Ever since the dawn of the industrial age, each succeeding generation of man has been amazed at the seemingly geometric rate of advance as technology whizzes past us. For every generation, it seems to them that no previous time in history could match what has happened in their time. The last century brought us from the horse for transportation and work engine to climate-controlled vehicles run by computers, and from Kitty Hawk to the moon and an orbiting space station. Within our little hot rod corner of the technology world, the progress would be no less astounding to those early pioneers of speed we discussed in last month's look at some of the early hot rodders and speed equipment makers.
To reluctantly establish some kind of boundary for editorial space considerations, we chose to look at some of the movers and shakers from the beginning of the dry lakes racing season of 1948. Alas, this entire issue wouldn't be big enough to include every important name or development in speed equipment. We're examining this peak point of the Flathead era as just a "freeze frame," if you will, of guys, cars, and hot rod hardware.
CamshaftsWe divided the various ad-vertisers in our 1948 SCTA program into rough categories of the most popular engine mods for the Flathead Ford V-8s. Of course, everything that lakes racers and circle trackers learned in the '30s about extracting power from the four-holers was applied to every engine later on, and after the addition of more carburetion and some compression, a reworked camshaft was the next step up. There were cam grinders everywhere, at least in California, and it would seem you could almost get one at your local gas station with a fill-up! There was so much competition that most cam guys couldn't make it on just camshafts; they also did ignitions or some other speed equipment as well.
Most of the "boys" racing the streets and dry lakes were on a pretty tight budget, so just as many of them had their stock heads milled for higher compres-sion rather than step up to the aluminum heads, so they also had their stock camshafts reground for performance. How do you make the existing lobes taller for more lift? You offset-grind them, which takes material away from the base-circle (low) side of the profile, thereby making a greater-than-stock difference between the low and the high lift. As things developed and the smarter grinders experimented more, the overall shape of the lobe and things like duration and ramp acceleration were also designed in. You could get a reground cam for 20 bucks or so in the early days, but experi-menting to find a good grind was tedious, as changing cams in a Ford Flathead isn't an easy job, especially if you couldn't afford adjustable tappets.
Harman & Collins was one of the cam-related advertisers in our program, and the name is all over the history of speed equipment. Cliff Collins and Kenny Harman started together as a business in 1945, but Harman already had a background from racing Muroc and Rosamond lakes and getting to know and learn from early speed pioneers George Riley, Leo Goosen, and Dale and Dutch Drake. After some five years of success, the partners split, with Collins keeping the H&C name for ignitions and Harman going strictly with cam grinding. He was very hot into inboard boat racing all during the '50s, then later scaled down to a small shop where he made motorcycle cams only, under the name K-H Cams. Contemporaries considered him to be a true innovator. The H&C name in ignitions had a good reputation; their dual-point, dual-coil setup was similar to what others were doing at the time, but they also made their H&C magneto for racing use that was an all-new design.
Some of the companies whose names were involved with early speed equipment were "tool companies" with lots of machinery and someone in the company who got the hot rod "bug." They started using the equipment after hours to crank out speed parts to afford to continue their "habit." One such company was Weber Tool Company in Los Angeles. Harry Weber was the son of the owner and like a dutiful son, started at the bottom of the business to learn everything. Being young and in Southern California, though, it was only a matter of time before he was exposed to the street and lakes racers and began turning out hot rod cams on his dad's equipment. When the senior Weber passed away, Harry kept the business going and it grew from camshafts to clutches and those lightweight aluminum flywheels that allowed a Flattie to "really wind up." Although it would be many years before standards were developed for modern performance flywheels, these cast-aluminum flywheels were much safer than the usual rodding trick of "chopping" (lightening) stock iron flywheels by machine work. Ironically, that is the treatment manufacturers use today to make sure a flywheel will explode on a dyno when testing scattershields! Weber also made high-compression heads for Studebakers.