Trick Part Of The Week II
If you remember my column from last month, it spelled out the trials and tribulations of getting the engine together for our stocker wagon. The good news is that the car made three complete passes in qualifying! This was quite a feat, as we'd loaded the car onto the trailer with only a burnout in the parking lot of my shop. Daniel qualified 0.25 second under the index. This isn't saying much except that it was my first class-legal engine and, as I told the NHRA tech officials, the engine was "laughably legal!" Like I said last month, I have a newfound respect for the racers and engine builders in Stock Eliminator. The best part of the whole trip was the 30 minutes I got to spend with the tech department, discussing the finer points of engine teardown and what they looked for. This will help me find some more horsepower in the future.
Back to the first round: The car wasn't a bolt of lightning, but it would leave quite well off of a 2,600-rpm two-step rev limiter, and this seems to be where we ran into some problems. Daniel was paired up with a C-stock automatic Camaro with a 375hp 396. This car was dialed in at 10.79 and we were dialed at 12.95. With the burnouts complete and both cars staged, the tree came down and the mighty wagon crawled off the starting line like a turtle, picking up speed about 30 feet out! I stood at the starting line in disbelief. The toughest part was walking past all our fellow competitors back to the pits, with them all asking what happened.
Back at the pits, I asked Daniel what he thought had happened. He said, "It was like it was loaded up, and it cleaned out about 30 feet out." Jumping in the car, I fired it up and everything seemed fine. I set the two-step and went to full throttle. Lo and behold, the rev limiter was holding the engine at 1,600 rpm, not 2,600 rpm like it was supposedly set to. Our "trick part of the week" adjustable rev limiter box is mounted in the glovebox for easy access and upon popping open the glovebox, we saw that the 1,000-rpm wheel of the limiter box was knocked down to 1,000 rpm, not 2,000 rpm! No wonder the big old wagon wouldn't move. The only way the box could have been changed would be that when the tire gauge was tossed in the glovebox it hit the rpm box. We've raced the car for almost six months and over 100 runs down the track without this ever happening. What luck, first round-and Daniel's first National event. I guess it's fitting; I lost my first round at my first National too. What do they say about things like this building character? Hopefully, it won't happen much more to Daniel. We don't need any other characters in our family.
Wobble Spark
Q I've just installed an Edelbrock Performer rpm manifold on my 350 for my '69 Chevelle. I noticed when I went to install the distributor that it fit loosely in the inlet manifold and it wobbles all over the place. Is there any fix for this? Thanks for your help.Billy Jones
Via e-mail
A The distributor hole in the production inlet manifolds of small-block and big-block Chevys is quite oversized. Edelbrock machines them even larger than the production inlet manifolds to take into account the variables of engine buildups. You may have noticed that the distributor doesn't sit perfectly straight up and down in the engine; it is offset to the right side of the engine by approximately 4 degrees. When you mill cylinder heads, cut the deck surfaces on the block, mill the intake manifold surface to match the cylinder heads, or use different thickness head and/or intake gaskets, you change the location of the distributor hole in the block and its relationship to the manifold. When the engine is produced by the factory, it is for a given deck height, gasket thicknesses, and head thickness, and the distributor hold can be kept at a closer tolerance.