The Bomb Factory Digger

The first line of the article linked before says it all - "this is exactly how hot rodding should be". Built on a long series of Wednesday nights by a shop teacher and a pair of Lawrence Livermore National Labs employees (hopefully that explains the car's name), this home-built 'rod cost under $10K and runs mid-10s in the quarter. The body is built from an authentic '27 Ford T bucket and a pickup bed that was hand-built sometime in the fifties; fiberglass repops just won't be right. The engine is a 283 small-block Chevy that was cutting-edge about 30 years ago, and it's fed methanol by a Hilborn mechanical injection system. While I wouldn't be too excited about trapping at 120 MPH in a vehicle that has no front brakes and 50-year-old drums out back, I think it's a tremendously cool way to go fast at the drag strip. Trying to hand-bend a rollcage around an old 16" wheel is probably a lot more fun than cutting fat checks to guys named "Boyd" or "Chip".