shift careers, pursue…

In a world without limits, camshaft designers have known for decades what profiles they’d like to grind. But real-world technological limitations—in terms of design feasibility, materials science, and manufacturing process—have held them back. Now, the introduction of sophisticated lobe design and analysis software, better materials, and computer-controlled manufacturing has pushed cams and lifters into a whole new performance envelope. Then there’s recent original-equipment innovations such as variable valve timing (VVT) and perhaps ultimately electronic valve timing. There’s no telling where it will all end. From the lowest street cam to the most radical high-end professional racing applications, big changes are occurring, so HOT ROD felt it was high-time we took a look at the state of today’s cam and lifter technology. IT’S A DIGITAL WORLD Today progressive cam companies design…

’10 CAMARO SPORT BARS Hotchkis Performance 877/4-NOROLL (877/466-7655) www.hotchkis.net The all-new ’10 Camaro handles great but still suffers from more body roll and understeer than we prefer. Hotchkis has a way to significantly improve handling, driver control, and the all-important fun factor in less than an hour with the new Sport Bar sway bars. The high-strength, tubular-steel, 1.25-inch front bar is 210 percent stiffer than a stock SS bar, while the 1.00-inch rear bar is adjustable to be 80, 120, or 170 percent stiffer than a stock SS bar, allowing drivers to dial in the way the car responds to throttle steer and driver input. Finished in durable gloss-black powdercoat, the bars include mounts, greasable poly bushings, all hardware, and instructions. Price: $495.95, front and rear HEADLIGHT AIRSCOOPS Spectre Performance…