Awesome August Issue

Cover Section

How to Build an Awesome Daily Driver

The Ultimate Daily Driver: What makes one car a better driver than another? Read on for our totally unbiased opinions.

The Big Chill: A top-notch cooling system is an essential ingredient of a reliable car

Easy Electrical Troubleshooting: Electrical gremlins can drive you nuts, but Marlan shows us how to cure some of the most common ones

Handle With Care: Look before you leap when modifying your car’s suspension for better handling

Special Section

Fuel Injection Basics

How to Diagnose GM’s TPI System: A paper clip helps, but a laptop with the right software is better

EFI Parts Buyer’s Guide: Know the difference between an LT1 and an LS1?

Tech

Basic Engine Diagnostics: Find out if your engine needs a tune-up or a rebuild

520hp Pump-Gas Chevy 350: Forget all those weak-suck pump gas mills, this one’s for real

How to Color Sand Your Paint: This last step in painting your car can make all the difference

Features

M-Class: Even Chevy guys will appreciate this gorgeous fastback Mustang

Vette School: We couldn’t pass up the chance to flog a fleet of Chevy’s best at the Bragg-Smith driving school

Fabulous Fords Forever: What? Two Ford features in one issue!?

RPO Z-17: Is this ’65 Chevelle an ultimate daily driver? We sure think it’s close

ATTENTION ALL READERS! A SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM CC EDITOR MATT KING:

The Car Craft Road Trip

Any and all readers are welcome to join us on Friday, August 3 for the Car Craft West Coast Roadtrip from Los Angeles to Reno for Hot August Nights.

We recently attended Hot Rod’s Power Tour, and it was a total disaster—all our cars broke down and we suffered the humiliation of trailering our Cheap Street Chevelle back home. Vowing to follow that fiasco up with an even better one, we’re planning our own roadtrip the weekend of August 3. Any and all readers who can make their way out to LA are welcome to join us on Friday, August 3 around 10 am at Los Angeles County Raceway in Palmdale for a little drag-racing action at the track before we hit the road to Reno, Nevada. LACR is actually located in Little Rock, California, near Palmdale, for those who’ve never been there. Just take Highway 14 off I-5 to Highway 138 and go east. You’ll find it eventually.

Depending on how many folks show up, we'll stage an impromptu bracket race for a couple of hours (expect to fork over about 20 bucks to make a few runs). Then we’ll head out by noon up Hwy 14 past Edwards Air Force Base over to US 395 and then up through Bishop, California, past Yosemite National Park, and into Reno, Nevada, to attend Hot August Nights. This massive rolling outdoor car show engulfs the Reno/Sparks area for the whole first week of August. We hear there are some great junkyards and other fascinating roadside attractions on the way up, so we’ll take our time.

The drive up the backbone of the Sierra Nevadas is one of the most scenic stretches of road in California, so we’ll make it a leisurely run to Bishop (which is home to one of the best beef jerky makers in the whole world, by the way) and spend Friday night there. (We're giving you all these details so you can try to make advance hotel reservations if you want). We have no idea where we'll stay, but that's part of the fun of a roadtrip! On Saturday, we'll head into Reno, where Hot August Nights will be in full swing.

We've never been to this shindig before, but from what we hear, the whole Lake Tahoe region is pretty much overrun by car nuts throughout the week, with outdoor concerts, cruises, a huge swap meet, and even some 1/8-mile drag racing thrown in. It sounds like sensory overload for gearheads, and we're not sure if we can take it! But it's worth a try.

Hot August Nights is a huge, well-organized event by our standards, and it’s "officially" only open to pre-1972 vehicles, plus there’s a $100 per vehicle registration fee if you want to be a formal part of the festivities. However, we expect that there will be plenty of gate crashers who simply park and walk, or run wild on the streets. As of this writing, we don’t have any hotel reservations ourselves, so we don’t know where we’ll be staying, but for more info about accommodations and events in and around Reno that week, contact Hot August Nights at 775/365-1956 or on the Web at www.hotagustnights.net. A word of warning to those coming from afar—bring your sleeping bags because we last-minute hotel rooms are virtually nonexistent in the Reno area during Hot August Nights.

Our plan, if you can call it one, is pretty loose. That means it could be a total disaster, the trip of a lifetime, or something in between. Either way, we know it’ll be a blast, and the stories will only get better as the years go by.

Matt King, Editor

Car Craft