By the time you read this, the 2007 Grand National Roadster Show will have come and gone, and the hot rod selected as America's Most Beautiful Roadster will be well known. But when we were out visiting Hollywood Hot Rods in Burbank, California, just a few weeks before the event, Troy Ladd was still doing the down-to-the-wire thrash toward completion on his Brookville-bodied Deuce.
This is the roadster we've been watching come together for more than a year now. We showed you how the Brookville steel body was sectioned without screwing up the distinctive exterior styling cues of a Deuce roadster. And a few months ago, we followed some more subtle metalwork on that same roadster when the cockpit's upper perimeter was dressed up with some custom sheetmetal work. There is no such thing as too much detail when building an AMBR contender.
We were back at Hollywood Hot Rods just before Christmas. The body and chassis were away at the paint shop, but the engine was at the shop in Burbank, where Troy and the HHR crew were finishing it up. The engine is a 392ci Hemi that once powered a drag racer. It had been retired years before and was crated up and packed away when HHR found it. The crew machined it and rebuilt it with the high-performance components it deserves. But when you're going for AMBR, even the engine has to be as imaginative and distinctive as the rest of the car.
The goal at HHR, as usual, was to respect tradition but push it to the edge a little. In the case of this Hemi, that was accomplished by modifying a set of vintage Hilborn injectors with electronics in an undetectable way.
Converting a mechanical system to electronics is not a new idea, but in many applications, either the electronic advantages are compromised for the sake of appearance, or vice versa. HHR's goal was to take full advantage of computer programming, but in a stealthy way. It's old school, but with a brand-new curriculum.
Reigniting an Old FlameHollywood Hot Rods needed to keep the whole roadster looking vintage, and Troy found an old '60s-era Flame-Thrower distributor that is a perfect match for the car's look. But he also needed an electronic ignition to allow the computer to control the timing and work with the Hemi's EFI system. His solution was to convert the distributor to a PerTronix electronic system.
The old Flame-Throwers featured a dual point and dual coil pack design with opposite coils firing one bank of cylinders. Troy figured out a way to program the ignition so the computer can fire the cylinders with separate coils. He programmed the ignition to think it's firing individual coil packs (like on a new car), but in reality, it's only firing two coils opposite of each other. The spark is distributed through the Flame-Thrower, but the spark and timing are controlled through computer electronics instead of mechanical weights and springs.
It's a design he conceived on his own, but he created it with some help from the folks at Perfect Power, who confirmed that nobody has ever done this, but that it will work.
