Hot Rod – November 2023
English | 84 pages | pdf | 51.96 MB
Welcome Hot Rod Magazine November 2023 issue
It’s been a busy month here at HOT ROD Magazine, with most of my time being occupied by the Dodge Coronet build we were working on as part of a Car Craft Video project. It’s a 1965 Coronet owned by a Vietnam veteran, and the car has been sitting for more than 20 years. We partnered with Amazon to completely rebuild it from a roller to an amazingly cool street machine.
That was the most ambitious project we’ve taking on during our fledgling video series, and I couldn’t be prouder of how much the team accomplished.
I’d like to take more credit for the work done on the car, but truth be told, the bulk of the work was done off camera , with the film crew and me there for the major points ,such as the installation of the drivetrain, brakes, and suspension. Holmes Automotive & Custom of Vista, California, was the shop hosting the build. Owner Kory Holmes and his crew of five guys did an incredible amount of work in a short period of time. The car was literally dragged out of a field and transformed into a running, driving car in six weeks. During that period of time, the car was stripped to bare metal, several spots of rust damage were repaired, and the car was painted a cool custom shade of green that is based on a current production Dodge color. If you’ve ever painted a car, you know that is no easy feat. All the weather stripping and window seals needed to be replaced, the car interior was completely reupholstered, and all the trim was straightened and polished. That alone can realistically take a restoration shop a month or two to do. Surprisingly, Amazon had almost everything we needed to build the car. I say almost, because no one makes some of the sheet metal and trim we needed to replace, so Kory ended up buying a second Coronet as a donor vehicle. But everything else came from Amazon. Car restoration by mail-order shopping. These are interesting times we live in for sure.
In between that and the rest of the stuff needed to keep the magazine coming out every month, I was struggling to make time to work on my ’93 GMC C1500.That’s the pickup my former Car Craft colleague Jeff Smith bought in 2004 and did a series of articles on in CC that year. I bought it from Jeff in 2017, and the pickup has been rock-solid reliable until two years ago—the first time it failed a smog test since I bought it. Back then, I replaced the converter with a generic parts store converter. It passed easily then, only to fail another emissions test two years later. This time around, I replaced it with a much more expensive converter from Magna flow, and the truck again passed with flying colors.
What happened since then? Do replacement converters wear out that easily? Though it has high mileage, the engine is in good shape. I had just performed a tune-up, and a friend and I verified that all the truck’s sensors were working correctly. The engine has good compression, it does not burn oil, and it is totally stock other than a set of California-approved shorty headers in place of the stock exhaust manifolds. In my opinion, a catalytic converter should not be considered a wear item that needs to be replaced every few years—that is totally unacceptable. Even more infuriating is the fact that “California compliant” catalytic converters cost at least twice as much as what you’d pay in any other state of the union. Am I being passively legislated out of my pickup by making it cost prohibitive to continue to operate it in this state? I can’t help but wonder that. Those questions and more will be answered over the next several
months as we dive into automotive emissions, and more importantly, how low emissions and high performance can go hand in hand with the technology available to us enthusiasts these days. I personally can’t wait to get those answers.
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