When you look around the automotive world, it's clear to see that hot rodding and V-8 engines are distinctly American creations. Sure, you can find a smattering of V-8s and/or hot rodders in pockets around the globe, but the United States is the home office for both. Where you find bent eights, you'll find hot rodders, and vice versa. The two enable each other.

Surveying the dyno facilities at the University of Northwestern Ohio (UNOH) the last Sunday of September, the scene was alight with activity. Inside the expansive receiving area a group of engine builders were busily unloading the crates containing their competition engines and essential parts. UNOH student team members selected to serve as assistants worked steadily prepping engines, carefully mating them to their assigned dyno docking carts. Stacked and ready for the festivities to begin were pallets of AMSOIL synthetic engine oil, and the necessary drums of VP 100 and VP Q-16 fuels. Down the hall, the adjacent dyno rooms were silent. The first of the competition engines for the morning start of the 2012 AMSOIL Engine Masters Challenge had already been married to the SuperFlow/DTS Powermark engine dynos and were ready to run. Over the course of the next five days this would become the epicenter of horsepower, where a collection of 32 determined engine builders put their talent and reputations on the line in a battle of power supremacy to claim the title of "Engine Master" in their respective division.

Ever since the first car mags started dyno testing hot rod V-8s over a half century ago, there's always been a kernel of suspicion over the results. There's just too many questions about who stands to gain by good (or bad) results, whether the dyno is correctly calibrated, and how the results are interpreted. Even if claims of favoritism are unsubstantiated, there's still the fact that magazines frequently publish tests done months apart on dynos in different places. It creates an uneven playing field that we've lived with so long that we hardly question it anymore.

What if you went to work one day and your boss had a sit-down with you. The news: He's going to pay you 5 percent more, you have to do 5 percent less work, the work you do will be 5 percent easier, your commute is going to be 5 percent shorter, and you get 5 percent more vacation time. When you go home that evening, your wife is 5 percent better looking, and that cold beer waiting for you in the fridge is 5 percent taller and 5 percent colder. Suddenly, 5 percent is a number that sounds pretty righteous.

Outright victory in the Xtreme Division of the AMSOIL Engine Masters Challenge doesn't come by chance-every factor has to be executed to perfection. Start with the engine combo. Here, the choices are wide open, but the 2012- winning School of Automotive Machinists team selected an entry based upon the small-block Chevrolet SB 2.2 NASCAR components. Success in the Xtreme division demanded starting with a successful engine combination. As SAM instructor Chris Bennett tells us, "The SB2 was one of the best NASCAR engines. From my standpoint the valvetrain is very nice, it has long-pivot rockers, there is a lot of room for the pushrods, it has a great pushrod angle, and great looking geometry. The ports are really small for what they flow, so it's a very efficient port." These Chevy engines are designed to race, so what better platform for an all-out engine competition on the dyno.

The Engine Masters Challenge is one of the densest gatherings of engine-building knowledge you'll find anywhere. Each of our competitors have gleaned pearls of wisdom gathered over the course of years in the business. They've dealt with customers' expectations, and they've seen what works and what doesn't, and that experience represents a well of knowledge we just had to tap into this year. In between dyno runs, we asked the teams of builders to offer up a tip either directly related to building engines, or related to making sure you build the right engine. The result was a broad list of 23 tips that are applicable to everyone no matter what you're building. It's all good stuff to sit back and ponder before you dig into your next project.

It takes a lot of different competencies to build a hot rod from the ground up—and few people have all of them. Even the top car builders farm out stuff like engines, transmissions, interiors, and even paintwork. Sharing some of the workload with experts who are more familiar is not only a wise move, it can also save you time and money by not having to do things twice. Fabricating your own interior and engine bay close-out panels, however, is not one of them. In fact, making your own panels is not only easy and fun, there’s very little downside if you mess them up, primarily because the tools and material needed to become proficient are inexpensive. Moreover, interior and engine panels are highly visible, and taking the time to build them right will pay big dividends when friends and fans start looking your car over in the pit area, paddock, or show field.

It seems like there is an alphabet soup of engine and head combinations out there: LSx, RO7, P7, D3, and the W7, W8, and W9. When straying from a traditional engine build of a small-block (insert brand here), unless you are an über-gearhead, it’s next to impossible to know all the different iterations and permutations. That’s why when it comes time to build something really special and off the wall, it’s best to head to a specialist. For small-block Mopar engines, that means talking to Brett Miller of Dillsboro, Pennsylvania.

When we built our Dart 400 SHP small-block and dyno tested it 24 months ago , the idea was to showcase Dart’s line of value-packed short-block crate engines, and combine it with a street-friendly induction combo that would run equally well at the track. At the time, we didn’t know what car the Dart SHP 400 was destined for—the ’68 Nova was still over the horizon. Nevertheless, we knew going in that the Holley 850-cfm Street HP carburetor was a proven performer for street cars in this displacement and power range, so we chose it with the full confidence it would be appropriate for whatever car we acquired. The dyno tuning techniques that apply to Holley’s Street HP are the thrust of our story here, but first, some background.

Show up to any of the many Pro Touring racing events through the country and you’ll spot a sea of Chevys, a handful of Mustangs, and maybe, just maybe, a Mopar. The running joke at the Goodguys autocross is that Mopars so rarely participate that there’s a bounty for the first one to show up and make a lap. Even if it’s just urban legend, it’s still close enough to the truth that it hurts. But Mopar fans should not despair; there are a few car builders and suspension manufacturers doing what it takes to represent you with muscle cars and parts that can turn corners on par with modern performance cars, and in some cases, even better.

Rocky starts are hard to shake, but the GM 700-R4 automatic has done just that. Although it promised the durability of the TH350 with the added flexibility of an overdrive when introduced in the early ’80s, savvy hot rodders immediately cried foul. Whether bolted behind a third-gen F-body, C4 Corvette, or a four-cylinder S-10 pickup, the 700-R4 quickly developed a reputation for chucking its guts. The street/strip crowd hated GM’s new automatic so much that many sacrificed overdrive altogether by swapping them out for the old TH350 or TH400. Given this kind of well-earned stigma, hearing rumors of guys putting 800 hp through these things is shocking to say the least. PerformaBuilt Transmissions (www.PerformaBuilt.com) has been beefing up these once-despised GM automatics from the very beginning, and boasts a long list of satisfied racers running 9- and 10-second e.t.’s with its 700-R4s. Needless to say, we had to take one apart to see how it’s done.

Some things are just a flash in the pan. A trend here today and gone tomorrow. The things that last and become embedded forever in our culture are those things that get it right from the start and just keep getting better. Such is the case with the almost 50-year-old big-block Chevy. Yeah, we know the small-block had a decade head start, but the fact that the big-block has been basically the same for almost five decades—that’s two generations of hot rodders—must mean that the General did something right, especially since that powerplant is still the main choice among the high-power bracket racers across the country today. That’s not the only thing that’s been on the job for decades. Veteran engine builder Mike Stine has almost as many years massaging those engines as they’ve been around; it’s the primary reason he chose one as his entry into the 2011 AMSOIL Engine Masters Challenge (EMC).

You’d think that 150 years would be long enough to solve a problem, but no such luck. Since the first four-stroke internal combustion engine rolled out the gate in the late 1800s, engineers have been beating their heads over the great compromise known as camshaft design. That’s because a motor running at low rpm is a completely different animal than the same motor at high rpm, as the dynamic effects of the intake and exhaust charge at both extremes require vastly different valve event timing. Until someone figures out how to reliably run two camshafts simultaneously in one engine, the duration and lift ground into a camshaft will always be a compromise between low-end torque and top end power, with variables like idle quality and driveability further complicating the situation.

One thing that we should probably clear up right off the bat is that an antiroll bar—more popularly known as a sway bar—is not the final word in handling, nor is it the most important component; they’re simply a tuning tool that must be tailored to work with the rest of a suspension system to get the desired handling effect. Sway bars do that by adjusting the understeer/oversteer balance of a car as it negotiates a curve by essentially coupling the front wheels together and using torsion to overcome body roll. That coupling also allows fine-tuning of the amount of load that transfers to the outside tires during cornering.

Those Occupy Wall Street folks just might be onto something. The 1 percenters have all the fun while the rest of us get nada. The hot rodding world certainly has its equivalent. The 1 percenters build sky-is-the-limit checkbook cars, while the rest of us window shop eBay and Craigslist. Sigh. Maybe one day. Screw that! Don’t stand around in some imaginary car guy unemployment line—we say, occupy Goodguys! Occupy Super Chevy! Occupy the Car Craft Summer Nats! Why should check writers have all the fun?

We spend a lot of time hanging out around autocross and road courses throughout the year watching some of the best handling muscle cars in the country cut corners around cones, so our level of expectation for our own cars gets correspondingly elevated. As a byproduct of this, we just don’t have much patience for wallowing, worn-out suspension systems. We want to actually be able drive our cars with abandon.

The decision-making process when selecting a camshaft used to be little more than answering the question, “How big do you want to go?” At one time, virtually all Detroit engines came from the factory with hydraulic flat tappet cams, and most of the time that was what went back in when building an engine for street performance. Solid flat tappet cams were OEM on some muscle engines, but were generally few and far between, while solid rollers were reserved almost exclusively for serious drag racing machines. Hydraulic roller cams came on the scene in the 1980s, offering yet another popular cam configuration. Today, we see street engines built with all four of these types of cams, and each have their pros and cons. The first decision that needs to be made when selecting a cam is just what kind of cam it is going to be. Here we look at these four cam configurations, their attributes, and which one is appropriate for a given application.

Readers who follow our annual engine building competition, the AMSOIL Engine Masters Challenge, are likely familiar with the efforts of the late Dan Miller and his incredible early Hemi. Dan was a regular at the event, and his innovative modifications always placed his engines in the thick of competition. Dan did not work in seclusion, favoring instead to involve numerous talented and enthusiastic individuals from across the nation, using their input and expertise to help hone his engine building craft. Dan was well on his way to building a new early Chrysler Hemi for the 2011 EMC competition when the unthinkable occurred. Dan Miller died from a sudden heart attack on the May 9, 2011.

Every year, us lucky editors sit down with aftermarket manufacturers and listen to their best new product pitches. Going in, we never know if we’ll be stifling back yawns, or if a new product is going to grab us by the balls and say, “Hey, check me out!” At this year’s manufacturer’s conference, we got a nice surprise from Auto Meter with their new Elite series gauges. The Auto Meter Elite gauges were designed for the racing environment; a large, easily read face helps keep your attention on the road or track, an advanced design stepper motor improves durability and precision, and all Elite gauges have small solid-state data acquisition grade sensors. And while that stuff is definitely cool, what really got my attention was one feature that I’m kind of embarrassed to admit. Simply put: These gauges are perfect for us older guys whose vision isn’t the best.

Big is a relative term, since it always requires some level of qualification or comparison to justify. For example, 496 ci sounds like a lot of engine, until it’s sitting next to a 572, which itself is smallish next to a 632ci, 10.2-inch deck Merlin-based big-block Chevy. And even that’s laughably miniscule when stacked against the offerings in the world of Pro Stock drag racing that soar up into the 700 to 900ci range. And we’re still talking about comparatively puny traditional pushrod-style automotive V-8s here. Plenty of military and industrial engines push more air in one cylinder than all of those engines combined.

When it comes to building custom performance engines, there are numerous choices in terms of what direction to take. For many, improving the OEM design theme is accomplishment enough, using replacement-style parts that offer to significantly improve output. For the likes of Nick Arias Jr., getting the most from an engine means starting with a clean sheet of paper, and then making the parts in accordance to his uncompromising all-out performance ways. As Arias likes to put it, “You can make a great street engine from a race engine, but you can’t make a great race engine from a street engine.” A case in point is the 427-cube Ford featured here. Using a hemispherical cylinder head conversion developed by Arias, the engine is capable of phenomenal output in a race configuration, while the same basic package can be built for reliable street duty with outstanding performance.

We were all set to finish the Art Morrison Enterprises rollbar kit in our ’68 Nova project car, counting the few days more it would be to have the interior completely finished for the summer cruise season, when we were dealt a cruel surprise by a previous owner: a driver-side floorpan full of rust. You’d think this would be easy enough to spot when buying a car, but our intrepid seller had artfully covered the rot with a thin layer of fiberglass, mudded it in with body filler, then camouflaged it with a can of truck bedliner to look like factory sealant. When the crew at Outlaw Motorsports used a grinder to smooth the surface in preparation for welding the rollbar mounting plates, the building filled with the acrid smoke of burning Bondo faster than you could say caveat emptor.

We’re firm believers in doing things the right way, and all the way. For example, if you decide to swap your column shift automatic (or manual for that matter) over to floor shift like we did with our project car ’77 Chevy Nova (Mar. ’12), you can’t just leave the original column shifter in place. The floor shift conversion will just never look legit with the telltale shifter boss on the column, and unfortunately there’s just no good way to hide it. You have to complete the illusion.

“We’ll either make 700 hp, or we’ll end up with seven pistons!” quipped Ben Strader, head honcho over at EFI University as he and master tuner Brian Macy of Horsepower Connection decided on the tune for our final nitrous dyno run of the day. The statement was an inside joke based on something a customer had once said to Brian, but the real joke is that nitrous gets a bad rap among the uninitiated—one that’s totally undeserved. Nitrous doesn’t destroy engines, bad tuning and getting greedy do.

Chrome is great. It’s one of those classic finishes that never goes out of style. It’s also something that we get to revel in on vintage cars since it’s present in abundance from bumpers, to trim, to the interior, and even under the hood.