A technical article from Hot Rod magazine providing advice from experts on improving the performance of your car.
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There's more to car shows than gawking at polished chrome and glistening paint. If you keep your eyes open, you'll find an unending supply of great ideas you can take home to your own ride. And while some of us may be prejudiced against garish Pro Street cars,
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If you're working with a small-displacement engine, it can be tough to achieve compression ratios even as high as 10:0:1. If you're working for every little point of compression you can get, it can be beneficial to order your pistons with no valve
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When you hear the word customizing, you probably imagine a chopped and channeled ’50 Merc or an overdone Monte Carlo with hydraulics and way too much gold trim. But customizing can also be used sparingly to make a hot rod just a little bit different from
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We recently attended an engine-building school at the Reher-Morrison race plant in Arlington, Texas. What's the big deal with a school? Simple–Reher-Morrison peeled open the doors of its professional engine building vault, and laid out virtually eve
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Practically by definition, hot rods are prone to overheating. (After all, they’re not lukewarm rods, right?) Of course, to prevent the occasional boil-over, you can do the obvious, such as turn on the heater (to dissipate heat from the block) or drive at
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No matter how much power your car has, no matter how beautiful the paint, no matter how efficient the engine, and no matter how comfortable the interior, it’s nothing if the foundation isn’t sound (kind of sounds like a house, doesn’t it?). It&#
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Talk about an exercise in frustration. Go into any mass merchandiser, walk down the car care product isle and try to pick out the proper cleaning supplies for your hot rod. You’ll find dozens of companies each offering two or three polishes and the same n
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What separates the neighborhood mechanical hero from the hack with a hammer and an adjustable wrench? Tools. How many times have you been presented with a baffling situation and wondered how in the world you were going to handle it when one of your pals whips
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Power is what hot rodding is all about. The classic approach is to take a stock or near-stock engine and tweak it until it thumps. But what should you do first? There are literally hundreds of roads to choose from, but a little forethought and planning will cr
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Driving hot rods should always be fun, especially when you’re young. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way. Many first-timer hot rods end up being powered by small-block engines that’ve been loaded with a 750 double-pumper carb, an
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Every now and then, HOT ROD does a special section on tech tips. Problem is, there are times when we’re just flat stumped and can’t come up with any new tips. Sure, we could rehash old tips, but that’s a cop-out. You see, your faithful HOT ROD s
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Fastest Street Car (FSC) racing is one of the hottest forms of heads-up drag racing in the country. The Pro Street boys and girls get most of the attention, but Super Street has quickly become the place to go racing because its rules make it more accessible to
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The Super Street class of Fastest Street Car racing is one of the most exciting and challenging classes because the rules are so limiting. Running 8.60s on a 10.5-inch rear tire, with engines restricted to a single-four-barrel and plate-type nitrous systems, d
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Customizing your hot rod is a great way to differentiate your ride from every other car in the world. While some customizing can dramatically change the way a car looks, such as swapping wheels and tires, it can also be a subtle art. Contained in the sidebars
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If you haven’t figured it out by now, the key to building a low-buck car or truck is to do as much of the work yourself as possible. In addition to saving some coin, doing all the work on your car is cool. Not only will you know every inch of the car when
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“You wanna run ’em?” In a hundred different forms, that invitation is the bottom line in motorsports. If you think you have a quicker/faster/better machine than the guy in the next pit, racing gives you the opportunity to prove it. Unfortun
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One definition of a hot rodder is someone who is always looking for a more efficient way to accomplish a task. Since hot rodders are inveterate tinkerers, they are also the best source for tech tips. A few months back, Valvoline sponsored a tech-tip contest th
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Typical hot rodders become just as wide-eyed and frothy at the mouth over new and fancy tools as they do over a cherry rod. If you don’t believe it, just throw a current Snap-On catalog into a group of hot rodders and watch how quickly the pages become do
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