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.
