2023
Greg Harris has been a car enthusiast for years and has built a number of muscle machines and classic trucks. He has had loads of fun with late-model cars, but he couldn’t shake the fact that he really had the yearning to build a street rod some day. His friends knew about his longtime goal, so when one of them found a partially completed early sedan for sale, he told Harris about the car. Harris went to take a look, and as it turned out, the car was a half-finished all-steel ’33 Ford two-door sedan powered by a 427 Chevy engine. He immediately knew he had to buy the sedan—it was just what he was looking for. He made a deal with Clark and Bridgett Short, the folks who started the project, and brought the ’33 home.
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Sometimes building a street rod can be downright exasperating. The amount of money involved and the stress of chasing down parts and coordinating the efforts of multiple shops can lead to a fair bit of tension in any owner. How many times have you heard someone say something along the lines of: “That damn car’s going to give me a heart attack!”? Odds are you’ve heard it or even said it at least once or twice if you’ve been involved in rodding for any length of time.
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When we were at the NSRA Nationals last year, we came across a nice Pontiac sedan that we just had to photograph. It was different, super clean and it had fantastic detailing that made you come back for a second look.
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Billy Blair is a man with a lot going on. He owns a pool building company that brings in a serious amount of business in Southern California and that allows him to play around with some other fun things like cable TV shows and, well, performance boats. We’ve seen a few of his boats over the years and they are always extremely well appointed and often understated in many ways.
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Boaters who traveled from as far away as Houston to participate in the first Smokin’ the Sound Poker Run were not disappointed. They enjoyed excellent weather, great hospitality at all of the Poker Run stops and they got up close and personal with the best spectator venue on the Offshore Super Series Powerboat Racing Association circuit.
Because there were several who were experiencing their first Poker Run, the basics were outlined in a morning meeting. Participating boats would each receive a card in a sealed envelope at each of the stops on the Poker Run route with the top three hands winning the prize money.
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The camshaft is often called an engine’s “brain,” and that’s an apt comparison. The cam controls all the major timing events in the valvetrain, which means it is responsible for how efficiently the engine can ingest and combust the air/fuel mixture. Choosing the right cam profile for your engine
combination is the key to making the most possible power.
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Ok, so you have your quarter-million dollar boat with twin 500 EFI Mercruiser engines for a total horsepower of just under 1000, but that just isn’t enough. What do you do? Well… there is one relatively easy way to dramatically increase horsepower, that’s right—a supercharger. On top of the power increase you get that cool unmistakable whine that will cause any wrench head to notice. This particular install is a stage 3 Whipple supercharger which will add approximately 240 hp per engine; in essence, we are adding a third engine.
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When someone buys a boat as a bare hull and finishes it themselves, the odds are that the boat won’t be nearly as sanitary as the original manufacturer rigged it. The original owner of this boat did a decent job but it was no way up to the usual Howard standards. The owner wanted the rigging cleaned up, spiffed up and colored up so he took it to Maveric Marine in Van Nuys, California where Dan Duffin straightened everything out and color-coordinated the powdercoating.
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We chronicled the building of the Challenger 600 EFI engine over the course of two months and now the boat is ready to get out on the water for testing. We headed out to Lake Elsinore in Southern California (one of the few lakes without a speed limit) and gave the boat a whirl. With the help of Paul Pfaff Racing Engine’s Gordon Jennings we had a good day on the water.
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All summer you’ve dreamed of passing all those boats that have blown by you since June. Now that time has come. You plunk down a large stack of greenbacks for a nasty supercharger and wrench all weekend bolting it in. Now comes the moment of truth. As you tear down the lake, all eyes are on the gauges, and the oil pressure is heading south too quickly. What could be wrong? You let off the throttle for a bit and all the vital signs return to normal.
We’ve ran into this exact scenario before. We installed an R-Tech Supercooler on the ProCharged Dorr’s Marine Engine 502cid motor in our Baja 250ES. The install was a huge success with a whopping 9mph increase in top speed. The boat worked well, but what we weren’t expecting was the huge increase in oil temperature from the gain in horsepower. If we had stayed on the throttle for a good 5,000-plus-rpm run, the oil temperature would have shot for the moon and oil pressure would have dropped to an uncomfortable level, forcing us to back out—what fun is that?
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