Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2023 i Diesel World

Sara and Chad Smith, a husband and wife team from Albemarle, North Carolina own Ace Towing and Steel Works, a versatile business that also does fabrication, metal work, and occasionally, builds cool custom trucks. Chad has built about a dozen trucks over the years but this one is special, built for Sara and surprisingly, this petite lady drives her massive rig everywhere! In addition to being a fully functional car carrier that often holds the family’s station wagon or Cadillac, it’s also precisely tailored to Sarah’s business called Pin Ups and Pumps. Sarah describes her group as an “…all pinup girl gang out of Charlotte North Carolina, with the goal of empowering women by hosting all girl car shows in the Carolinas. Our Pin Up contests are part of the…

In past Vintage Smoke we’ve talked about the vaporizing fuel oil engines of the 1895-1930 era and how they related to, and competed with, the engines we now know as “diesels.” One early engine that straddles the gap between a diesel and a vaporizing oil engine is the Hvid (pronounced “Veed”) engine, sometimes also called a Brons engine. It’s an oddball four-stroke “almost-a-diesel” design that took a chunk of the US oil engine market for about 15 years. RECAPPING THE VAPORIZING OIL ENGINE There were many types of vaporizing oil engines, commonly known as “hot head,” “hot bulb” or “hot tube” engines, built from the 1890s into the 1940s. Almost all were 2-strokes. They were “compression ignition” in a sense, but achieved ignition with only 1/3 the compression pressure of…

There are just some rides you can’t walk past without doing a double, or even triple-take. Diesel Performance Specialties (DPS) has built just such a vehicle by seamlessly mating a 6.7L King Ranch truck and a Ford Excursion SUV. With an insane 20 inches of lift, six doors, and wild amounts of chrome and powder coating, this 2016 “Excursion” is a truck like no other. But the question remains, how did they build it? It all started with two bare cabs and an idea. Shop owner Trevor Lima and the team at DPS wanted to build a flagship of a shop truck, but they didn’t want to build something cookie cutter. So the idea came about to build the SUV Ford didn’t--a 2016 take on a Ford excursion. Thus begun…

Sentimental value drives some of the most unique builds you’ll come across in the diesel world, and a sentimental attachment was the genesis behind Cory Wheat’s idea to resurrect his late grandfather’s old grain truck. With a knack for building medium-duty ratrods, a flood of ideas went into this ’65 F-600 project. The body would be placed on a ‘97 Dodge chassis and a secondgen powertrain that included a 12-valve Cummins and the venerable NV4500 transmission. The original grain bed would be removed and repurposed to create a skirted flat bed. Then a set of milled-down super singles would help Cory stuff 37-inch rubber inside the large fender wells. 21,000 ORIGINAL MILES Originally purchased by Sinclair Oil Corporation, the F-600 was obtained by Cory’s grandfather, Jerry Plummer, in 1968. Promptly…

With a 3.0L V6 EcoDiesel under the hood putting out 260 horsepower and 442 pound-feet of torque, the Jeep Farout Concept is an impressive and capable adventure machine. Jeep was kind enough to hand us the keys to this one-off concept truck and say “go have fun.” And, that’s what we did! ADVENTURE WAS CALLING It was just a matter of connecting the dots. The Farout concept was collecting dust in a Michigan warehouse since its online debut in 2020 and 2021 Easter Jeep Safari and The SEMA Show appearances. I needed an overland style vehicle for an adventure from Las Vegas, across the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and finally to Overland Expo West 2022 in Flagstaff. Lucky for me, the good people at Jeep not only make…

The last years of corporate independence for Minneapolis-Moline were not filled with a stagnant model line. Despite financial upheaval, and having to fight tooth and nail against larger companies in the ag market, from the mid-1950s to the corporate acquisition by White Motors in 1963, Minneapolis-Moline (M-M) fielded a solid line of tractors. One of them was the U-Series that began in 1938 and ran to 1957. SLOW TO DIESEL M-M was slow warming up to diesels. M-M was very big into LPG-fueled engines because in their most lucrative market, the wheat belt of the upper Midwest, LPG was very popular. Still, diesel power was inevitable and the first volume production M-M diesels came as an option in the 1954 UB line. The UB had debuted in 1952 as an…

RIDE OF THE WEEK STAINLESS DIESEL’S PRO MOD IS JUST ABOUT READY FOR RACE SEASON It won’t be long now… With Stainless Diesel’s split window Pro Mod Corvette in the highly capable hands of HammerTech Racecars, look for driver Johnny Gilbert and his team to be out in force at the ODSS season opener, Rudy’s, on April 21. If you recall, Johnny took a wild ride into the sand pit at the Scheid Diesel Extravaganza back in August, with the car sustaining extensive body damage in the process. However, the chassis was deemed salvageable at the time and is now in the final stages of its resurrection—along with a few updates. The Stainless crew will see you in North Carolina! SOURCE: HTTPS://WWW.STAINLESSDIESEL.COM/ WILD P-PUMPED 7.3L POWER STROKE PULLER Leave it…

This month’s Shell Rotella Truck Of The Month hails from Alberta. As you’ll read, the rig has been painstakingly reborn. Like so many automotive projects, it has taken years. In this case, there have been many hands guiding it to its current restoration. But unlike any similar project, this one was rebuilt by students at the Sexsmith Secondary School. Their Auto Tech teacher, Clinton Brundige entered the 1986 Dodge Ramcharger on his students’ behalf. They were thrilled to learn that their labour of love had won. Clinton shares how this rig was resurrected over many years by many students. It’s an inspired story of learning, persistence, and pride. I took over the Auto Tech program at Sexsmith Secondary School 7 years ago. When I first arrived, the biggest obstacle was…

Just to recap, the beginning of this story dates back more than 10 years and it serves as proof that—with the right combination of parts in the mix—a stock bottom end 7.3L Power Stroke can live, indefinitely, at 600 hp. In Part 1, we highlighted the stronger pushrods and valve springs, the heads being re-anchored to the block via ARP head studs, big fuel introduced in the form of Unlimited Diesel Performance 350/200 hybrid injectors and a competition fuel system from Irate Diesel Performance. High-pressure oil needs were met with the late SRP1.1 and Gearhead Sales tied everything together with PCM calibrating, made available by way of a Power Hungry Performance Hydra chip. But that was only the beginning. The factory turbo—and in fact the entire OEM turbo arrangement—had to…

When Maxx Metcalfe with Double XX Designs from Cave Creek Arizona wants to build a SEMA bound truck he doesn’t mess around. Maxx decided he was all in and went for a full frame-off custom build. He purchased a used 2002 7.3 Power-stroke truck which was a great base to start his build. The entire truck was then taken completely apart and after a relentless search he found a 2008 Ford F250 donor truck. He grabbed the frame, and axles and a few other suspension components from that truck and began prepping them and began to build his one-off custom suspension. Maxx went to work right away designing his custom suspension on CAD and after many hours of measuring and designing and re-measuring and re-designing his ideas were coming to…