Cars of Technology

You might carry an extra wheel bearing and a new grease seal with you every weekend you're at the track but the real problem is that a bad wheel bearing can destroy a spindle. I bet you don’t have one of those in your weekend parts inventory.  Checking on Bearing Wear and Condition             Checking on bearing play should be a part of your race prep program. You need to do this every time you go to the track. Usually nothing will be wrong but you need to do it just the same. A bad wheel bearing at the track usually means you get to go home early.             The quick and dirty way is to raise the front wheels off the ground. With one hand at 12 o’clock on the wheel and your other hand at 6 o’clock try to move the wheel back and forth. If you feel the play is excessive you might start taking things apart for inspection or you can use a dial indicator gauge on the w...

Not much really shows if you have the big hubcaps. I could have simply sprayed the lip of the wheel with some gloss black paint from Home Depot and no one would have known the difference - except me. Like a true fanatic I felt the need to restore my '58 Corvette wheels to the exact condition they were when they rolled down the final few feet of the old St. Louis assembly line. Let's get one small point out of the way before we even begin. First, we are not going to paint the wheels the same way the assembly line workers did in 1958. We're simply going to make them look the same way. There is a limit. From 1953 to 1962, all Corvette wheels were painted by first dipping each wheel into a vat of black primer. They were then baked in a drying oven. The wheels were next placed on a steel rack and sent to the color area, where the final color coat was applied. This painting rack was constructed in such a way that five wheels were stacked on a rack back to back-meaning 10 wheels ...

Tires are the only part of your car that actually touches the racetrack. Even then very little of the tire is actually in contact with the pavement at any given time. Everything you do on the track requires contact between the surface of the track and your tires. Because so little rubber is in contact with the track you need to maximize the tire’s footprint. Since all four tires to have to contribute to this traction the first step is to make sure all four tires are equally loaded. Remember that the tire with the least traction is going to set your cornering limit.  An unbalanced car feels unpredictable and unstable to the driver. When you drive hard into a corner you need to have confidence that you’ll come out of that corner with no surprises. Since we turn both right and left we want the car to react the same way regardless of which way we’re turning.  This means we need to measure how much weight is on each of our four tires. In the bad old days we weighed our cars w...

I wrote this article for Vette magazine back in 2000. After thirteen years it was time to revisit the '58's suspension. Actually this whole deal all started with my tires. Twenty year old tires are not a good thing. They actually blow out while the car is sitting in the garage. Really.  I almost sold thi s '58 Corvette fifteen years ago - it was that bad. It was just a hassle to drive. It moved all over the road and it would never stay in a straight line. This old straight-axle just wasn't any fun to drive. I'm not into garage decorations, so it was time to move the car down the road. Then I decided to use some current technology and give it once last shot. Most shock companies didn't have high-tech shocks for a '53 Chevy chassis. Then again we really don't need fancy shocks. Remember, if you're driving a straight-axle Corvette, your chassis is really from a '53 Chevy sedan We're talking about a really old design here. On the other hand, the ...