Extra 100 Horsepower

Looking good there.

Hi, welcome to horsepower TV.

You know, these days you can't buy a new car with a carburetor anymore. Everything's fuel injected

but in the world of aftermarket muscle cars, hey, the car is still king

and guys are still tweaking and tuning on carburetors and intake manifolds and still making more horsepower. Well, today we're gonna show you how to update the intake on one of America's favorite muscle car motors, big block, Chevy, whatever. I like that. Here's something for you to work on. In the meantime. Now this 67 El Camino has a crate, Ls six big block in it that was installed a few years back.

It's a powerful package, no doubt about that. But it's got an intake manifold that was first used on the Corvette engine back in 1965. Plus, it's got a Holly carburetor that was designed back when Moses was just a kid. Now, there's a lot of induction technology that's gone on in the last 30 years and well, we're gonna see if we can put some of it to work for us today. See how much horsepower we can generate at the rear wheels Now, once we get the El Camino strapped down, we'll see what we got to work with.

All right, there it is. 203 horsepower, man, that's it.

I bet Moses had a camel with more power than that.

I'll tell you what we gotta do is get that old carbon intake out of the way. In fact, if you'll disconnect the battery, I'll drain the radiator. That's pitiful. Once that's done, we can disconnect the linkage

and electrical connections.

Then all the hoses,

vacuum lines and fuel lines

disconnect the alternator bracket,

remove the plug wires and distributor cap,

then the distributor,

finally, the manifold boats can come out.

Well, now we'll take the screwdriver and pry the manifold loose,

hopefully remove the intake and carb together.

Hey, good job there. Blue oval boy, keep it up. I'll make a Chevy mechanic

you.

Now, if you remember earlier, I told you about this intake, that's basically 40 years old. But the elements of a dual plane design can still be found on today's current offerings like this Edelbrock performer RPM air gap intake that we're gonna bolt up later on today. Now, dual plane of course means that half the engine cylinders are gonna feed out of one side of this intake and well, the other half are gonna feed out of the other side of the intake.

A dual plane intake typically enhances bottom end power and torque and it's gonna give you a great crisp throttle response too. But

Edelbrock managed to improve this design with these large volume runners that help this intake make good power from 1500 to 6500 RPM.

Plus this air gap design, make sure that you have a cooler denser incoming fuel charge. And if you look right down here in the plenum, you'll see those little ridges there that improve fuel atomization

and help prevent puddling.

So just add it up, you got bigger runners, a cooler denser incoming fuel charge and improved fuel distribution.

That's gotta mean more power, but like intakes, carburetors have gone through the gamut of changes too.

In fact, the design of this Holly, we just took off. Chuck's Camino goes back to the 19 fifties. Now, this one is not that old, of course, but the throttle shaft is worn out and won't hold vacuum. So it loses Idol. Plus this thing's been rebuilt several times and

we kind of like Darrell Waltrip overdue for retirement.

So we're gonna replace it with this Edelbrock Thunder series A BS car.

This one flows 800 CFM 20 more than the old one.

And it features an adjustable secondary air valve to let you tune it easily. Now, here's something I like about all the Edelbrock performer. Carbs. There's no gasket below the fuel levels and you know what that means? No leaks, plus the metering rods and step up springs can be easily swapped out without removing the car or disassembling it.

Well, we've already cleaned off the old gas material from the cylinder heads and laid the new gaskets in place. Next, I'm gonna lay out a little bit of silicone right here on the end of the block. Let me show you something.

Every gasket kit comes with these end pieces here and I've tried to glue them in place before to hold them down. But you know what, eventually they're gonna blow out

and you end up with a big leak right there.

Now, we can drop the intake into place

and tightly intake bolts in a crisscross pattern,

reinstall. All the brackets

connect the coolant lines and hoses,

reinstall the distributor,

the cap

and wires.

Well, I guess we can drop on the carb now,

man, aren't you on the spot with that gas?

Here we go. Here are a few tips for you any time you make a carb swap. First of all,

replace the fuel filter. It's cheap, easy and definitely worth it.

And the same goes for the P CV valve. And you also wanna check your hose

and fuel lines for any cracks or leaks and replace those two. If you need to. By the way,

we're swapping out our fuel line for this braided piece we got from Edelbrock. Now, the A N fitting connects right up to the filter and this piece that goes up to the carb is gonna tuck in nice and tight to the car body.

Man, that's some good looking stuff right there and you know what else looks good.

How about a break right about now? And while you're watching this, we're gonna go ahead and top off the radiator, reconnect the battery and finish tightening this carb. And when we come back, we're gonna see how much horsepower this new intake and carb is gonna make for us

later. We turned the world upside down with a festival of power in South Florida featuring cool show cars and six second outlaw drag racing.

Hang on as we let it all hang out.

Hey, thanks for sticking with us through the break. I'm just checking the total timing here to make sure that we're ready for another

dyno Jet run. And, well, I've got it set at 36 degrees total. I think that ought to do it, Joe and go ahead and cut it off

and we can hook up our dyno Jet leads.

There's number one plug lead

and there's a good ground.

Yeah.

Wow,

man. I don't know what the numbers say, but this thing definitely feels a lot stronger. Well, it should, can you believe uh 310 horsepower? No way. Quite an incredible jump over two or three on our baseline there.

Now, I know Edelbrock works pretty hard to make those performer packages stout out of the box. But those numbers are unreal, man. I'll say, you know, during that first run though, I could feel this thing really struggling to get above 4500 RP. Am I really to punish it to get it to crank above five grand? In fact, I bet you could hear this thing laying down long before I lifted. Oh, yes, indeed. But I tell you what, maybe we could find a little bit more horsepower in this thing by tweaking on it with some metering rods. In fact,

the manual that comes with our carburetor recommends that we step it up a couple sizes, do a run. See what we got. Are you game? I'm game. I got my tune up kid over here. But you know what? I didn't know, you knew how to read.

We first remove the cover, concealing the metering rod and step up spring,

then remove the plunger and rod as an assembly.

Now, we can replace the rod on the plunger with the new one.

Well, then we can just put everything back together again. But first, I want to show you something.

These rods are pulled out of a jet similar to this one and the smaller the end of the rod, the more fuel is allowed to flow through the jet. Now, our new rod here is two steps fatter than the old one and has a little more taper right here on the end.

Well, that was worth the effort. But

the El Caminos reached this, the

PICO only 309 that time. Well, I guess that means that we'll just have to go ahead and reinstall those old rods and button the thing up, run it the way it is. Yeah, I tell you what, while you do that, I'll get our new air cleaner assembly ready. Good idea.

Now, we don't want to give you the wrong idea and think that you can just bolt on a set up like this and pick up a 100 easy horsepower. But what it does do,

it really points out how an old worn out carburetor and an old intake manifold design can really hold back your performance. Now, if you are gonna go ahead and buy a used carburetor from a swap meet or a yard sale, whatever, make sure it's a good one because, you know, you can rebuild a carburetor 100 times. But if you start with poor parts, you're gonna get poor performance.

We've done all of our testing today without an air cleaner. But when you're out on the road, you gotta have a filter to keep all that crap out of your motor. So we're gonna install this KNN air cleaner assembly. It uses the new extreme airflow top that uses the same media as their other filters for unrestricted flow.

Well, there it is. It sure looks good, but I gotta tell you one thing

we've added some height with that new intake carbon. Now, the air cleaner, I'm way ahead of there, Bud. You know, I could read too and the Edelbrock catalog told me that, that sit up there just wouldn't clear a stock 64 to 67 hood. So, check out what I got over here.

What I've got here is a prototype cow hood that fits 67 Chevelles and El Caminos. Now, this thing comes from Good Mark Industries and it's got a two inch scoop here that's gonna give us the clearance that we need. Of course, underneath here,

the bracing looks pretty much stock. But when they actually kick this thing into production, hey, there's gonna be a nice round hole right here that you can seal your air cleaner too and bring cold air into your engine. Now, let's see about getting this thing bolted up.

You got to tighten up.

All right, let's see how this thing's gonna fit.

Oh, there it is bolted up and looking good, I'll say, but you know what? We gotta bolt ourselves. It's time for us to take a little bit of a break. That's right. But when we come back, we're gonna take you to a brand new horsepower party down in Florida. Stay with us.

That does look like

that. Two inches is just what we needed.

It's the Moroso Power Festival featuring some of the fastest outlaw cars on four wheels and even some crazy wild stunts on two wheels. Stay with us.

See that little guy there.

That's one thing Florida is famous for, but we're not here for gator power.

It's all about horsepower

for horsepower on the quarter mile strip. Look for a shootout between James Clark and veteran Pat Newsy in the pro outlaw class, which is kind of like Pro street on a diet

and we've never run it this way. This is outlaw Pro Street. So we're about 100 pounds lighter.

I'd like to go in the fifties here. We'll see what happens. And I've been six forties in that car at

mattress weight. So

it's pretty cool.

Clark's last trip to Moroso was a bad trip, but a simple broken seal on his oil filter led to a crash and considerable damage.

I think everything tuned up good. I know Pat will be running hard. We'll have a good time

and

we think it's gonna take the fee

of music.

Let me just a little bit slicker.

But, uh, I

mean, we should, we should be running at six.

No problem this weekend.

But you also got to love Larry

Nadu's outlaw pro PT cruiser

with its clone Keep Black 225 Cube engine.

My chassis that I already had set up for a fire car.

Uh, the width was only about a half an inch difference. So

I realized that I could go ahead and make the car work.

I bought a car in pieces over the counter. It's an all steel car

and, uh, I just started chopping and cutting and stretching and

Ella

in the heavy street class. Watch out for Richard Sweeney's Camaro, a good car, good driver and a pretty good, rich in the pits who's also a legendary pro street racer.

So you just take it nice and easy just to feel everything out.

So you gotta lay into it a little bit more this time. That's what we're setting it up for right now.

Is he helping you out? Seriously? Yes, he is. Been with us, uh, been helping me since we started with the car

and a tremendous help

someday. I'll have his knowledge

at it. If he ever gets my looks, then we'll have problems so much.

I'm enjoying it. These guys that buy a lot of parts for me. I like working with them

cars fast. I mean, we've done,

if there's 3500 pound weight, what this car weighs, then the fastest car around. I mean, anywhere

it's a power festival with hot show cars too like this 1954 Mercury Monterey in the early custom category,

green metallic paint outside

and under the hood and air cleaner cover handmade from a Harley gas tank.

Well, fat fender show trucks were a big hit at the South Florida Show too.

And speaking of trucks, how about this? 72 blazer that went topless. A picture is worth 1000 words and a picture on a T shirt is definitely worth whatever the airbrush artist is charging.

Well, now back to the track and for a quick look at the finals of the four classes and this inaugural Moroso Power Festival. But first check out, this

final one is for

PT, has the ET for a wild win. Although a broken rear axle bearing puts Larry out of the competition

good straight

right

to the

last

minute.

Yeah,

that's what can happen. That's called drag racing.

It's called horsepower.

Really?

Isn't that what it's all about

in the finals of pro outlaw? The Clark Jesy shootout was a washout as Clark broke and busy soloed his way with the 684 win.

Then the red bulb got a workout first in outlaw Super Street as Spy

jumped the gun

and Jeff Sover ran a 778

in heavy streets. Sweeney's opponent also sees red as Richard's 764 goes down in the books as a win.

Finally an outlaw drag radio arm narro

breaks but wait his fat Tony Perez also red lighted by 1/1000 of a second

and the disabled nova wins the hard way.

Anyway, that's it for the racing. But not our adventures here in West Palm Beach.

When we come back, you'll witness some extremely wild two

tricks

at the Moroso Power Festival.

Want the latest on horsepower. Check out our website at Horsepower tv.com.

We made an interesting discovery here at the Power Festival at Moroso.

Remember when you were a kid and couldn't wait to do stunts on your bicycle, you know, look ma no hands and whoa,

stuff like that. Well, here's what happens

when that kind of horse play gets out of hand

and most people call it insane. We call it fun.

My first trick standing on the seat, you know, with the hands out and next thing, you know, I'm, I'm sitting backwards and

I've never seen any tapes, didn't know anything about it. It was just, you know, kind of came natural for me.

Basically, we all can do the same stunts. You might have one guy who's better at doing Endos, which is like the nose wheelie.

One guy might be better at fast wheelies or slow wheelies. You know, everybody has their strong point, but we all basically can do the same thing.

What does it take to do that?

Uh,

a

lot of courage, a lot of determination, a lot of band aids,

you know, health insurance, that kind of thing,

you know, super slow wheelie. What's called a 12 o'clock wheelie? That's one of the hardest balance tricks because what you're doing is you're riding a wheelie,

uh, right around five miles an hour. You're using the rear brake to balance yourself. And, I mean, you're barely on the bike. The bike's in the verge of fall out, the bike wants to fall over because it doesn't have the,

uh, the, uh, gyro effect holding it up anymore. What about the bike? Anything special about it?

Um, as far as engine wise? No, not really. But we'll do a couple of things like, uh, new frame sliders, which keeps it from, you know, getting too scratched up when we drop it. We do um, a

wheelie bar on the back really short one.

So when we go all the way up, we can kind of park it on its tail,

um,

a couple of other small modifications, but honestly, we could do pretty much the same stuff we do with these bikes with bikes that come out of the dealership,

You guys and us with the generation of the future. Let's make something happen. Support your local extreme sport.

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Horsepower TV S hot parts is brought to you by Jags. One call gets it all. One click, gets it quick.

Ad U I is something that we all wanna try and avoid. But if you drive an A MC, here's one that you'll be happy to get.

Now this thing comes from performance distributors and it's the only one piece drop in distributor for six and eight cylinder AM CS.

Now they all come with a high performance coil and module

and they only take one wire to hook up. Plus they also come with a custom calibrated advance curve for instant throttle response. And these things are available in either race or street form with prices starting at about 350.

Here's something else that will give you

throttle response. It's the new stealth ra M fuel injection system from Holly for small block Chevy with non

Vortec heads, fuel delivery is handled with their commander 950 controller and you get software that's loaded with base maps for various power combinations. Final tuning is handled on your laptop PC.

The ram type manifold mounts a billet 58 millimeter throttle body. And the kit also includes injectors,

pump sensors and of course a wiring harness. Now, you can uh pick up this set up for just under $2300.

You Mopar guys would have to be off your rockers not to appreciate the shaft mounted roller rocker system from Urson Cams.

It's engineered to bolt right up to a stock cylinder head of any 273 to 3, 60 cubic inch small block and it'll also bolt right up to any aftermarket head.

It'll accept stock

rockers. Now, these billet aluminum rockers ride on needle bearings that are mounted on this chrome Molly shaft and these needle tips right here help reduce side loading on the valve to minimize guide wear.

Now, you don't have to wear out your wallet though, to afford a set up like this. It's priced at about 600 bucks. Well, I'm about worn out from working on his Chevy, so we're gonna say goodbye. See you next time. Hey, you know what though? You did pretty good. I hope you appreciate that for a board boy.