Chucklhead Rides the Rods!

Hot Rod King #1
Fall 1952

Joe Chucklhead wandered into the garage about the time I was putting the new head on my Ford V-8. I stopped him just as he was about to flick some ashes into the open cylinders, and sat him down in a chair against the wall. I made sure there were no parts within his reach. Things have a way of coming apart when Joe is around. He shook his head accusingly as he glanced back and forth from the engine to my sweat covered forehead.

"I don't see what you guys get out of all this work. You knock yourselves out every weekend for months, for what? Maybe you get a few more horsepower or better pickup—what's that mean? My little ol' car gets me around okay, and I never waste any time working on her."

I shuddered at the thought of his "little ol' car," old long before its time. You could hear it backfiring through the cracked muffler six blocks away as it staggered along dragging after it a gigantic cloud of pungent blue smoke. The suffering thing should really be called a diesel since it burned more oil than gas. A guy who drove a monster like that could never appreciate the throaty roar of a dual or the acceleration that knocks you back in the seat and holds you there. I started to tell him—but his grasshopper mind had already jumped to something else.

"And why bother with all this work when you can go out and buy a real hot engine? I was reading in this magazine here you can buy this Offenhauser engine, right out of the crate it comes in, and put out 225 hp and only weighs 400 lbs. Get one of those and keep your hands clean!"

The thought of laying my hands, either clean or dirty, on an Offy was enough to make me drool. But I put the thought out of my mind just as fast as it came in. I had invested about $250 in my crate to turn it into an average road job. For another $250 I could work it up into a "full house" competition job. This kind of money I can scrape together through a year's time, but I wondered where Genius Joe thought I could get the $3500 for a new Offenhauser.

Chucklhead liked this new idea of buying an engine all wrapped up in cellophane like a candy bar. It was a simple idea, he could understand it. His eyes glowed with joy, he was going to straighten us rodders out. He, Joe Chucklhead, would bring the benefit of his glowing intelligence into the darkness of a thousand shadowy garages.

"Don't waste all your time and money on that puny little Ford block! Why do you know—," his voice was lowered with the importance of his statements—the sage bestowing wisdom on the student, "why do you know that you can get that much horsepower out of a reconditioned Packard stock—and it only costs $200!"

I shuddered slightly. I should just see those 200 or 300 extra pounds crunching down on the chassis of my tiny roadster. The thing you always shoot for when hopping up a rod is maximum acceleration and speed for a given horsepower output. Acceleration is a matter of inertia as well as power. Say you put the same horsepower engine in a light car and in a heavy and start them off at the same time. The light car will pull away from the heavy job—it's just a simple matter of having less inertia to drag up to speed.

When you buy the big engine you get both horsepower and weight. When you soup up a small engine you can double the horsepower with only a slight increase in weight. An extra carb or a racing head only add a few pounds to the total weight of the car. The time and money you put into a souping job gets you not only a powerful engine, but a small powerful engine.

I stopped my day-dreaming just in time to beat Joe to the radiator core that I had overlooked earlier. He seemed a little unhappy at stepping on the concrete floor rather than the delicate copper tubing, but he soon cheered up. He gave me a knowing leer and pointed his thumb towards Henry, who was working on his car at the other side of the garage.

Henry was just installing new straight-through exhausts, just about the final stage in his souping job. He was warming the engine up for a road test and it was acting like a real high-strung thoroughbred. Henry ground the starter, then engine caught, grumbled in its throat for a few seconds and then died. When it finally started it idled irregularly—he kept coaxing it to keep it turning over.

Joe held one hand over his ear and motioned towards the door. He must have thought, incorrectly, that I preferred his noise to that of Henry's hot rod. I went with him in the hope that there might be some way I could lose him out there. Also, there was nothing for him to step on in the yard.

He lit a cigarette and dropped the match into the oily waste barrel before telling me what was wrong with Henry's rod.

"Too noisy! It sounds like a threshing machine stuck in a wire fence. And look how hard the crate is to start! And when it does start it doesn't idle smoothly and it's noisy—no, that's not for me! An engine that sounds like that couldn't be much good."

How can you explain to a guy like Joe that the engine sounded like that because it was good. When you soup and engine you soup for power, nothing else. The special grind crankshaft, carburetors and other speed equipment do the job they are intended to do and that's all. Hot rods are the perfect example of the conservation of energy and you don't get something for nothing. When you gain the extra power you lose the easier starting and idling. Because you are getting more work out of the engine for every instant of its operation you will find it wearing out faster. Hot rodders know this and it is one of the things taken into consideration whenever modifications are to be made.

Joe was leaning on his heap now, or rather in it, since his hand had gone through one of the rust spots on the fender that he had long left unattended. If I could get him into the car there was always a faint chance that he might drive away. With this idea I pumped up a false smile and patted the cracked windshield affectionately.

"How does your little ol' car idle, Joe? I seem to remember you having the same trouble a while back."

"Whoever told you that was no gentleman!" he said, forcing the door open so he could climb in. "I take good care of this little ol' car and it takes care of me."

He mashed the starter and flooded the carburetor, at the same time pumping the choke. This heroic technique had some effect. Faintly through the cloud of raw gas that filled the yard I could hear the engine catching, cylinder by cylinder. He must have thought five out of six was enough because he began to race the cold engine. I could almost see the grooves he was putting in the bearings.

Joe forced her into gear, grinding about a pound of teeth off. He shouted to me as the car moved forward haltingly.

"You rodders ought to wise up! Be relaxed with your car the way I am! You'll find that my way will get you there just as fast!"

By this time his car was really moving. I stood watching in amazement as he tore away down the highway at his top speed of 37 miles per hour.

THE END