One advantage to building a rod or custom from a late-'40s or early '50s vehicle is that most American automakers had developed and fitted their cars with independent front suspensions by this time. The downside is that many of those early IFS arrangements wer
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Check out for tips and tricks for this 1929 ThunderRoad Pickup as well was the mods that went into this rod inside Rod & Custom Magazine.
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Read about the Hotrod & Restoration Trade Show held every February in Indianapolis that features high-tech hot rods inside Rod & Custom Magazine.
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Check out some tips and tricks about Hot Rod Solid-Axle such as the steering damper from So-Cal Speed Shop - Rod & Custom Magazine
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Check out Tips& Tricks to Keep your hot rod Roadster Clean - Rod And Custom Magazine
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Elsewhere in this issue, we explore some interesting alternatives for building a cool custom '50s ride. Whether your preferences run tastefully traditional or sleek and contemporary, mid-'50s passenger cars are an incredibly...
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When guys like Norm Gabrowski and Andy Brizio kicked off the "Fad T" craze back in the '60s and '70s, the little fiberglass buckets with giant rear meats and oversized...
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A technical article from Hot Rod magazine providing advice from experts on improving the performance of your car.
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There's more to car shows than gawking at polished chrome and glistening paint. If you keep your eyes open, you'll find an unending supply of great ideas you can take home to your own ride. And while some of us may be prejudiced against garish Pro Street cars,
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If you're working with a small-displacement engine, it can be tough to achieve compression ratios even as high as 10:0:1. If you're working for every little point of compression you can get, it can be beneficial to order your pistons with no valve
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Frankly we’re tired of hearing it. Rodders with prize-winning high-tech cars explaining why they can’t drive them, and guys with low-budget street weaponry belly-aching that the high-end cars are unstreetable. Both arguments are equally bogus, and we
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Quick, make a mental list of famous Ford V-8s. The flathead’s a no-brainer, and so are the side-oiler 427 and Cammer. Then there’s the Cleveland, FE big-blocks, Boss 302…. The list goes on. But we’ll guess only the most die-hard Blue Oval f
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Chrysler’s first hemispherical-headed V-8 engines seemed light-years ahead of the competition when introduced for the ’51 models, and stayed on the leading edge of performance into the ’60s. But by the mid-’60s, the new 426 Hemi made the ea
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When you hear the word customizing, you probably imagine a chopped and channeled ’50 Merc or an overdone Monte Carlo with hydraulics and way too much gold trim. But customizing can also be used sparingly to make a hot rod just a little bit different from
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We recently attended an engine-building school at the Reher-Morrison race plant in Arlington, Texas. What's the big deal with a school? Simple–Reher-Morrison peeled open the doors of its professional engine building vault, and laid out virtually eve
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Pinstriping has been around longer than most of us realize. It’s a decorative art form that dates back beyond the horse-drawn buggy days. Ornamental hand-striping was last factory-applied on an American car in the late ’30s. By the mid-’40s it w
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Rough Riders Bottoming out is not only aggravating and jarring, it’s a not-too-subtle sign of an improperly set up coilover suspension. According to Gary Heidt at Heidt’s Hot Rod Shop, who knows a few things about independent front suspension, botto
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Click on the sidebars below for tips and tricks.
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No matter how much power your car has, no matter how beautiful the paint, no matter how efficient the engine, and no matter how comfortable the interior, it’s nothing if the foundation isn’t sound (kind of sounds like a house, doesn’t it?). It&#
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Practically by definition, hot rods are prone to overheating. (After all, they’re not lukewarm rods, right?) Of course, to prevent the occasional boil-over, you can do the obvious, such as turn on the heater (to dissipate heat from the block) or drive at
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What separates the neighborhood mechanical hero from the hack with a hammer and an adjustable wrench? Tools. How many times have you been presented with a baffling situation and wondered how in the world you were going to handle it when one of your pals whips
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Talk about an exercise in frustration. Go into any mass merchandiser, walk down the car care product isle and try to pick out the proper cleaning supplies for your hot rod. You’ll find dozens of companies each offering two or three polishes and the same n
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Power is what hot rodding is all about. The classic approach is to take a stock or near-stock engine and tweak it until it thumps. But what should you do first? There are literally hundreds of roads to choose from, but a little forethought and planning will cr
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Driving hot rods should always be fun, especially when you’re young. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way. Many first-timer hot rods end up being powered by small-block engines that’ve been loaded with a 750 double-pumper carb, an
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