Next time you’re in Las Vegas, check out the Shelby Museum.

This past spring, my wife and I made the drive up to Las Vegas to see our friend (and PHR contributor) Kenny Wayne Shepherd play at the Orleans Hotel. The sold-out show was fantastic, but left us with plenty of free time during the middle of the day. Lucky for us, there are several car-oriented things to do in Sin City if you’re up for it. There’s the Strip At Las Vegas, as well as the Speedway. If nothing’s going on there, you can always take the gang carting, like we did. But the coolest thing we did was take a tour of the Shelby Auto plant, which is in North Las Vegas, nestled right up against the race track.

On our weekend, NASCAR was in town, so the place was closed. I had to pull a few strings to get in, but normally, the Shelby factory and Shelby museum are open to the public. (You may want to call ahead on your next trip to Vegas because big race weekends usually shut the place down.) Normally, the museum is open from 8am to 4pm, Monday through Friday, and tours of the adjacent plant happen at 10:30 am every day. (You can call Shelby at 702-942-7325).

At the museum, you can see the very first Shelby Cobra, as well as many other significant Cobras and Mustangs built over the years. Shelby also manufactures supercars based on the newest version of the Mustang, and we got to see the top offerings there in the museum. Shelby also handcrafts new Cobras and the line of Terlinga classic Mustangs in the adjacent workshop area. We got a chance to check out several cars in progress, and we were all impressed with the level of craftsmanship. A big thanks to Gary Patterson of Shelby for taking the time to give our group a super good time!

Make any transmission swap easy with this simple, inexpensive must-have tool.

When I first saw this, my immediate reaction was, “why didn’t someone think of this a long time ago?” Powerhouse Products has just come out with a simple kit that will convert your ordinary floor jack into a specialized transmission jack, and it retails for about $79.95. The Transjak transmission floor jack adapter kit can be used to install any popular automatic or manual transmission. You can turn, tilt, raise, and lower your transmission safely in your own garage using most popular floor jacks. The central support adapter fits into the center post hole of most floor jacks (where the jack’s cradle support normally goes). The Transjak kit even comes with hold-down chains and hooks to keep your trans steady while it’s being tilted. The part number for the Transjak is Powerhouse No. POW351500. For more info, call Powerhouse at 800-872-7223. 

There are many things to be aware of when buying a new car. Here are some that can make a huge difference.

I recently bought a project car. It is in great shape, I looked over every inch possible and really got a good deal.


Unfortunately, I was not aware of the fact that the owner of the car had not done the paperwork to register it when he bought it years ago. So this car was not in his name and had not been registered for many years. When it acquires a new owner who does do the proper paperwork, they are responsible for all the past registration fees. Now this is fine, if you know about it in the beginning. Looking back, if I had known about the near $600.00 in registration fees, I would have used that for leverage on reducing the price.

Make sure to investigate these things!

With the high price of popular Chryslers, could the full-sized C-body cars be the best bargain out there? 

If you follow my blog, or read Popular Hot Rodding, you probably already know I bought a ’75 Laguna for our next big build-up series. But you may not know that I was actually looking for an A-body Mopar when that happened. One of my shopping forays took me to one of my favorite places: the Pomona Swap Meet.

While at Pomona one early morning, I spotted this grandpa-fresh ’67 Plymouth Fury III. These full-sized cars—built on the Chrysler’s long-wheelbase C-body platform—are not all that popular due to the limited number of parts available. After all, these were not muscle cars, they were ostensibly luxury cars. They were big, heavy, and lumbering. Unless you can find one with all it’s tweaky trim pieces present and accounted for, you’ll never finish a project like this. Other people must agree with that, because you never see them at shows or races. Nevertheless, some C-bodies—like this ’67 Plymouth—had bold, beautiful lines. Often times, the styling of the mid-sized B-body cars mimic’ed that of these big beasts. To my eye, this Fury resembles the Satellite and Belvedere of the same year, especially in the roof line.

Ultimately, I chose to pass on this straight, rust-free luxury liner, in spite of its $3,500 asking price, and drive-away-now condition. It was loaded with its original 383 big-block too, making it even more valuable to anybody wanting to part it out. Yeah, I chickened out because of the difficulty level and rising price of gas, but I sure hope somebody picked it up and gave it a good home!

Waterspots begone!

The time I lived in northern California, I never had any issue with washing my car. The weather was almost always good and the water was soft.

I moved to Wyoming for school after High School, and started having problems. The water there wasn’t as clear as California water, and half the time would freeze before you could dry it off.

That is when I bought myself the Mr Clean AutoDry system. I wasn’t sure it would work; many of the things you see on TV aren’t as great as they make them out to be.

In southern California the water leaves really bad spots, and can sometimes look more dirty after you wash it then before if you don’t get it dry fast enough. When I try and dry my truck out in the sun, there is just no way win that race.

To my surprise, the AutoDry system worked great and I could walk away from the truck after rinsing. I strongly recommend the product; most of my friends have them now.

And no I am not sponsored by Mr. Clean. (although I am interested!)

Schwarzenegger was proud of his H1 Hummer back in the May ’93 issue of  PHR.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I stumbled upon this old PHR news item written by long-time automotive journalist, Scott Oldham. It tells the typical Hollywood tale of special entitlement, where a movie star—Arnold Schwarzenegger—is given royal treatment by a company—AM General—which then places the financial burden on the backs of its customers—in this case, the US Army, and, you guessed it, taxpayers.

What Oldham couldn’t have known when he wrote the piece is that AM General paid for that Hummer. I know this because my uncle worked at AM General at the time (he headed up the engineering team tasked with making it compliant with Federal standards), and worked on this very project. In fact, I drove a Corvette-powered Hummer just like this one at AM General’s Livonia, Michigan, headquarters around the same time.

Notice the bitterness in my tone? Now that Terminator’s the governor of California, he’s made the ultimate flip-flop, and teamed up with every environmental group he can find. His agenda? Eradicate fossil-fuel burning vehicles from the roads in a misguided attempt to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Repeat after me: “carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.” For the record, I don’t buy into global warming, namely because absolutely none of the global climate change over the last four billion years was caused by man. But that’s a different topic. Whether you believe in man-made climate change or not is immaterial to my argument: Schwarzenegger is a man who clearly practices the “do as I say” school of management, not the “do as I do,” model. The Flip-flopinator is a jet-setting, energy-swilling hedonist who once again is making those of us in California carry his water, while he and his entourage cruise in comfort.      

I personally don’t have access to a paint booth, so I make the most of it and tackle as many rattle-can paint jobs as possible.

Project Ideas:

Paint old headers with high temp paint

Engine bay (inner fenders, firewall, brake master cyl)

Trunk (splatter paint)

Molding (black for custom look)

Dashboard

MSD distributer cap/coil (for sneaky stock look)

Aluminum heads, water pump, and radiator (same as above)



Prep:

Prep is responsible for 80% of the final product so it is important to take the necessary steps to get the paint to stick and look good.

I start of with a thorough sanding then a light mist of primer to serve as a tack coat. I put on a couple more coats of primer to cover any color inconsistencies, then 1 or 2 coats of the final color. Make sure to read the instructions on the can for ‘flash time’ to know how long to wait between coats. Also, make sure to do even 50% overlapping pattern to get a nice even finish.

When you spend thousands to get better handling, why stop at the tires?

Everybody poo-poos R-compound tires for the street. In every single case I’ve heard the complaint, it was from somebody who invariably hasn’t run a set. Liz Miles got me thinking about this a few blogs back, and I want to expand upon it here. Let me put it this way: If you spend several thousand dollars on suspension parts, brakes, steering, chassis, wheels, and tires, why would you stop at the very place where it makes the most difference: where the rubber meets the road?

You can buy a set of Nitto R-compound NT01 or NT555 RII tires for about $700, which is about the same price as a regular hard-compound set of tires. I’ll mention that these grooved tires are ostensibly for competition in the rain (unshaved), and I’ve used them like that plenty of times. In fact, when I lived in New Jersey, I had R-compound Nittos on my daily driver, and when I say “daily,” I mean, rain and snow. Don’t even try to make the argument with me that these are for summer weather only. I’ve used them in all conditions, and I’ve discovered otherwise, despite the disclaimers.

The first set of R-compounds I had lasted 17,000 miles. Among those miles were several drag outings and four open-track weekends. I sold that car before I got to change them again, so I don’t know how long they would’ve lasted, but it was an awesome car to drive while I had it, mostly because of those tires.

Fast forward two years ago. I had another brand of tires on my ’76 Camaro—which weren’t R-compounds—and was driving to work one day on the highway. The car in front slammed on brakes. Of course, I had a killer suspension, huge brakes, quick-ratio steering, ad nauseum. But my tires didn’t grip. I locked the fronts up, and slid right into the back bumper of that Toyota. A set of R-compound tires would have produced a far different result. I was in luck that day, because the Camaro was scheduled to be put on a truck and shipped out for paint work the following week, but what if this scenario had played out after the car was finished?

You can do what you want, but I will never put anything but R-compound tires on my high-performance street car, ever. I can’t afford not to.

Welding is a skill that not everyone has, but comes in really handy when you need it.

Many of the projects performed on cars in these magazines have some minor thing that has to be welded or fabricated that can keep us from tackling the project ourselves.

Picking up a cheap used welder and a book can expand the possibilities immensely. This isn’t just true for car projects.

I have made all sorts of cool shelving, tables, fixtures and other household/garage items that make my life easier.

Welding is a money saver too. You can shave a lot of money off the cost of your project when you don’t need to outsource any work.

I have made a bunch of furniture and art out of scrap metal that I can sell for a few extra bucks as well!

Lincoln Electric

 See some of my projects

HERE

How come you can never find what you want at a swap meet, but always find what someone else needs?

I travel to a bunch of events every year, and one of the first things I always hit up is the swap meet. Sometimes it’s just a few vendors, and other times it’s a humongous parcel of acreage. Either way, you stand about as much chance of finding something you want as winning the lottery. In 15 years of combing swap meets, I’ve only found something I was looking for once. I bought it, then ironically, lost it. After safely squirrelling it away in my garage, I couldn't find it come time to use it!

The key to swap meet success is to have so many project cars going at once that your odds of finding what you need is increased. Yeah, that’s not an affordable reality for a lot of people, but having a bunch of friends all with different projects is kinda the same thing. Next time you go to the swap meet, go in mass and help each other!

If you are looking for technical info, opinions, or just some friends; internet forums are a great resource.

It's hard to even imagine what I would do without the internet. It has virtually everything you need to know inside. I regularly bring my computer in the garage with me when I am working on my car in case I need a little extra information.

Forums are a great source. Though google search, threads from these message boards come up and you find others asking the same questions you have. It's also a great place to run ideas by others, and people with more experience can help you refine your ideas.

Not just  for searching for answers, forums are an easy way to get in touch with other people who share your interests. Just remember, there is a percent of these people who use the internet to express their negative feelings about things too, so be ready for some of that.

This full-page ad in Popular Hot Rodding dates from 1979, and really brings back memories.

I recently spent a day going through the old Popular Hot Rodding archives. I plan to bring you some of the more intriguing tidbits as blogs over the next few weeks, and this old ad from Hurst really made the memories flood back. The ad features a guy in a ’78 or ’79 Camaro, who stops to chat up a cute girl, presumably at the local cruise scene. The inference is that having a cool set of shifters will help you pick up girls.

I remember checking out a used ’84 Hurst Olds Cutlass 442 at a Pontiac dealer around 1988 or ’89. It had the same Hurst Lightning Rods as in the ad, only they were factory installed. I’d never seen them before, and immediately associated them with the levers of a Lenco transmission—which is exactly what Hurst intended. The car salesman gave me a 10-minute demo before he let me drive the car. There was an elaborate procedure for upshifting and downshifting (according to him), and if I did it wrong, I was told, the trans might break! That 307 Olds motor couldn’t peel the skin off butterscotch pudding, and that salesman tried over and over to light the tires on the 1-2 shift, but to no avail.

The bottom line was that this was a very fun product, and it really got the driver involved. The Lightning Rods were more fun than a barrel full of monkeys, and turned an automatic transmission back into a manual.

It’s high time somebody remembers one of our industry’s best editors—before everybody completely forgets.

Let me start by saying that I never knew Pete Pesterre—never even met him to the best of my recollection. I had only been in the business a scant three years when Pete met with his premature fate. People I talk to who knew Pete say he was a whirlwind force in the industry. He loved racing, he loved building cars, and he loved being the editor of Popular Hot Rodding. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because you probably read his stories and columns.

Pete Pesterre was an anchor at PHR for many years, working under the Argus Publishing umbrella starting some time in the 1970s. According to a mutual friend, Terry Cole (formerly of Super Chevy magazine), Pete died sometime around the Christmas vacation break of 1993 – 94. He was an avid dirt bike rider among other things, and suffered a fatal collision with another rider while out in the desert, far away from proper medical care.

Pete’s last editorial column was in the February 1994 issue (see photo), where he discusses all the cool project cars PHR is planning to build. He mentions that no other magazine has done more project cars—and you know something, nothing has changed in all those intervening years!

I decided to write this because after doing an internet search, absolutely nothing showed up about Pete and his notable career. I hope this changes that. One of the things Pete is most famous for is exposing the NBC Dateline fraud of the exploding Chevy truck fuel tank. In that scandal, it was discovered that NBC had rigged the Chevy truck with toy rocket motors set to detonate at the moment of impact. (They actually exploded a split second before, which can be seen on the slow-motion video playback.) NBC’s Dateline still suffers from a lack of credibility to this day. (It’s a little-known fact that Chevy actually gave Pete a free truck as a token of thanks.)

I’m embarrassed to say that the publisher of PHR at the time did not see a reason to mention Pete’s death in PHR at all. The March 1994 issue came out, and Pete was just erased from history. After not having an editor at the helm for seven months, a replacement was found, but that fellow (who shall remain nameless because he’s not at fault) was never allowed to say anything about Pete’s whereabouts, or lack thereof. Let’s all reflect for a moment on the bright, short career of one of the best!

Everyone has a tool in their collection that they are really glad they spent the extra bucks, and to me, that’s my set of gear wrenches.

My tool collection didn’t happen over night, it started with a little lunch box with not much more than an adjustable wrench, screw drivers, and a roll of tape. Since then, I have graduated to a 13-drawer tool box filled to the brim with tools of the trade.

Of all the necessities and niceties, the gear wrenches are the best investment I have made. There have been countless times I have used them and wondered how on earth I would have gotten the same project done this century with a standard wrench.

The only thing that bothered me about them in the beginning is that since the model I had didn’t have a reversing mechanism, you needed to flip it over to change direction. That is fine but every time you use it you have to stick your finger in the box-end and crank it over to see which way it wants to spin. My solution to that was to lay all the wrenches on the ground facing the way that they would tighten a bolt then spray paint the handles. That way, when you grab it off the ground, you can one handedly know if it is flipped for tighten or loosen.


Try these things out!

I spotted this hilarious “For Sale” sign at the Pomona swap meet this past spring.

I got out of bed at 3:30am that Sunday morning to get to the Pomona Swap Meet early. I was not in a good mood at first, but quickly got excited when I saw rows of hundreds of cars for sale. My mission: find an A-body Mopar for a project car. As you know, I ended up with a mint ’75 Chevy Laguna S-3, but I looked at a lot of Chryslers first, one of which was this ’69 Valiant two-door post car.

A quick look at the price on the sign, and a cursory look around the car was all it took to know the seller was totally out to lunch. His only hope was to find someone dumber than he was; a shoddy repaint, buckets of bondo, wavy doors and panels, rusted out subframes, and a less-than-desirable set of options made it a losing proposition all around. This was a $3,000 car on a good day.

I did, however, get a kick out of the sign. It’s loaded with spelling and grammatical errors. I count at least nine mistakes. Like I said, it was early in the morning, so maybe I should cut him some slack, huh?

When you spend tens of thousands of dollars on your car, why put cheap tires on it?

For a long time, my Camaro didn’t have the suspension or the power to benefit from real-quality tires. The brakes weren’t powerful enough to even get a wheel to lock up, so spending a lot on tires didn’t seem important.

Now though, I have put countless hours and dollars into it, I see things differently. I traded my 400-tread-wear tires for BFGoodrich R1’s; a barely DOT road race slick.

I was skeptical at first. I didn’t know how long they would last or what might happen if it starts to sprinkle. So far, I have two track days, an autocross event, and a couple thousand street miles on these tires and they are still technically legal!

If you ever have to make a sudden maneuver, it’s nice to know that the tires won’t let go.

So bottom line; why not have the best tires you can afford?

p.s: you can run BFG dragradials on the front too!

Source:
BFGoodrich
www.BFGoodrich.com

Sometimes, when you are a frequent attendee, time can go slowly and seeing all the cars makes you really want to drive. Good Guy’s have solved that dilemma with making driving part of the event.

I have been going to Good Guy’s car shows since I could drive at 16 with my Camaro. I attended every Pleasanton, CA event since then. After my move to southern California, I couldn’t make it to Pleasanton anymore but found the Costa Mesa show to be less than 10 miles away, even better!

This was my first time to a car show since I moved, apart from the local Saturday donut show. This was also my first time at one of Good Guy’s revamped events featuring the Street Challenge autocross.

Cones are set up to form a course on an open flat of pavement. You drive the course as fast as you can to earn the fastest time. Unlike the SCCA events I attended, there weren’t a lot of sponsors, and the intention of the event wasn’t so much to win, but to have fun and give the attendees something to watch. I competed against many cars like my own along with many I would never picture on an autocross course.

When I wasn’t driving, I found myself drawn to watch like many others (shown in the pictures). Sometimes arriving at gate open and leaving at closing time, leaves you with a lot of time to fill and not a lot of activity to fill it. The Street Challenge solved that problem!

Attend one if you can!

www.good-guys.com for event listings

Artist Chris Gray gives you a look into what we’re thinking for our ’75 Chevy Laguna project car.

You won’t be able to get the full details of our new project car—Project Talladega—until the October issue of Popular Hot Rodding hits the stands sometime in late August, but here’s a glimpse of what we’re working on. After picking up our ’75 Laguna S-3 for five grand, we didn’t waste any time scheming.

We wanted to nail down the visuals fast, so we turned to artist, Chris Gray. Earlier, Chris had rendered a “what if” design for a ’70 Nova, done up Trans Am style. The suede paint job he did on that Nova really caught our attention because he really hit the look on the head. When we got the Laguna, we thought of him first for our rendering.

So we’re floating the illustration here first for you guys to see. What do you think about the graphic treatment, such as the satin paint? What about the sponsor logos? What about Neil Bonnett’s car number and name on the roof?

The Digital 6 offers some great features over the 6AL unit to make your car easier to tune and upgrade.

I have run the MSD 6AL for 5 years in my Camaro without any problems, but when the Digital 6 was called to my attention, I had to make the swap.

The Digital 6 box is the most power full digital ignition system of its kind and draws much less amperage than the alternatives. It also has two rev limiters, one for staging and one for high rpm limiting. The great thing about these limiters, is that they are adjusted by a dial rather than swapping chips marked with a specific rpm. This is great for experimenting with shift points. If you are using nitrous this is a great piece since it has a built in retard function for single stage nitrous use. Like all of MSD’s products, it is very easy to incorporate other electronic devices such as shift light, timing controllers, tachometers, and whatever else you may need on your street or race car.

The case of the control box is a slightly different shape than the 6AL and uses a different bolt pattern. If you do not wish to drill new holes in your firewall, or wherever it is you had the box mounted, you can make a simple bracket to relocate it as I did.

I run my ignition box in the glove box of my car, so I noticed right away that there is reduced noise, as the 6AL made a slight electrical hum. I strongly recommend this unit to anyone with a street car who wants race performance!

Looking back, I can’t believe how badly I treated our project car!

The other day, a reader sent me a photo—the lead shot in this blog—that reminded me how I used to treat my ’76 Camaro project car. One thing you can plainly see is that I’m standing on top of the roof with a tripod and camera. One thing you can’t see is that the tripod had worn-out rubber feet—the aluminum tube of each leg was digging right through the roof’s paint and scraping into metal.

In a way, I long for the old days, when I could just go out and abuse my Camaro. It was fun not to worry about anything—just go out and drive it (or use it as a photo platform). Now that Project g-28 has been given a paint job that cost more than I made in 1995, I’m a little more circumspect about driving it. And I certainly wouldn’t stand on the roof with a tripod either!

Thanks to Larry Noble for sending me this candid photo our April 2004 cover shoot. It sure brought back good memories!

I took out what felt like 40-lbs of stock seat whose springs were sagging from age and use, and replacing it with a light weight bolstered unit.

I have done many, many, modifications to my car, and usually they come one at a time since I drive the car so much. This isolates each change, making it easy to see the changes it has made.

I took out what felt like 40-lbs of stock seat whose springs were sagging from age and use, and replacing it with a light weight bolstered unit .

I chose a ridgid back, Corbeau Forza seat because from what I have heard from pro-race guys, ‘if it reclines, its not a real race seat.’ Corbeau offers a bracket to mount the seat in the stock location. I figured sometimes, it’s worth it just to buy the bracket instead of spending the time to make this one.

My first trackday after changing the seat, I noticed a huge difference in control and how I felt at the end of the day. Usually my arms are just toasted and they were only slightly sore. The height of the seat was slightly higher than what I was used to because of my old sagging seat, which made it easier to see the corners of the car.

Aluminum gets all the glory when it comes to cylinder heads, but are you really better off?

I find it funny that there is a knee-jerk reaction to aluminum cylinder heads. People automatically assume that anything made of aluminum is better than anything made out of iron. As it turns out, there are some pretty good reasons why that ends up being true in most cases, but it’s not empirical by any stretch.

Aluminum as a cylinder head material is often better, because it’s a far more easy material to use. Small boutique companies can make specialized, low-volume products, with a wide variety of combustion chamber shapes, port volumes, and so forth. That doesn’t equal a superior product, it only enables a higher level of competition in the marketplace. As my uncle, a doctor, used to say, half of all doctors graduated at the bottom half of their class.

I am really jazzed about Engine Quest’s line of iron cylinder heads. EQ has them cast in Australia by a company that pays super attention to detail. They only cast iron cylinder heads, and it shows in their product. Unlike an aluminum component, casting an iron one is a far greater investment in tooling. Here, it pays to have superior techniques and materials, such as the smooth, fine “green” sand, native to Australia. EQ uses Flow-Cast technology to make every finished head flow as if it’s been ported. That’s because precision flow modeling and mold-making techniques have been employed. Finishing things off are phosphor bronze guides, and CNC valve-guide and seat work.

Because EQ needs to make a huge number of heads to make a profit, there is a need to hit the sweet spot in the market, namely, the rebuilder, and DIY performance engine builder. In most cases, that means street applications with stock displacement, and lots of bottom-end torque. It also means having a dirt-cheap price—in most cases around $250 per head, bare. Last year, you may remember we built a Vortec-based 350 with some unported EQ iron heads, and made 447 hp on 91 octane. Now that’s the kind of performance I’m talking about. EQ makes a targeted selection of small-block Chevy, Ford, and Mopar iron heads for the street that always amaze us with great power for the dollar. So if you’re looking for an inexpensive small-block head for your street car, and haven’t considered iron, I recommend you call Engine Quest at 800-426-8771.

Gas prices got you down? Performance perk you up? The solution could have 2 wheels

With gas prices increasing, it’s getting harder and harder to afford to take your 11-second V8 street car out for a spin. Wouldn't it be nice though if you could buy a vehicle faster than that, that costs less to operate than a Honda Civic? What if its buy-in price was less than that of a motor for your car?

I have a 30-mile commute each way to work, and driving my ‘68 Camaro would cost me hundreds of dollars a month to sit in LA traffic to and from work.

Here is the alternative. Sport-bikes. I know they aren't as accepted in the hot-rod community as the traditional domestic motorcycles, but they are fast, fun, and get great gas mileage. There is a whole culture that comes with them too. Just like your local weekly (if you are lucky) car meets, there are groups of sport-bike riders who come to show off their toys and talk about riding and wrenching. These people are just like us. They spend their spare time tinkering with their ride and detailing its every nook and cranny.

At 45 mpg, access to the carpool lane, and performance hardly met by street cars, sport-bikes are a great way to save money and enjoy every minute of it.

Ever wonder how those crazy action photos are taken? Here’s how ours was shot.

When you see our August 2008 issue on the newsstand in the coming days, you can be forgiven for uttering a sigh of disbelief. The depiction of Jay Biondo’s ’67 Nova cruising along at 90 mph doing a smoking burnout, all while the camera is in perfect focus front to back, is perhaps a bit too far fetched for even the most jaded readers.

Rest easy, things didn’t actually go down the way it looked. Here’s what really happened. Ace lensman Robert McGaffin actually compiled the final shot in a digital photography program called Photoshop. It’s built from four different shots that were combined, then massaged.

Robert starts with a rig that’s made up of aluminum poles, a hinge, and some strong magnets. The rig’s magnets attach under the chassis, and the rig holds the camera steady. The first image taken is a static shot with the car standing still. For the second shot, Robert has an assistant roll the car forward or backwards at a very slow pace, while he snaps a long exposure to blur the ground, wheels, and trees. For this cover, Robert also had car owner, Jay Biondo, do a smoky burnout with the camera still attached. The last of the four shots was another static shot with the hood removed.

Robert then combined elements of all four images in the final picture, and touched things up—such as removing the aluminum pole from the image. Nice Job Robert! And you can read all about Jay Biondo’s street-legal 9-second Chevy II in our August issue, on sale everywhere June 24.

Forgeline's new Snowflake style wheel that is true to their performance heritage with style

Walking around the car show or the paddock at the track, I always see two extremes of wheels. The high-bling super polished wheels that weigh a ton, or the generic plain-Jane five-spoke lightweight wheels. So it’s refreshing to see Forgeline find a middle ground, and produce this ultra light-weight wheel with unique styling. Derived from Pontiac’s Snowflake wheel of late ‘70s, the wheel got the period-correct feel with high-tech materials and manufacturing practices.

I’ve always liked the originals, but sometimes when the style of the car you’re building surpasses the quality of that era, the stocker wheels just won’t cut it. Sizing is also a problem. Back then, 15-inch diameter wheels were pretty standard, whereas 17-inch wheels are on the small side for most people. These Forgeline Snowflakes are currently available in 19-inch diameter, and range between 7.5 and 14 inches wide. Most of the fancy front clips and fabricated suspensions accept a much wider wheel than stock, as well.

There are other companies out there making larger vintage-style wheels that look really cool, but if you’re looking for the race-winning performance edge that Forgeline is known for, that has the vintage Pontiac look nailed, this is your wheel. You can find out more by logging on to www.forgeline.com.