Chrome bumpers made a quick exit from the automotive scene in the late '80s. In their place are elaborate, but flimsy, plastic covers hiding stamped-steel impact beams with a wide swath of Styrofoam sandwiched in between. Why? Cost, weight reduction, and ease of repair are the likely culprits. Plastic bumper covers are cheaper and easier to manufacture and replace in the event of an accident.

It's been nearly a year since our '67 Buick GS 400 ran. We had just added an Air Ride Street Challenge system and were driving it home when we heard a strange noise that got worse when we revved the engine. That noise turned out to be several bad rod bearings that had eaten their way through the journals of the crankshaft. We shipped the engine off to JMS Racing Engines, where the mill was rebuilt and a set of Edelbrock heads were added. Now that we have it back, it's time to make this sucker run again. Stabbing the engine is the easy part, but what about the initial start-up? It seems simple enough, but if you blow it, you'll likely start a fire, kill your battery, or both. Watch and learn.

Whoops, there is a big crack in your paint. You didn't see it before, but there it is. Was it the Bondo that cracked or was it the application of the paint? How do you find out? We're going to show you. There are many reasons you might need to spot-repair your otherwise perfect paint job, such as a door ding, a paint bubble, or a large scratch, but we are going to show you a worst-case scenario-ours was a sheetmetal failure under the bodywork.

If you are anything like us, you've stabbed a distributor one tooth off at least once and put 'er in 180 degrees out more times than you are willing to admit. Swapping a points distributor for something a little more billet or simply pulling a race piece out for a recurve or a new gear should be a simple 20-minute operation. But if you get it wrong, you can spend the night in the garage. We don't want that and neither do you, so follow along as we show you two different scenarios for installing a distributor so you can get it right the first time.

The idea is to get the large hard-parts into the car, then follow up with the details, like dialing in the transmission electronics, the fuel injection, and tidying up the lists of all the little components beyond the scope of this story. The '64 El Camino still had the original 283 V-8 that smoked like the stack at Burger King. We shoved the powerplant into a corner for a rebuild later.>>>

Foot to the floor for 100 feet when you brake for that bus full of nuns? Upgrade when we show you that putting disc brakes on the rear of a GM car is actually very easy. Watch as we swap out the drums on our '86 Caprice and swap in a set of discs from a '94 Caprice police car. The good news is that these tricks will work for any GM C-clip-style 10- or 12-bolt axle on nearly every GM car.

We mocked up our small-block with a Milodon oil pan, along with a Tremec five-speed to see how everything would fit the first time in.>>>

Every April, we paint a car, and this time around, we made an honest girl out of our '67 Mustang coupe, which made its first appearance in CC exactly two years ago. To refresh your memory, we picked up this lowly I-6/C4 commuter from its previous owner for $2,000. And it looked like what you'd expect from a 40-year-old car at that price. There were several layers of paint, some rust spots, and someone in the recent past was a regular practitioner of the "park by feel" method-reverse till you hit something, forward till you hit something, inch back, and ... you're good. As you'd expect, the front and rear of the car had more creases and folds than the entire cast of The Biggest Loser.

There are certain things in the car building world that are considered black arts- jobs that seem to require mystical powers to accomplish. Making headers is one of those jobs. This month, we stepped into the void and attempted to make a set of headers in-house. In last December's issue, we chronicled our experiences at Lincoln Electric's welding school, where we got a solid foundation in the basics of TIG welding. We certainly put our skills to the test with this job, too. No one will ever call what we made a masterpiece, but we learned a whole lot during the process. The next set of headers we make might actually end up on a car.

'The new darling of the engine-swap set is the GM Gen III family of small-blocks that includes everything from the lowly 5.3L truck engine to the LQ9 6.0L all the way up to the swarthy Corvette LS7 427. But not everyone demands EFI sizzle with his Gen III steak. Capitalizing on that concept is the amazingly simple MSD Ignition conversion box that allows you to stick a carburetor on an LS1 or LS2 while still employing the very accurate GM distributorless ignition system (DIS). We've rubbed our greasy paws over this system several times, and it is so incredibly easy to use that there's no excuse for even considering adding a cumbersome distributor to the Gen III/IV engines. You don't even need a laptop computer if you don't want to get into that. If you can fog a mirror, you can plug in one of these boxes and supply accurate spark to any Gen III/IV engine. We'll run it down, and you can decide if it's cool.

Manual transmissions are making a major comeback in the performance world. Regardless of whether you have a four-, five-, or even six-speed manual gearbox, the one common denominator with any of these trannies is that they get their power directly from a spinning clutch-and-pressure-plate assembly. If that clutch doesn't make a firm connection, the chain of power is broken and all your hard-earned horsepower will make is a bunch of lining-melting heat in the bellhousing.

Being low on cash sucks. But you can still work on your car even with a tight budget. It just takes a little more time, skill, and ingenuity. While some people can just open a catalog and place an order for cool suspension parts, the truth is that most of us cannot. Here's a secret, though: The factory parts are pretty good, and there are inexpensive ways to make them even better.

'The performance world is full of cool stroker engine combinations these days that fill more pages in crankshaft catalogs than ever before. We're talkin' about long-arm 460 Fords, wild Cleveland combos, oddball inline-six cylinders, and stroke bumps for the new generation of GM Gen III engines. All of this is in the service of the "mine is bigger than yours" approach to horsepower heroism. But all this stroker hype can also cause confusion.

'New-car manufacturers spend a lot of engineering resources minimizing what they term NVH, which stands for noise, vibration, and harshness. One component of the noise factor is the wind whistling through cracks in the seals around the doors and windows. The musclecars of the '60s are famous as wind-whistle generators, and much of that noise emanates from those quirky vent windows prevalent in most '60s cars up until 1968 when, on most GM cars (except El Caminos, for example), the vent wing disappeared.

'We're all slaves to traction. After all, what good is a 600hp thumper gonna do underhood if it just turns into tire smoke when you mash the honker pedal? Though suspension tuning can take you part of the way, real traction gains always come from increasing the contact patch via bigger meats. To fit the big rubber, you may need to narrow your rear axle.

'Everybody wants to talk about bottom-of-the-page camshafts with calendar-length duration figures and valve lifts approaching 31/44 inch. With all this thinly veiled aggression going on in the valvetrain, the one overlooked component is often the valvesprings. The combination of lift, duration, and rocker ratio dictates the amount of time the valve stays open to improve flow and make more horsepower. But if the valve doesn't follow the exact path the cam lobe prescribes because the valvesprings are too weak, then the chances of making good power are greatly reduced. Engine rpm is the easy path to more horsepower, but only if the valves actually follow the dictates of the cam lobe.

'There's never been a better time to restore older musclecars than right now. Entire '69 Camaros are being reproduced, but that doesn't mean that original sheetmetal should be trashed. Original tin is still considered good as gold, so when it came time to resurrect our midwestern-rusted '66 Chevelle's front fenders, we could have gone the repop route with brand-new reproductions. But instead, the fenders were good enough to warrant saving.

Red Camaro, orange Camaro, blue Mustang-is this you? We look at 5,000 cars during the Car Craft Summer Nats alone, so we've seen every type of paint job imaginable. The musclecar hobby is making a huge comeback since the import scene ebbed a bit, so that means more competition at car shows for that glittering trophy (if you are into that sort of thing) and more guys vying for that crowd of dudes offering street cred.

'It's not that bad, really. Some people balk at the notion of spending half a day cleaning and detailing their cars. We're here to reassure you there is no black magic involved in detailing. You just need to be able to recognize which products to use for each surface and condition. Combine that with some manual labor and a few hours, and your car will be looking like new. Plus, the more often you do it, the easier it will be, and the longer your paint job will last.

'Working to make your car go faster can sometimes involve addressing what is slowing your car down. That's the situation we're facing with our hot street/strip car. The brakes are dragging mercilessly because of mismatched components causing excessive brake-pad wear, overheated rotors and slowing us down at the dragstrip. This situation has been eating through brake pads, ruining rotors, and slowing down the car at the dragstrip. This story is going to help you find out if your car has a brake-system problem and show how to correct this issue.

'There aren't many things better than cruising your ride down Main Street. The rumble of a finely tuned engine, the smell of mildew-infested upholstery-oh, wait, that's not supposed to be part of it. Nothing ruins a sweet ride faster than a ratty interior. While it may sound expensive and hard to replace, in reality, it is quite simple.

If you have been following the CC/Rambler project, you might have noticed that we've made 480 hp and run 12.06 at 112 mph using a completely original fuel system. It has the crappy stock 31/48-inch pickup in the tank with original fuel lines and a Jeep Cherokee mechanical fuel pump. It works just fine, so we are going to fix it.

Before this tune-up, when the green light lit this '71 Buick Skylark would smoke the Mickey Thompson stickies down the first 100 feet or so of the track before hooking up and running. The starting-line tirespin was maddening. Part of the solution we'll show here applies to production cars with coil-sprung, nonparallel four-link rear suspensions such as '64-'72 GM A-bodies (Chevelles, Skylarks, Cutlasses, and Tempests) and Fox-and-newer Mustangs. Next month, we'll dial it in.

'The idea behind this story came to our inbox by way of one of our readers. Glad said, "It's a picture of a guy washing off his mains with a garden hose." The guy in question races Camaros on lots of boost and nitrous. He wrote in to tell us that when he blows up one engine, he goes to the junkyard and gets another one, hoses it down, drops it in, and goes racing again. We all thought this was completely crazy, but kinda cool too, and it got us wondering how little money we would need to rebuild an engine.