Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2007 i Hot Rod

HELP ME PICK A PROJECT Help me. Seriously. We’ve belabored that I’ve got too much junk and too many harebrained schemes, so now’s your chance to get me on target. Check out my current top 12 ideas, then e-mail me (HOTROD@primedia.com) or log on to our message board (www.HOTROD.com) and tell us which of these projects you’d most like to see, or which ones you really hate. You could even rank ’em in order from best to worst. Whatever. Just get to it. We’ll list 1)70 Dodge Super Bee Revamp: This was my first car and the subject of HOT ROD’s Operation Rumble Bee buildup of the early ’90s (see it in the project cars section of our Web site). It’s fairly well restored and loaded with a 750hp Hemi,…

It’s almost December as I write this, and over the last week, I’ve talked to a lot of folks Back East and in the Midwest, especially in Ohio and Michigan, and they all tell me how cold and snowy it’s getting. You’ll be reading this roughly in mid-January, so it’s no doubt only going to get nastier outside. Unless you’ve got a heated garage, you probably don’t have much else to do right about now, so why not drop us a line? Fire up the computer and dash off an e-mail, or break out a pen and put your thoughts on paper, then lick a stamp and drop it in the mail. Throw some photos in the envelope, too. Be assured we read everything, but go ahead and hate us…

It’s a brave person who takes the path less traveled, and that’s especially true in the hot-rodding forest. Building a Pro Touring Camaro or a street/strip 5.0L Mustang is the easy path to acceptance; you can get in at any car show, and people don’t look at you weird. Problem is, they may not look at you at all, since everybody and his brother has a Camaro, a 5.0, a Dart … you get the idea. Building something truly different is far more risky. Casual onlookers often won’t get your sense of humor or sense of style, and in many cases, they won’t even know what the heck they’re looking at. It’s just as easy to be a zero as it is to be a hero, simply due to the…

Every magazine project car's got to survive the harsh scrutiny of the readership. To save you the trouble, we'll plead guilty right up front: Here's yet another Camaro, it's unspeakably expensive, we did virtually none of the work ourselves, and some guys will think we're out of our glue-sniffing gourds for painting it flat Army green. Yet we're counting on winning you over with the F-Bomb, as it absurdly embodies HOT ROD's editorial doctrine by Daring To Be Different both aesthetically and purposefully. We've spoken against overpowered, underperforming, undriveable show rods, so this is our comeback: a true 1,500 hp we hope to drive every day and race on the dragstrip, in top-speed events, and on road courses. This'll be one twin-turbo small-block that's more than just set dressing. That's…

There are three basic ways to make a car and/or its parts look good: painting, plating, and powdercoating. Since we just finished our huge, 10-part series on how to paint your car last month, this month, we’ll touch on what powdercoating is all about. POWDERCOATING EXPLAINED Why is it called powdercoating? To put it simply, the coating is originally applied as a thermosetting powder made up of polyester, epoxy, and acrylic resin combined with various crosslinking compounds. The powder is so fine that each grain looks like a piece of dust, and you can order powder in thousands of different colors and textures for very specific applications. The powder is usually either sprayed on the part or the part is passed through a booth filled with powder (used mostoften in…

Spring is right around the corner. It’s time to get ready for another season of hot rodding. Whether you do it at the strip, on the track, or just cruise Main Street, we’re ready to help with your parts questions, tuning problems, and combination inquiries. I’ll answer as many questions in the pages of Pit Stop as space permits. If you have quality digital photos of the car, engine, or part in question (at least 300 dpi at 4 by 4 inches or larger), we may throw them in as well. When e-mailing, don’t forget to include “Pit Stop” in the subject line and put your real full name and hometown or military unit, base, or ship in the message body. –MARLAN DAVIS BRAIDED STAINLESS HOSE FOR POWER STEERING I…

LOWRIDERS VS. KUSTOMS In the Apr. ’74 issue, HOT ROD published its first and most focused of the very few stories the magazine has ever printed on lowriders. The article was courtesy of open-minded Editor Terry Cook and included the rides of the Imperials car club of Los Angeles, a locale credited for the origination of the lowrider genre, which was then unlikely to be found elsewhere. Later, HRM’s Pat Ganahl touched on lowriders and sleds, recognizing their intrinsic value as automotive art, though the niche has probably had fewer pages in HRM’s history than any other automotive kink. Perhaps it’s retrospect that makes $ it easier to see how the lowrider culture was influenced by the customs of the mid-to late ’50s, and especially by the wild scallops and…

“We took a Dodge Magnum underbody and a Challenger concept shell and married the two. Then we literally dreamed up the vehicle in between.” —Steve Meloche, Challenger build team This is special. When this project was conceived, there was only one running '08 Dodge Challenger prototype in the whole world. And as you can guess, it has been pretty busy doing the car-show scene and hauling journalists around. Mopar Performance Parts wanted a Challenger, too. A smash hit when it was introduced on the floor of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit last winter, the Challenger was the perfect vehicle to showcase Mopar's new 392 Hemi crate engines and to fly the flag for Chrysler performance at the SEMA show in Las Vegas. The Mopar people just couldn't…

It may have been born on the wrong side of the tracks, but our “500 HP For Cheap,” 383ci small-block Chevy (Sept. ’06) has shed its humble origins and put on some class—namely, the 600hp class. Ace engine builder Joe Sherman has stepped up, metamorphosing our humble sow’s ear into a silk purse, bolting on some serious parts to boost power as well as long-term reliability. The genesis for the upgrade was an opportunity to test Air Flow Research’s new Eliminator aluminum heads. Prototype castings were made available to us, and our budget 383 was handy, so we figured why not try to raise a 528.5hp mill over the 600hp barrier? Obviously, more cam was needed, and with more cam, much stouter valvesprings were required. The bigger springs wouldn’t fit…

“A hoodscoop will never improve drag, but a well designed one might not hurt it. —Gary Eaker You think of air as flowing over your car at speed, right? Actually, you’re ramming into it and shoving it out of the way—punching a hole through a wall of fluid that weighs about 0.08 pounds per cubic foot. It fights you coming and going, pushing against the nose of the car as you compress it then leaving a low-pressure wake that sucks back-ward on the tail. That’s all bad. As any veteran bench racer knows, if a car is running at its top speed, then to double that speed would require eight times the horsepower. More practically, to go just 25 percent faster—say, from 125 mph to a bit over 155 mph—requires…

HOT RODS AT MIRAMAR The sixth annual Car Show at Miramar was the largest to date, with more than 270 of Southern California’s hottest cars showing up to support the U.S. Marines. Those who arrived hungry were greeted by the Boy Scouts cooking breakfast, gourmet coffee, and, of course, each driver received the traditional 6-8-ounce glass bottles of Coca-Cola along with a complete lunch of Johnsonville Brats and Mission Chips. No one left the show with an empty stomach. DJ Tye, himself a reservist, drove down from Boise, Idaho, to provide music all day, and to top it all off, the owner of the car of the day, which was ’56 Chevy, received a $700 toolkit from Mac. The show’s theme was support for the base Auto Skills Center, a…

HOT-ROD GRANNY? The attached photograph was taken a few years ago while my wife’s grandmother was visiting. She was born in Texas and moved to Los Angeles in the ’20s, where she raised her family. She built B-17 bombers during World War II and told some great stories about the old days. During her life, she had several nice cars, and her grandson has recently restored one of them. I don’t think she ever had her own subscription to HOT ROD magazine, but with a family of car nuts, one was always around for her to read. She died last year at the age of 97. I was looking through some photographs and found this one. I thought it said a lot about your magazine. Jeff Barbay Via e-mail Thanks…

INSIDE THE OEs THE IMPALA GOES NASCAR RACING IN ’07, COULD GO REAR-DRIVE IN ’09 Chevrolet has decided to throw the Impala SS four-door sedan into the fray in NASCAR Nextel Cup competition for 2007 alongside the current Monte Carlo coupe. Next year, NASCAR will introduce its Car of Tomorrow package at selected races, beginning at Bristol in March. Among other changes, the COT features a taller roof line, a sports-car-type air splitter in the nose, and a rear wing in lieu of a spoiler. NASCAR’s new equipment package is designed to improve safety and competition and reduce costs. So for the 16 Car of Tomorrow races in 2007, the Chevrolets will be entered as Impalas, with the Monte Carlos running the balance of the schedule. In 2008, the factory…

Most Dare To Be Different cars like those featured in this issue require a good deal of know-how, imagination, and fabrication ability to complete because it’s likely there won’t be many ready-to-go, off-the-shelf parts available, especially if the plan calls for real performance instead of just style. Only a decade or so ago, the same was mostly true of even the most popular musclecars. Most of the parts dedicated to a particular year and model were restoration-oriented, not performance-minded, so to build a full-on Pro Touring car required an impressively outfitted shop and a builder with advanced knowledge of chassis preparation and serious fabrication ability. Not so much today. We’re at a point where almost anything you want for your project can be mail-ordered, ready to install, and in many…

This story is certain to generate a ton of controversy among those who believe the Pontiac V-8 is a great low-revving torque factory, but little more. For sure the Pontiac 389 and 421 enjoyed their fair share of racing success back in the days of factory-assisted NASCAR circle track and NHRA dragstrip competition, culminating with the awesome ’63 421 Super Duty Catalina. But an antiperformance corporate policy arrived by 1964, and hard-core Pontiac engine development ground to a halt. All the experimental Hemi head, SOHC, DOHC, and aluminum block programs were unceremoniously canceled. Oh what could have been. Sure, the ’60s and early ’70s brought the legendary Tri-power 389, Ram Air 400,455 H.O. and 455 S.D. motors, but these were essentially super-performance street packages with mainly cast-steel guts, not race…

UNIBODY ’33 FORDS Race Bodies by Bond 308/234-6021 When Kyle Bond of Gibbon Fiberglass Reproductions closed the company’s doors and sold off the body molds, it appeared he was finished with the hobby altogether. Apparently, he was just cleaning house to get started on a whole new take on traditional-style hot rods. His new operation, Race Bodies by Bond, is releasing the first available ’33 Ford unibody design. The package has no separate chassis and uses a bolt-on front subframe. The race-car-inspired design is a complete rollcage built on a steel floor plate with a fiberglass body shell bolted to it. This structure allows the floor to be dropped as low as the framerails on a stock Ford chassis creating a great deal more available passenger leg room and a…

THIS IS GONNA HURT It’s shocking what guys will do for money, even when it involves sacrificing their cars. An excellent example of this is the annual, highly entertaining World Power Wheelstanding Championships at Byron Dragway in northern Illinois. Conceived and promoted by track owner Ron Leek, the rules are simple: take off your wheelie bars, stand on the gas, and try to ride your car’s rear bumper as long as you can. The truly insane actually attempt to flip over backward, though nobody has accomplished that feat yet. Even so, coming backdown to earth usually results in destroyed suspension components and oil pans, and there are the occasional barrel rolls down the track. A $20,000 check forthe winner makes people do it, and Byron’s small facility is amined to…