Motor Mouth: ‘Hot Rod’ magazine just became immortal

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Long before — actually just two years before, but when you’re only 11 years old, nine seems such a long time ago — I discovered motorcycles, I was a Hot Rod magazine fanatic. Pictures of fat-tired Chevelles doing glorious burnouts at a drag strip, Deuce Coupes roaming the salt at Bonneville, and slammed Ford F-100s prowling sunny California streets were outrageous to a boy from a northern Quebec ville whose main street was yet to be paved. It was all some fairy tale that I lived once a month when Hot Rod hit the shelves at Beaulieu’s tabagie on Laure Boulevard. Someday, I dreamed, that would be all mine.

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What really got my motor running, though, was all the mag’s technical articles. To the budding geek — and, yes at nine, I already had my first pocket protector — focused on internal combustion, Hot Rod was a font of insider information. I learned the fundamentals of valve lash, the wonders of Plastigauge (which measures main bearing clearances) and the basics (I was only nine, after all) of camshaft lobe centres all from its pages.

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A few things still eluded me. I couldn’t quite grasp how ignition coils worked — age didn’t, as I had hoped, make it any easier; my lack of comprehension of third-year electromagnetics ‘helped’ me switch my major to mechanical engineering some 10 years later — and for the life of me, I probably still couldn’t rebuild a Stromberg carburetor if my life depended on it. But the mag’s concise, clear explanations filled my brain with visions of someday engineering my own outrageous engines, and remain the template I use to tackle automobile technical explanations.

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Even after two wheels took over from four in my heart — and I dumped Car & Driver, Motor Trend, et al from my reading list — I still perused every issue of Hot Rod when it hit the newsstand. So informative were the articles that, even though a pushrod V8 had virtually nothing in common with a double-overhead-cam four, the theories espoused on those pages were the best insight into internal-combustion technology to be had in print journalism. I learned how to adjust the ignition timing on my first motorcycle, a glorious Honda CT70 minibike, from something I learned in Hot Rod. Ditto for its first valve clearance check.

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Even after I graduated from university, Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering in hand, I was still learning from Hot Rod. I started using wideband oxygen sensors to calibrate bike carbs long before motorcycle builders discovered the wonders of digital tuning, and once even grafted a Haltech electronic fuel injection system onto a Laverda RGS1000 — surely the first and, I suspect, the last time that was ever attempted — from what I gleaned from the pages of Hot Rod about retrofit aftermarket EFI systems for cars. (And, by the way, that business has grown so much that today you can buy a system from Autotrend that perfectly emulates the throttle bodies of original Rochester carburetors so that your resto-rod looks perfectly period-correct.)

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The point of this somewhat long-winded diatribe is that the journalism that graced Hot Rod’s pages formed the tech bits I pen today. Without their model — and that of the world-renowned Cycle magazine as well — I would have never been able to become editor of Canadian Automotive Trade, a tech magazine written for mechanics, that served as my stepping stone to full-blown automotive journalism. The point is that there’s a direct link from Robert E. Petersen — Hot Rod was the first title in the once-dominant Petersen publishing empire — to today’s Motor Mouth.

That’s why I am thrilled at the possibility that those dog-eared pages will live on in memoriam. With 2023 being the 75^th anniversary of Hot Rod — it was first published for and sold at the 1948 Los Angeles Hot Rod Exhibition — the MotorTrend Group announced it will be offering, free of charge no less, digitized versions of every issue produced in those 75 glorious years. Every single article has been replicated, every single picture scanned.

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Thus will we have photos of founding editor Wally Parks — he who created the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) — tinkering with four-wheeled toys, articles detailing Autolite’s attempt to storm Bonneville with its (lead-acid) battery-power “Lead Wedge,” and more details than you ever wanted to know about GM’s original aluminum-block ZL-1 427-cubic-inch monster V8.

You’ll even be able to read all about — and I have to admit that I missed this back in December 1968 — Dick Smothers, of the famed Smothers Brothers comedy duo, producing an aural history of American racing on vinyl record. We’re talking about more than 900 issues in all and, according to current editor-in-chief John McGann, an incredible 128,000 pages of content.

You can bet I’ll be one of the first to hit the archives. The wraps come off the biggest treasure trove of historic auto mechanics on Tuesday, November 1.