When I was a wee tot
in the age before funny cars, there were Gassers.
Gassers went the whole range from homebuilt wrecks to professionally built monsters, and there were a lot in between. I did a lot of work with one of the in between guys.
His cars never really looked all that good, and in fact there was one that we painted with a roller and house paint.
let’s back up: A gasser is a special kind of car, usually with a big damned engine, and a heavy duty rear end- often off a truck- to handle the torque of the big engine. Big back tires, rear end jacked up to clear the tires, and a tiny old solid truck front axle and tiny tires, welded onto the frame directly with little or no suspension at all. Rich racers trailered their gassers to the track, poor bastards would drive, and the lack of suspension meant you either carried a pillow to sit on, or you drove with a sore ass. Most gassers looked a lot like this:
The point of all this modification is the hookup- the moment when the torque of the engine and the grippiness of the tires combined to lift the front of the car nearly if not completely off the ground. A “Wheelie”. If you had enough engine, you could flip the mother over, so you hung wheelie bars off the back to keep that from happening. The point of the hookup is to concentrate all the engine’s power on those two wheels and make it scoot. You didn’t really care what kind of car it was because the car was just the iron the engine rode in, you just wanted it to be light and simple to hammer back together. I saw a lot of Checker gassers because they had a full, strong frame, you could weld the doors on and gut the inside and cut the weight down dramatically, and they had a ‘Retro” look right out of the gate. Plus, with that bigass frame, you could put in any damned engine you could lay your hands on.
my friend was a genius at building engines- he built all the engines for my cousin’s cars, and when I was down there visiting I would watch him, it was like watching G-d work.
he had built, INSIDE his pole barn, a little room. it was made out of those corrugated fiberglass panels and he must have had ten fluorescent lights around it. The room was like a little garden shed and all the panels were on the inside, it looked as if it had been built inside out. This allowed him to carefully wash it down so there was no dust of any kind, and he had a little fan which blew air into it through a stack of furnace filters. It was a sort fo a homemade ‘Clean room”
he had done this after he lost an engine in a race, dismantled it, and discovered it had a mud dauber’s nest INSIDE the engine.
So when he built an engine he had a Craftsman toolbox lined with foam rubber mats, and he would carefully wash all the pieces with isopro and put them in the toolbox and tape the drawers shut. He would wash down the block and all the pieces INCLUDING the engine stand and roll it into the room, and close the door behind him. We would stand outside watching him through the window in the door.
He only wore white painters pants and a white teeshirt when he was building an engine, and he only used fresh assembly oil and lubriplate out of sealed containers. He had a little tray of tools that had exactly what he needed and not one tool extra, and woe betide anyone who touched THOSE tools.
Of course we all thought he was a little nutty and not one of us had ever heard of a “Clean room”. But his engines ran.
In the early 70’s if you wanted a hot car you could buy a crappy car and make it hot. A lot of guys my age spent what would have been their college education money taking wrecks and putting smoking hot engines in them. It rarely benefitted any of them, but they had fun, and I had fun helping and watching them, and it didn’t cost me a dime.
I do miss those days, somewhat, and those engines, the carburetors sitting atop roots blowers stolen salvaged from oilfields. there are still kids building cars and engines today, which is cool, but like each generation, I suppose, I miss those glory days.
Not enough to buy an engine with mechanical ignition, mind you.
Of course, when the motor mounts give way, you can get to the oil drain plug easier.
Not that it helps…
I’d bet that what y’all learned from the experience would come close to — if not exceed — a college education.
M
Nice post. I’ve always wondered what made a Gasser a Gasser. Always liked how they looked.
I’m going to finally do (attempt) an engine rebuild. 88 Festiva! First new car I ever bought. It will be a father/daughter learning experience. She needs the wheels and I’m hoping to get them on both the road for under a grand.
My older (by a wide margin, one has a son six months younger than me) brothers raced stock cars at Weissglass Speedway on Staten Island, long before I came along. One of the cars had a three-on-the-tree that wouldn’t stay in passing gear, so they hung a chain from the roof to hold it.
Mom would never go watch them race for fear she’d see them crash. They finally convinced her to come watch, that was the day my brother George rolled his car. It was also the last time my mother went to the track.
When I was a kid in the late 70’s early 80’s a lot of the local guys had jacked-up cars, mostly GTOs and Camaros, I one guy had a Javelin. Spending my formative years seeing those cars may have inspired me to buy my Mustang in 1989.
I remember some of those cars. While we had some guys in my class doing this stuff there where not many. In the later 70’s we did some mud racing. that was hoot and a half.
Now they stuff a nitro tank in the truck and some kind of sick rattle chamber on the pipe and thing they have a race car.
Something about the smell and feel of those old cars will not be replicated.
We used to build them in the hobby shop at the base, and that shoebox gasser looks better than ANY I ever saw at the track! Talk about dumping one on the top, I saw that happen at Campbell in Hawaii in 1974, pretty little Willys body, broke BOTH wheely bars at the welds and over she went.
Those old wrecks with big engines were called “sleepers” around Portland, OR. My fave that I helped build was a 52 Chevy business coupe with a 56 Olds (389″?), Tri-Power and all stuffed in. We stripped all the chrome off the Chevy, because the car-diss of the early sixties was, “if it don’t go, chrome it”. We put a decent black paint job on it, and even used stock steel wheels for the front. The rear end had 10x16s and the wheel wells were tubbed to make that work. The car had lakers, and the illegal cut-out diverter to make them roar. No smog checks then. As long as you didn’t have the lakers cut in when you passed a cop, you never got written up.