These are all sheet metal manifolds. Who’s making your manifolds?
HH: David Visner in Michigan. And we work with Hogan; there’s a Hogan on the car. We’re just continually working on the cylinder heads, trying to improve the cylinder heads, manifolds. And it appears that when we try to extend the runner out of the port, well, it just looks like it’s a loser, but it makes really good power. But it has enough torque-wise, and torque is what gets a car down the track, not horsepower.
So, when you make a modification like that, are you on the phone with the manufacturer, saying “shorten this runner a quarter inch”?
HH: Yeah, there’s a lot of that. We tell them. This (intake on the race car) is our idea --how to do this. We’re not saying it’s gonna work, but you can see we’ve done a lot of epoxy work, reshaping and stuff. It’s just a continual learning process.
As many years as you’ve worked on a Hemi, does the light bulb still go off in your head and you think, “Why didn’t I think of that before?”
HH: Yeah, it happens. We were talking today and I said, “Why in 1968 and ’69 did we think we had to run the forty weight oil?” Because we were stupid. But everyone else was stupid too. And you know what we’re running on the cars?
Zero five?
HH: Try like zero two. Pours like kerosene. But it makes power, and the engines are living. Here’s an example of an oil pan. [Holds up an oil pan.] This is one we had on the other engine. See, if we do this, we can widen the pan a bunch. So the crank scraper scrapes the oil off the crankshaft right in the pan, so we can get a lot more windage in the pan; we don’t have the windage losses. Keeps the oil away from the crankshaft.
Something like fine-tuning a scraper like this -- do you pick up four horsepower or ten?
HH: With a well-designed pan, it can easily be twenty, twenty-five horsepower. But the big horsepower gains are not there anymore. We’re looking at two, three, four, five horsepower, and we’re happy to see that. If the rules allowed us to run a dry sump system, there’s good power (to be found) there, but we have to run a wet sump.
Is that another cost factor as well?
HH: I don’t know. The dry sump would certainly raise the cost, I’m glad we can’t do it. The other day, I have a ’65 Belvedere my grandson drives, and we’re doing a new engine for it
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now, so I called Jesel up. I said, “I need a set of lifters for this.” Well, they’ve gone up in price they’re $2,000 now. So I said, “Wrong.” So I called Crower, which is what we’ve been running. They were $692. It’s insane what these things (engines) are coming to; what they cost. I think they paid $95 for five gallons of fuel. Synthetic oil is eight or nine dollars a quart. It takes some pretty deep pockets to run an operation like this.
[Ed. Note: At the U.S. Nationals we saw racers draining the 90 weight from their rear-end housing and replacing it with 20 weight to try and gain a few thou.]
How many engines do you build a month or a year?
HH: I don’t do anything for anyone else. I take that back. I’ve got a couple friends. Cal Percy up in Idaho and Norm Scott up in Grant’s Pass, Oregon. We help them with stuff. I am doing an engine for Cal Percy right now he’s building a new A car. But we don’t want to do anything for the public, just our own stuff. And believe me, that keeps me busy. We’ve got four engines now, and to keep four engines running and competitive is a full time job.