Builders
we learned that three important players in the hot rod industry—Chip Foose, Unique Performance and Year One—were coming together for a unique collaboration. Their combined goal was to build a limited-production-built car. Unique Performance already has just such a business, as it builds and sells its continuation Shelby Mustangs.
Alternative-fuel sources and hybrid cars are all the rage today. Everyone from major automakers to backyard inventors is pursuing alternative fuels and energy sources. While the ultimate goal is generally to eliminate dependence on foreign oil, for hot rodders there is also the desire to invent and create a better-performing engine.
If you don’t know the name J.F. Launier, you soon will, as this young craftsman has made a big impression on the hot rodding world in recent years, and from the looks of this, his latest project, he’ll be well represented in the decades to come.
It was a sketch published in another street rod title, and while it brought many interesting comments, to our knowledge no one acted on the sketch to convert it to a real roadster. Enter Sam Magarino of Sussex, New Jersey. Now, Magarino likes hot rods, and lately he has enjoyed building some pretty outrageous hot rods with the help of Barry Lobeck and his crew at Lobeck’s. This would be a project of great magnitude, and that was the name aptly applied to this car for the show season.
Enter Carl Casper, a man best known for building custom cars and promoting his huge custom car show every year in Louisville, Kentucky. Casper has long been a self-thinker and innovator with plenty of experience under his belt, and he was intrigued with the concept of alternative fuels, hydrogen in particular. During our conversation with Casper, he summed it when he said, “I feel many of the solutions will come out of the car guys. I want the mechanical wizards who have taken street rodding and auto racing to the highest levels imaginable to start putting their creativity into alternative-energy systems. I’m putting my money on them. Everyone seems to be waiting for the big corporations to pull us out of this energy crisis, and they tend to forget that from the very beginning of time it’s often the little guy with a shop behind his house who creates the next great idea or invention of our time.”
While several different rod builders have created limited-production vehicles, few handled every aspect of the construction in-house, mainly because they thought it best to team up with other craftsmen to create certain aspects of their cars. While this takes nothing away from the quality or beauty of the cars they created, it does say a good deal about SAR. By keeping every aspect of the construction process in-house, SAR has been able to maintain personally set tolerances and control the design theme at every juncture, yet still build each car as if it were the only one. And because each of the Double Dozens is offered simply as a “roller,” the final results of each still depend heavily on the imagination, talent and individuality of their owners. In the end, each of these cars will be special in its own right, and we’ll be showing them to you in the months and years to come.
In part nine of our Cimtex Rods Super Cameo Buildup Series, we covered the installation of the Classic Industries Parts and Accessories reproduction ’55-’59 Chevrolet/GMC lower door hinge panels, doorsill rocker panels, upper and lower door hinges, new right- and left-side front floor pans, inner and outer lower cab patch panels, and right- and left-side truck cab supports. To put it in a nutshell, the crew at Cimtex Rods in Jarrell, Texas, basically rebuilt the whole bottom end of our Super Cameo ’56 Chevrolet big window truck cab from stem to stern. Now, with a rock-solid truck cab firmly bolted onto our Cameo’s highly modified C4 Corvette-suspended truck chassis, we closed with the promise that we would be installing a new set of Dynacorn International Inc. ’55-’59 Chevrolet/GMC reproduction truck doors, followed by angle-chopping the top on our ’56 big-window a total of 3-1/2 inches in the front and 3 inches in the rear. Unfortunately, things didn’t exactly go according to plan.
In part seven of our Cimtex Rods Super Cameo Buildup series, we covered the installation of our Stainless Works four-tube ZR1 headers and Cimtex Rods-fabricated 3-inch custom exhaust system, as well as the fabrication and installation of our Cimtex Rods-constructed 22-gallon fuel tank and the accompanying MagnaFuel fuel system. Now we’re going to cover the mockup of our Powerdyne BD-11A SilentDrive twin supercharger system. But first let’s digress and take a look at the big picture. One of the key criterion in our Cimtex Rods Super Cameo buildup was to elicit that all-important “wow” factor throughout the entire series. When it came to the engine, we didn’t want to install just any old run-of-the-mill, multi-carbureted GM small or big block, much less a late-model GM crate engine straight out of the catalog. Going in we figured that the Cimtex Super Cameo powerplant should be something special.
“What’s going on right now with this truck is probably one of the most difficult parts of the overall buildup,” commented Cimtex Rods’ Darrell Cimbanin. “Getting everything to fit inside and underneath this highly modified 1956 Chevrolet Cameo half-ton chassis, like the exhaust and fuel systems, for example, requires a lot of thought and careful planning, not to mention the actual fabrication process, which is very time consuming!”
In parts two and three of The Auto Builder’s Cimtex Super Cameo series, we followed along as Cimtex Rods primaries Tim and Darrell Cimbanin instatlled one of Flat Out Engineering’s Corvette C4/C5 front and rear independent suspension crossmember kits beneath a 1956 Chevrolet 1/2-ton pickup chassis.
Of course, this was followed by the actual installation of the 1984-1987 Corvette C4 rack-and-pinion-steering-equipped IFS and the bolting up of the 1984-1987 Corvette C4 IRS, which makes for a pretty nice-handling street truck.
Along the way, some modifications to the Corvette C4 front suspension were made for the sake of simplicity and an enhanced ride. For openers, Flat Out Engineering designed its kit to incorporate a pair of 12-1/2-inch Aldan Eagle 659/450 coilover shock absorbers, which replace the somewhat antiquated GM designed Owens Corning Corvette C4 monoleaf fiberglass front spring.
