Even in the very early years NHRA always had lift, duration, and overlap specs. They checked all three on cams all the way up through 1987. Where some may be confused is the fact that 1968 was the first year reground cams were mentioned in the rulebook. Prior to that only OEM cams that met the specs were legal. Up through 1967, if a cam came close to duration or overlap spec, it was pulled out of the engine and checked for OEM markings. Of course there were OEM cams that were being reground by cam companies. Finally in 1968 NHRA adopted this rule: "CAMSHAFT, Stock: Regrinding to factory specifications permitted, but stock duration, overlap, and maximum lift must be maintained. No exceptions."
From what I have gathered, the "In-Bomber" H/Stock 283hp turned 6500ish by the end of the line with 5:13 and 5:56 gears. I dont know how high they wound it up on launches though or shifting. Consistantly ran low 13's with a best ET of 12.85, 1968/1969 era, Duntov 097 solid cam by Racer Brown. My "Locomotion" '55 turned 10,000rpm with a 331ci 327 in the late '70s/early '80s. -Dean
Lol, i was like 4 yrs old NO i don't remember that! Someone patched over the inner fender holes(for the headers) on mine with fibreglass matting,so there still there.I am thinking for Pa state inspections?Hell if i know.not sure if that will pass inspection now unless somehow i can use cutoff's and leave the factory exaust hooked up too. that or may have to factory exaust it and get inspected/or antique plated(this will need no yearly inspection) ?? what about cam spec for 2X4 265?
That helps answer my question. I know that TODAY, stockers have WILD cams that meet the OEM lift specs. I wasn't sure if that was true in the 1960s or not. Sounds like you were a little more limited with what you could do in a stock class prior to '68. The whole duration / overlap thing is very "loose". I guess it all depends on where you measure it. I can tell you that those GM advertised durations were not at .006" lift, as Comp and others use today. Probably more like .0002" lift! LOL What about Pure Stock classes?
I re-found a book that I had bought used years ago called the complete book of Stock-Bodied Drag Racing by Lyle Kenyon Engel. It is a first print, Sept' 71 and has a # on it, TK1062. It talks about all the bodied cars and is very good reading for me. Here is a link to online used book stores, good day, Henry. http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?q...yle+Kenyon&browse=1&cm_sp=works*listing*title
This is Glen Midkiff's "Top Cat" GTO from Owensboro, KY that ran very successfully in the mid to late 60s. Funny thing was he also had a 421 Bonneville 2+2 street car and I couldn't help but think that maybe the engines got swapped.
Happy to see that you guys have kept the thread going. Sorry I haven't posted any pics lately but I've been working on some Indy pics from the mid 70s that Bill "Redman" Floyd sent me. Here are a few that I bought from Les Welch that were taken at Indy in 71.
Remember when we were talking about Paul Longnecker and I said I saw him at Indy with a 427 Chevy powered 1960 Pontiac wagon running in E/MP? I never took a photo of the car by itself, but I did spot it while scanning this photo. Talk about a BEAST! It must have been brutal on the drivetrain.
I love it when guys painted their helmets to match the color of the car!!!!!!!!!!! The whole car, including the driver was a "presentation". When you think about it, that was very professional in those "junior ranks".
While it's in its 'death throes' I though a little Junior stock thread 'recap' would be interesting. ... lets call it a 'wake.' Sooo ... (during the wake) I thought a little survey seemed in order. *Sorry, no food served at this wake. Survey question #1: What was/is your favorite image that was posted during the thread's 55.4 page 'tenure'? Here's mine ... (originally posted by 'COLESY') methinks it says it all--> *Taken in the 'staging lanes' @ the '69 Winter Nationals--> ... and Survey question #2: What was/is your favorite race car from that JUNIOR Stock (*approx)*1963-1971 era? Here (hands down!) is my favorite car (and driver) ... Thanks4thememoriesGeorge-->
I think it may have been gone through before, but what exactly is the "chronological order" of the history of Tokyo Rose, when it raced, the accident, color change (as I recall)... Is it around today? Ken Nelson told me that (I forget the event) the In-Bomber did race the Tokyo Rose (after it was a NHRA class winner car) and beat it. Certainly one of the top jr. stockers. -Dean
The car was originaly painted orange and was to be named "Big Orange" but the paint turned out the rose color, hence the "Tokyo Rose" name. The car was wrecked in a towing accident and was repainted marina blue. One of the members who has posted on this thread currently owns the car and is in the process of restoring the it.
I can't pick a favorite- in fact I saved every single picture on this thread. I will say that I had searched high and low for anything on the Monster Mash, so I was excited to see several photos of it here. I'm also involved in a small way with the recreation of the Strickler 61 Biscayne, so Im partial to the PA boys in general. Thanks everyone for all the great stuff Pete
Getting slightly O/T here (1970), but does anyone know why the Ray Allen car above was a heavy 'vert? I'm sure it had something to do with weight breaks on classes.
Exactly! The car was classified based on the factory listed shipping weight divided by the HP. IE: The 'weight break.' And, as you noted, the convertible was heavier than (for instance) the hardtop, which, in this case, put it in a lower class. Pit Side at Englishown, 1971 By the way FYI (RE: "R.I.P. Ralph") Ralph Truppi 03/23/1941 ~ 07/27/08 From-->http://www.camaros.net/forums/showthread.php?t=138607 "TRUPPI-KLING ... How utterly territorial the phenomenon was. Other than the obvious commercial connection, the exchange of proprietary information between the southeastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey splinter groups was scant. About 45 minutes north of Red Bank, Ralph Truppi and Tommy Kling were laying the foundation for another Jr. Stock society in Greenbrook, NJ. Truppi worked days as a line mechanic at Queen City Pontiac in Plainfield. Musclecars were in and the locals were digging them. In the beginning, before there was a T/K Performance, there was Ralph, literally hawking his wares on the street. He'd order a half dozen sets of Belanger or Jardine headers-worth .3-second over the more popular Hedmans and maybe as many sets of Casler cheater slicks and sell them to the street racers who haunted the burger joints out on Rt. 22. Ralph"s first serious involvement was with someone else's wheels, Barry Muglia's mousey 1961 Impala. Far from a killer combination, Muglia's Chevy was equipped with a modest 230hp/283 and three-on-the-tree. Sometime in 1962 or '63, Truppi was introduced to Ronnie Parnes. Though he liked Ronnie, Ralph was much more interested in the 283 hp fuelie engine and 4-speed in Parnes's car. He'd heard of such a thing but had never seen it. He was convinced that tremendous potential awaited. He had unconsciously begun his life's work as a rules wangler and nitpicker par excellence. He applied his discovery to Muglia's Chevy, fitting its bone-stock short-block with the dual quads, Duntov cam and big valve heads from a 270/283 and backing it up with four-on-the-floor. When the rest of the street bunch was revving up with 4.56 gears, Truppi went a couple of steps beyond and found that 5.38s were better suited to his purpose. Then he discovered Drag News. The confirmation he needed was printed right there on the NHRA record holders page. Muglia's overweight F/S Impala was performing just as well as the purpose-built race cars. Ralph started to worry about the details and he hasn't stopped since. He was where Jenkins, Stahl and others were in the Jr. Stock philosophy, using his brain instead of his bank account (there was none) and picking the right car for the class. Truppi and Muglia were confident enough in their hybrid to take it to Indy. Though they didn't win, they demonstrated the fastest car in class. As soon as Ralph returned to Greenbrook, he searched for a '58 Chevy to exploit its weight advantage in F/S as compared to the Impala. In the process, he joined up with Tommy Kling, a rational individual and an exceptionally clear thinker. Not long after this, the pair found themselves at Connecticut Dragway watching Frank Iaconio's "Bad Banana" '57 wagon set the record in F/S. Sold on the efficiency of this new combination, Truppi and Kling built the parallel "Terrible Tangerine" and set a few records of their own at the hands of Ray Allen. According to Truppi, Ray was a natural and as accomplished a driver as Strickler or Sox. While the bulk of the competition was equipped with carburetion, T/K specialized in tuning the alien Rochester fuel injection and felt that they could set the record in any class by rotating a hardtop, sedan, convertible, wagon, delivery or utility coupe around a single engine combination. Most of their customer cars relied on carburetion however, and the customer base was huge. How many records were they part of? Truppi put his hand to his mouth and rolled his eyes towards heaven. "Thirty, I think...or maybe it was sixty. I forget. Mike, how many records?" "More like sixty, Dad," said Truppi's older son, closing his eyes in mock exasperation. "Yeah, you know, we've got 'em put away in a box somewhere." In complete opposition to the popular Jr. Stock system of the period (leaving the record "soft"), Truppi and Kling liked to run their cars as hard as possible, banging. records and putting them out of sight. The reasoning was if you can run two-tenths under the mark, you have no incentive to improve performance. Though the T/K union taught the meaning of grief to scores of racers who weren't under their umbrella, Truppi and Kling refrained from public gloating. But 25 years after the fact, Ralph couldn't resist this little needler: People used to phone him about what he and Kling had done to make the Ronca Brothers N/SA '55 run so hard. He remembers two callers in particular, Buddy Ingersoll and Sonny Bryant. In those days, Ralph was extremely self-effacing and took great pains not to hurt feelings or get into a political mishmash because he already knew this cottage industry was small and incestuous. Don't piss anyone off today; tomorrow you might have to do business with them. While others were following, T/K experimented with oil pan technology and discovered the considerable drag the addition of a single quart of oil made, so they promoted deep sump oil pans. They planted a 2.54:1 low gear in place of the normal 2.20:1 ratio. They substituted a 12-bolt Salisbury rear end in place of the mandated 10-bolt by affixing the 10-bolt rear inspection cover to the stronger housing with two or three bolts that happened to line up correctly. They cut the heads off the rest of the bolts and glued them to the cover to make it look kosher. The cover, in turn, was cemented to the housing with yellow 3M. Truppi claims they never had any trouble with this arrangement from an operational standpoint or from Bill "Farmer" Dismuke's legion of doom. Truppi and Kling never acid dipped cylinder heads or spent much time with body and chassis prep. Specs for the front end were set by alignment specialist Jack Arnew in Baltimore. Arnew was adept at getting out the toe and maintaining proper geometry as the front end of the car rose and then settled back down to "working" height to make it track straight and true. Truppi and Kling expanded their expertise to low buck piston science. They equipped a 302 Chevy with specially-built slugs that they modified inhouse to position the top ring as close to the combustion chamber as possible, thus raising compression. This necessitated a fourth ring groove at the very top of the stack. The original top ring was omitted and a much thinner ring was installed above the vacant ring land. Though he had no engineering background, Truppi had begun just as Jenkins and Stahl and quite a few others. He consumed pulpy car magazines like his life depended on them when he was supposed to have been doing his school work. He demonstrated his prescience by only believing half of what he read, and says that he got most of his good tech ideas from books dealing with SCCA racing, not hot rodding. At T/K, the approach was to finagle the gray area to the border of illegality and do every little thing you can to make it add up to a "good" whole." <!-- / message --><!-- sig -->
Yes Dean, It seems it's 'sorta' " still around." Would be nice to get an update from its current owner 'Wagon Killer.' Alas, here's the last that we've heard of the "restoration" of George Cureton's 'storied' ... Tokyo Rose! ... ...
'Old Tech's most likely correct. Not really sure if Frank had a 'wagon' or not ... perhaps he did for a very-brief spell. But he sure did have this sedan, shown here holeshootin Jere!
Their was a Bad Banana II 57 wagon but I don't believe Frank ran it. It was a 4dr 210 or Bel Air. I'll post a picture later. Love this shot of Frank and Stahl (LaVerne?)
The Jalopy Journal
