Thursday, June 27, 2013

Alright Already



 For those of you that have been religiously checking back to see if there was a fresh blog post since last Fall, I commend you on your diligence and patience. I'm terrible at keeping secrets at the best of times so this one was a killer. After the demise of our faithful old "Blue Bullet" race motor at last years season closer, Chris and I made a hard decision to bite the bullet and get our pal Dan Dvorak to build us something special. Dan is a legendary stock racer and engine builder who has been slinging his trade since our car was new. He resides in Waldo Florida so having a 700# crate shipped coast to coast seemed unreasonable to us...therefor we decided it was a good idea. As we began scheming with Dan about our hopes and expectations from this new mill it was clear that this project was going to quickly spiral out of control. Better the project than the car though. I made haste in acquiring a retired 413 block and heavily massaged heads from our pal and racing mentor Chris Barnes. Now that we had a starting point we needed to make some big decisions about induction, oiling, compression and the like. It was important to us to keep as much of a visually appearing 1964 race motor as possible. If our car was built in 1965, which is the era of our "Funny Wagon", it would most likely have a fuel injected Hemi for power. A private race team would probably be able to procure a cross-ram Max Wedge from the previous season for half of what it would cost to get into a Hemi. We went this route. Though our iron heads are not the original "hens teeth" Max Wedge" units, they are ported beyond belief and will (according to Dan) out flow the original MW heads. The Cross-ram that we decided to use is a beautiful reproduction built by A&A Transmissions and it has also been ported to match our tricked out iron heads. Since we're not running in a stock class we decided that it was o.k. to completely rollerise the motor and add every "go-fast" trick that those poor stocker's aren't allowed. It seemed like a good idea in the scheme of things. Dan took two brand new 750 cfm Edlebrocks and completely re-worked them for our application. There is way too much going on to list here but when the dust settled and Dan broke the motor in on his stand, running 15-20 gallons of fuel through the big lung to make sure that everything was well sealed and ran like a champ. It did. Dan was beside himself with the results. This from a guy who has been building race motors his entire life. He ran it for me on the phone and the sound was unbelievable. "It sounds like a funny car" Dan says. He of course is referring to a more modern top fuel type of car. The irony is that our machine is the original "funny car". Tonight we will install the motor and hopefully fire it up.

 Let the wild rumpus begin!!!