The Great Modified Cover-Up

The horsepower modified racer gets a radical new cover up today and we hit the road course with some pros to bang on some modified muscle cars.

Hey, welcome again to the horsepower shop where today we're gonna put the wraps on a modified race car project. That's right after we finish in disassembly here. This thing is gonna start getting a custom color scheme with graphics and without using a drop of paint.

A

couple of weeks ago, we installed the race car's body panels with pop rivets from a kit we ordered and before long it was ready for the ultimate cover up.

You might remember last year we enlisted the talents of the guys at Ape Rafts to help us design a complete vinyl wrap for our 69 supernova

after designing printing and plotting the panels at their facility in Dallas.

Well, they were ready to attack the Nova with a vengeance.

The first panels covered the entire side of the vehicle. Then they got busy wrapping the hood,

the deck lid

and finally the top

the result, a show stopping statement. You could never pull off with pain.

Hey, to sure. Good to have you back now, how's wrapping this modified going to be different than the NOVO was? Well, the supernova is a lot more challenging compound curves and all of that,

that modifies a lot flatter surfaces. There are a few challenges where such as the

the cage intersects with the body. Those are a couple of the items. But overall, it's a pretty easy lay down a similar graphic to the supernova.

Slight difference though the supernova had a blue upper. We elected to go with

a dark upper on this, but rather than just shoot black ink, we thought we'd do a simulated carbon fiber pattern. Man. That's nice. And obviously you couldn't do that with paint. But another advantage to wrapping a modified and I saw this is your shop. Those things get banged up inevitably every Saturday night. Nice thing about uh the modified is the modified panel can be burned the following day

and sent to you before the next weekend you lay it down and you got a brand new car. Yeah,

to speed things up for TV. Troy brought a whole crew to wrap the bona fide.

The first step is always to prep the car, wiping all the surfaces with isopropyl alcohol to get them squeaky clean.

Hey, remember the contact paper your mom used on the kitchen shelves. Well, same principle here

except the material is extremely durable pliable and with a little heat, you can stretch it over any contour.

The initial placement is critical. A small mistake here can be a big problem later.

Once committed, there's a lot of squeegee

action. A lot of tugging and a fair amount of patience here, Dean is cutting out material for a window that he'll neatly trim and tuck inside.

Now, Troy brought his whole crew here because he knew we'd be skipping out to cover an event one that you'll see later on in the show.

Meanwhile, while we blow out of here, the rap resumes

that

well. No real surprises. Everything went well. Uh The only thing left are contingency stickers and I think that Joe and Mike can handle that, don't you?

Anyway, I think they'll be real happy with that.

All right. Home. Sweet home. Yeah. Too bad. We had to go. I'm dying to see how this thing turned out.

Oh, yeah, man. That thing looks awesome, man. It almost looks too pretty to take to the track. Yeah, but the good thing about that is if we heard a panel, we replace it and call Troy for another piece of the wrap.

That's right. And we can even lay those on ourselves. Hey, notice how the Apes guys left plenty of room on the bottom panels for our contingency stickers and we'll slap those on later.

Hey, it's worth pointing out that while this is the ultimate, you can go with a partial

and especially if you have black panels to start out with that way. Save a lot of time and mostly a lot of money.

Hey, you wanna know where we were while all the wrapping was happening.

Well, it involved a beautiful racetrack in the middle of Indiana. Five professional race car drivers, a bunch of beautiful cars and of course, us two idiots. We'll flash back to it right after the break. I love this. You like how it turned out?

It's nice.

Welcome back to Horsepower. Now, here's where Mike and I were, while the mod

fide was getting wrapped, Putnam

Park Road course as the guest of air ride technology.

Yeah, they invited us and some professional drivers to challenge some of the air ride equipped street machines here on the two mile road course in worst

galley.

What do you think

he calls that working

air ride caused this event? Their street challenge

and they invited customers, media and pro drivers here to prove a point.

Air suspension has kind of gotten a reputation for being appropriate for sitting around in the parking lot and

we're here to prove that's not true. These cars can handle and perform with world class cars

first. A quick slow tour around the course to get the feel for it. We tagged along with pro driver, Scott Pruitt.

It's kind of a long sweeper to the right.

You just got to be careful right at mid turn.

There's a big bump right

there.

So it actually pretty good dip,

you know, this

very well, very Well, this is the era that I

love, especially the sixties. They had such

such cool cars.

I mean, today's cars are kind of boring as far as I'm concerned. There, there's nothing

exciting. People, talk to me. Hey, what kind of car you want?

I said anything old and fast

then auto cross and slalom sessions that give the drivers a fuel for the cornering capabilities of the air suspension systems.

Now, this red Camaro is equipped with air ride and disc brakes.

This gold one has a totally stocked suspension brakes.

The silver

Chevelle has the new stuff, but the red one

phone,

the professional drivers made time runs in each to check the difference. 3250

a 3220.

So we're looking at about a five second difference on the Cheval.

I didn't make it through the second cone and I was like two handfuls of wheel out in the grass.

It was big. But, uh, you know, that's,

that's what it's all about. It's night and day, it's just unbelievable. I mean, on a 32nd lap, it's five seconds. So, I mean,

if you could get that kind of percentage in race car, you, you'd be a hero. You know, the old cars just don't turn. I mean, they're just rolling and you're waiting on everything and, uh, you know, with their suspension on, it feels like a, you know, a brand new mustang.

Now, the fun part

tilt on the two mile road course

here, the air suspensions were put through the ultimate paces

and the drivers got to test their skills and nerves on the turns

and straight away of this challenging piece of asphalt.

We drove these cars here. They're not race prepared cars, not by any means. We drove them here and, you know, God willing, we'll drive them home too.

Uh, sorry, Brett, you won't be driving this one home. Looks like the suspension held up better than the engine.

Hey, Scott, I got a confession about most of my fast driving has been on the drag strip.

Not the road course. Would you give me a crash course? Absolutely. Joe. I'll tell you everything that I know.

Ok.

And that's how

it is

riding with the pro

ready, ready. Let's roll.

You got to plan ahead for the turn a little bit.

You're the slow part of the track right here. Yeah,

turn around.

Ok. Use up all the race track. Yeah,

it sure is.

Yeah, you're giving us gas val. Right. And now we get it.

I love the way you're working to break.

That's one of the things, you know, in the race cars. We do a lot of, uh, that

foot breaking.

You can really control the car a lot better.

Well, I think I learned a little bit. I

guess

you'll give it a try. I don't know. Oh,

sure. I gave it a shot. And why not?

Who wouldn't love to hit the road course in a muscle machine that's got cool old looks along with hot new suspension technology.

Yep, this is what they call the best of both worlds

so far on this week's horsepower, we got our modified race car nicely wrapped. Thanks to the guys from

ap raps. Of course,

then we got to beat up on some airbag muscle cars on the road course now. Well, we got something in store for the 69 Royal Bird that's going to be cool. Literally,

back when we dropped in this aluminum 474 for clearance reasons, we had to get rid of the factory air box, which did live here. Of course, we did bolt up this sand and compressor with plans of installing an aftermarket ac system later. Well, later is now and we're going to install this kit in the

Pontiac. And in the meantime, give you an idea of what it takes if and when you decide to put one of these in your old street machine. Now, we got ours from hot rod air and it's laid out on the table pretty much how it's going to go in the car. And the main components of the system are the evaporator, the dryer and the condenser.

The first step is to install the brackets onto the evaporator.

Then with the evaporator held in place, mark the holes on the firewall and passenger side kick panel

with it out of the way, go ahead and drill your holes.

Now, we can install the firewall plate we made with the bulkhead attached.

Next, the evaporator bolts up loosely

and make sure you have enough room for the ac lines.

The 2.5 inch duct toes runs from the evaporator to the Louvers. Now, you want to make sure you stretch this stuff as far as you can for maximum air flow and go ahead and get the right distance before you cut it.

Hey, well, Mike finishes that ducting. I want to show you something.

This is the stock control panel that we set off to hot rod air so they could configure it for our new system.

Now, this cable here controls the heater,

got a couple of vacuum switches that mount on the firewall, they control the opening and closing of the vents.

These also mount on the firewall, they're prewired electrical relays. Now, here we have a manual thermostat switch with a blue wire that goes up to the compressor clutch. Now, finally, a red and yellow wire that goes to a positive 12 volt source.

Sound complicated.

Well, not for me. I want to have him do it.

Here you go.

First, we can connect our power lead,

then attach the heater cable to the valve,

secure the relays under the dash, followed by the vacuum switches.

Earlier in this build, we ran into a big problem finding re pop parts for this dash. So we put it back to stock but didn't like the appearance at all. So that's why the control panel and the thermostat switch are just hanging loose until we figure out exactly what we want to do.

Finally attach the heavy blue wire to the compressor.

All right, with that handled, we can move on to installing this condenser which mounts in front of the radiator and needs to cover as much of the radiators surface as possible with these tubes running horizontally. Now, we're going to mount it to the radiator core support after we install these brackets from the kit

with some self tapping screws.

It's going to mount right here just inside the core support lip.

We can run our hose from the compressor down around the radiator support and to the condenser.

Now, we can mount our dryer

in a cool location

and route a line from it

to the condenser

and run another hose from the bulk head

up to the dryer.

The final steps are getting all your hoses cut to the proper length. And unfortunately, that's all we can do for today. We have to take the hoses down to the local ac shop and have them crimped using a special tool for the job. Now, we also left the radiator out because we have to get back up to the condenser to tighten those lines up. Then we'll take the car back to the ac shop, have it dried and charged and it should be ready to go. Meanwhile, we've got more horsepower coming up. Stick with us

compared to petroleum oils synthetics, reduce more friction, releasing more energy

to find out how much a few years ago we baselined an LS one Camaro

and added royal purple synthetics to the engine.

The six speed tranny and rear end

granted, it cost a little more than a regular oil change, but the dyno Jet reported an 8.2 horsepower increase at the rear wheels.

Well, since then, you've seen us use a ton of this stuff in our project vehicles. But what you haven't seen is how they formulate a synthetic that actually frees up horsepower.

So before we give them back their Royal bird, we're heading to their headquarters to see how they give this stuff. The royal treatment

the process takes place at Royal Purple's facility in Porter Texas building. A super synthetic starts at the company's storage tank farm where millions of gallons of synthetic base stock enter the system

before being accepted. The oil is checked for quality

samples are taken at the bottom of the load to measure moisture.

A second sample from the top gets analyzed for contamination.

Now, if you thought chemistry class was tough in the next 25 minutes, two phd S

and eight lab techs will subject the samples to a battery of test

that all have to be passed or the load is rejected. A 260 degree hot plate crackle test checks for moisture.

If there was water in there, it would have spattered already, water's heavier than oil. If there's water in the sample from the top, we know we've got a problem. It's

all throughout the truck.

Microscopic inspection for visual contamination is checked.

Next inductively coupled plasma testing.

The IC P uh determines the elemental content of uh whatever sample we're running.

It sends light from a plasma source to a prism which refracts the light through the sample.

Photoelectric cells measure all 23 required elements like magnesium, zinc and phosphorus.

Then it's visco

meric testing, specto

testing. And

well, you get the picture

once accepted, the oil is metered through miles of filtered stainless pipes into heated tanks where the center

lack ingredients are added and it's ready for the signature purple containers.

Now royal purple is secretive about its center

la

technology. We weren't allowed to photograph this part of the process.

If everybody could do what we we we were doing, they'd be doing it.

But it took many years of a lot of sweat and blood from some very bright people

to be able to get these products to the where they

are producing the performance level that we have today.

During the blending and bottling process, the product gets continually retested,

everything from anti

booming tests to four point test at 70 degrees below and more

today royal purple may be the oil of choice for automotive performance,

but the technology was initially high dollar industrial applications.

We are a company that started off lubricating these multi million dollar pieces of equipment. And when people were saying the kind of performance they got on that, they certainly want something for their car.

Bottom line is compared to conventional motor oil synthetics, provide more power, lower temperatures and extended oil drains.

If you're dropping, you know, whether it be a grand or 20 grand or even 100 grand into your car,

you want the best insurance you can buy. And I say

lubrication is the cheapest insurance you can buy.

Hey, if it's time to put your pony on some laughing gas. Check out Edelbrock 50 wet Nitrous plate system. Now, this thing is adjustable from 100 and 50 to 300 horsepower and comes with this 916 cents, billet spray bar plate, plus nitrous and fuel

cleoid and all your filters. They even stepped up to stainless steel jets and it comes with all your wiring brackets and switches to install it. Now,

kit runs 600 bucks but does not come with a bottle. So if you want to add that on plan on forking out about another 200 bucks. A crane's got a new dual valve spring assembly for your LS one that they call the quiet one.

That's because they're harmonically designed to maximize performance up to 6500 RPM without triggering your knock sensor. They're a drop in design that can handle up to 600

thousands lift without head machining. Now, combine these with a new set of titanium retainers, set of locators and beaded

steel locks and, well, you got a system that'll really give your LS One a wake up call

the price. Not too alarming about 431 bucks.

Well, we'll spring into action with another edition of Horsepower next week. Why don't you join us?