Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2011 i Hot Rod

LOVE IS NEVER WRONG What compels a hot rodder to love a car? Especially those beat and sometimes rusty hulks that get pushed to the back of the garage to languish in untouched obscurity for years, sometimes decades? My own poor Camaro, which I’ve written about too many times, suffered that fate for 15 years, following me for six moves now without so much attention as, after the consumption of many, many beers, staring at it and repeating the mantra “I’ll get to it eventually.” A few times along the way I was tempted to sell it, but I couldn’t. Why is that? It wasn’t my first car, not even my second, and I was well out of my teen years when I got it. And it is just another…

THE LEGEND OF THE WHAMBULANCE Why do we do what we do? We’re depraved but unashamed, so it’s odd that we’ve taken six months to share the tale of the Whambulance. If you’re squeamish you might want to tear these pages out of your copy of the mag. The family of participants in HOT ROD Drag Week(tm) ’10, sponsored by Gear Vendors, knows what we’re talking about here, though the story began a few days earlier than Drag Week(tm), at the ’10 Holley LS Fest. The HOT ROD staff planned to drive from the LS Fest in Bowling Green, Kentucky, to the to the kick off of Drag Week(tm) in Columbus, Ohio, a jaunt of 320 miles. One night, after a beer or six, we realized it would be absurd…

We’re pretty flaky for a bunch of guys who live under constant deadlines, but hurl us a challenge and we’ll refuse to fail—unless the challenge is to hand in a story on time or to get a car completed without the urgency of a target that promises the satisfaction of vehicular superstardom. Delusion as motivation—try it some time. Distracted by other shiny objects, we’ve failed to get our ’70 Dodge Super Bee on the road after many stalled attempts, so we created our own criticality: We announced that we’d drive the Bee to the Moparty at the Strip show and race, and that we’d have it on the cruise from Glendora Dodge in California to the event in Las Vegas on April 7. We’re writing this intro three weeks before…

HOT RODS THAT ARE NEITHER I’ve developed an unhealthy admiration of cars you’d call worthless, but readers rolling their eyes at me again is of less concern than the risk to my marriage. Recently I’ve had perilous temptations to buy a ’75 Monaco, a ’73 Matador, and a ’74 Electra 225. There’s a ’74 Suburban Id own right this instant if only I’d not been informed that I’d have to live in it. Alone and far away. Which still seems a viable option. Why the love for mid-’70s forget tables? First, because I have a supernatural talent for finding an urgent use for any American, rear drive car I come across. Second, every mainstream model from ’28 to ’75 has become too spendy and long past predictable. It seems that…

Here’s the unfortunate fact about project cars: Many are never completed. Sure, they invariably begin with high hopes, but they often end up as a pile of fail hidden behind the barn. No matter how much time, talent, enthusiasm, and money are allocated, one or all are bound to run out at some point. Hot rods are never really finished, rodders like to say, not quite realizing how truly they speak. America’s garage floors are strewn with permanently half-finished project cars. As a professional automotive artist and designer, Murray Pfaff knows this all too well. He’s lost count of all the builds he’s helped to get off the dime, only to see them grind to a halt before obtaining completion. And he’s seen that the more ambitious the project, the…

The odds are good that you aren’t Chip Foose or Jimmy Shine, and short of a camera crew getting lost in your neighborhood and discovering you lying under your hot rod, you’re never going to be either of those guys. That’s OK. The world doesn’t need another TV hero fabricator. But why should a lack of celebrity stop you from building cool stuff at home? If anything, a lack of skill should be the only thing getting in the way of your next stellar mod, and that’s a problem easily remedied with instruction, patience, practice, and the right tools. In our June ’11 issue (“Your First Burner,” pg. 74), we showed you the entry-level equipment for Metal Inert Gas (MIG) welding success. Now we’re here to lend a little skill…

321 … TAKEOFF With the added opportunity for a tour of the Kennedy Space Center (see Roddin’ at Random, page 22), including an actual drive “inside the fence” through Launch Complex 39, the HOT ROD Power Tour(r) presented by GM Performance Division is now more than just a caravan, it’s history in the making! Our hosts in Port Canaveral and Cocoa Beach, Florida, are rolling out the red carpet to everyone. Starting Thursday night with a Launch Party, then the Ron Jon Friday Night Cruise, and Saturday Night at the Cove, all these festivities are in addition to the traditional event taking place Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Port Canaveral’s Terminals 2 and 3, hosted by our Kick off Cruise Night Sponsor, Painless Performance. Then on Sunday,…

SPEEDWAY CENTENNIAL Just as this issue goes on sale, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway celebrates the 100th birthday of the Indy 500, and HOT ROD sends its congratulations. Long-time readers will recall that the Brickyard and HOT ROD are old friends. From the magazines start until the mid-’70s, when we more or less outgrew each other, HOT ROD provided in-depth coverage of the annual May classic. In those years, Indy was the absolute pinnacle of American motorsports, yet still relevant to hot rodders as an attainable goal. Many Indy racers, from Dan Gurney to Andy Granatelli, Mickey Thompson, and Barney Navarro, had their roots in hot rodding, and we trumpeted their exploits in these pages. Our Aug. ’64 coverage of the Indy 500, oddly enough, contains no mention of the now-famous…

We try to put together a story like this every year or so, showing the neatest hot rod cars, trucks, bikes, and what have you being bolted and welded together in pro shops and home garages across the land. We hope to inspire ideas and encourage readers to get out and do the same. Normally, we ring up the hero list of builders (Trepanier, Strope, Ladd, et al.) and see what’s shaking but this time we also hit the trenches to bring to you some true low-buck, father-and-son, at-home builds that are cool. A hero has to start somewhere, right? Got a project you think is interesting enough for our next installment? Let us know about it at HOTROD@HotRod.com. TROY’S RAD RIDES Troy Trepanier’s Rad Rides shop in Manteno, Illinois,…

40 YEARS LATER You already know we gearheads are an opinionated bunch, forming strong beliefs about and prejudices against certain vehicle styles. Currently, it’s the so-called rat rodders in the hot seat, just as lowriders were scorned before them. Dragster racers hated and ridiculed the first Funny Cars. Bar fights broke out over flatheads versus over-heads. Coupes and sedans were excluded from dry-lakes racing by the roadster snobs who started the Southern California Timing Association. Some things never change. Of all the victims of the style police, none has suffered more or longer than poor vanners. The occasional foreign cover car notwithstanding, nothing we’ve printed on these pages since 1948 has generated nearly as much hate mail as the decade of van material that all began with a coverblurbed, full-color…

BILLET BLOWER DRIVES Chris Alston’s Chassisworks 800/722-2269 CAChassisworks.com Component Drive Systems is a new line from Chris Alston’s Chassis-works developed in an effort to expand its coverage for racers. The first in the line are the billet aluminum geardrives for single or dual centrifugal superchargers (ProCharger, Vortech, and Paxton) on Chevy small-block, big-block and LS-series engines and Ford small-block and modular motors. They mount in line with the crankshaft and run directly off the damper, eliminating side loads on the crank and supercharger bearings while allowing pedaling of the motor without throwing a belt. Gearsets are available to tune the drive ratio, and the brackets come with an integral timing pointer, crank trigger mount, and gear-case vent. Check out the website to see the line of single and dual kits.…

DRAG WEEK™ DRAMA If you follow HOT ROD’s Drag Week1’, our annual torture test of drive, race, and repeat that’s gone on for the last six years, you’ve witnessed the unbelievable progression of performances in the Unlimited class, where Larry Larson made a 6-second pass last year after driving his car well over 1,000 miles and through rain. The fire is raging in the months prior to the ’11 Drag Week1’, with a big field of heavy hitters gunning to stop Larry’s dominance of the class. Denny Terzich of Pro Rides in Pennsylvania, whose Unlimited Camaro is seen here, is one of them. Next month we’ll provide a rundown of who they all are, what they’re building, and where they think the bar will be set this year. SEE THIS…