Hot Rod Garage

On this episode of HOT ROD Garage Presented by Lincoln Tech Mike Finnegan gets tips for strengthening sheet metal using a bead roller from world-famous fabricator, Jamey Jordan, owner of Handmade Seat Company. Then he and David Freiburger eliminate a few electrical gremlins in the Roadkill 73 Chevy C30 ramp truck and pick up more power on the dyno by replacing the old quadrajet carburetor with a new Holley Ultra Street Avenger and the stock HEI distributor with a new part from MSD. Finally, Freiburger tests Duplicolors Vinyl and Fabric Coating, a spray-on dye for restoring interior parts. If you arent sick of their faces by the end of this episode, stick around to watch the duo answer questions from the Hot Rod Garage Facebook page and insult a good portion of the Motor Trend staff.

On this episode of Hot Rod Garage Presented by Lincoln Tech, we turn a lowridin’ 1965 Pontiac LeMans into a corner-carving muscle car with a budget-minded suspension system, a quick-ratio steering box, and disc brakes. Classic Performance Products supply the parts, which bolt in place and result in dramatic improvements to the handling of Hot Rod Magazine staffer Brandan Gilllogly’s car. Once the LeMans is sorted we work on our 1973 Chevy Ramp Truck during a Dickies Roadkill Project Car Update. The electrical system has seen better days and so we play detective to trace a battery drain and replace both batteries with new units from AC Delco. We wrap up this episode with a question and answer session with Mike Finnegan and David Freiburger as they ponder the mysteries of the universe and cars in general.

In this episode of HOT ROD Garage presented by Lincoln Tech, we set out to build a good old-fashioned sleeper! We found a very innocent-looking and long-forgotten 1965 Plymouth Fury III wagon and began to revive the old Mopar 400 big-block from Rollsmokey. Watch Tony and Lucky take that shaky, low-compression 400, strip it to the block, and rebuild it into a 512ci stroked beast! After the new 512 big-block gets stuffed into the #furyroadmaster, it’s time to hit the streets for some fun!

In this episode of Hot Rod Garage presented by Lincoln Tech, we get our hands on a hot-rodding icon, Project X! In 1965, Popular Hot Rodding purchased an unremarkable 1957 Chevy 210 and began a 50-build legacy using it as a testbed for every hot, new part. It’s been sitting for years with a Pro Touring look and fuel-injected big-block, so we decided it was time to take it back to its roots! Watch Project X get a nasty LSX 376 GM Performance crate engine with a Weiand blower and two proper Holley carburetors!

In this episode of Hot Rod Garage presented by Lincoln Tech, we decide to upgrade all the necessary things to make our 1966 Fury Wagon (which is housing a 512ci V-8) safe. Watch Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa install 4 Piston disc brakes, an upgraded transmission, and axles to handle the power of our big-block Mopar. Once that’s sorted and she’s a reliable driver, we turn the power way up with cylinder heads, an intake manifold, a header, and a big, new Holley carburetor—just to make sure this car is still way out of control! Once we’re done, watch Tony literally tear the tires off the #furyroadmaster in our most epic testdrive ever!

In this episode of Hot Rod Garage presented by Lincoln Tech, our Drift Project, a 1972 Plymouth `Cuda, gets a serious drivetrain for the kind of sideways action we want out of this car! Watch Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa install the brand-new Mopar Performance 392 Crate Hemi kit and a Tremec T56 Magnum six-speed into project FishTail. As part of a six-week build to unveil the car for SEMA, the guys are hustling to turn this barn find into a track monster!

In this episode of HOT ROD Garage presented by Lincoln Tech, watch our hosts, Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa, finish the build of their new, ultimate shop truck: the Crown Hick! They took a minty 1966 Ford F100 truck body and laid it onto the frame and mechanicals of a 2007 Crown Victoria Police Interceptor that has some serious suspension and exhaust upgrades. Once the guys get it all bolted into place and integrate steering, brakes, and throttle, they apply a Holley EFI system and MSD transmission controller to make it all run! Once together, they take it out for a serious shakedown to show off all the modern performance that is now hiding under that 1966 F100!

In this episode of Hot Rod Garage presented by Lincoln Tech, Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa get the #HRGLEMANSTER back in action with a complete QA1 suspension system, and fire up 326 with the new Holley Terminator Stealth EFI system. Starting with our freshly rust-free body, and completely beefed up frame, watch these two guys install a complete QA1 suspension front to back, and then install Holley’s new carburetor look-a-like fuel injection system and hit the road in just a couple of days!

The Drift ’Cuda is back! Project #fishtail, Tony Angelo’s dream drift muscle car build, gets some suspension upgrades and sees some track time on this episode of HOT ROD Garage presented by Lincoln Tech! We made the trek to Angelo’s home shop outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he and Lucky Costa modify the ’Cuda that was built fast for SEMA, installing custom NASCAR-style sway bars and different-rate springs and getting it track-ready. After this show car is dialed, Angelo and Costa take it over to Old Bridge Township Raceway Park to spend a day on the drift course!

On this episode of HOT ROD Garage presented by Lincoln Tech, watch Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa try to stuff 10 pounds of engine into 5 pounds of car. Instead of the usual HOT ROD tact of doubling or tripling the horsepower of a Mustang 5.0, the guys decided to take the 200(ish) hp of this 1986 Ford V-8 and cram it into a tiny 1964 MGB ex-racer. Different route, but same terrifying results! Power to weight is the name of the game.

On this episode of HOT ROD Garage presented by Lincoln Tech, Lucky Costa’s personal ’66 Chevelle gets major upgrades to its 6.0L LS truck engine. Tony Angelo and Costa install a set of AFR heads and a Magnuson supercharger on this high-mileage, well-worn engine to really wake up the powerplant. Without any upgrades to the 100,000-plus-mile bottom end, the #66ChevHell puts down more than 500 whp!

On this episode of HOT ROD Garage presented by Lincoln Tech, Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa dive into the red-hot C10 truck market and show you how to build a killer shortbed truck on a longbed budget! Watch the guys cut, shorten, and weld a longbed C10 into a sweet shorty using a Brothers Trucks kit and bed parts. Then they turn their new shortbed C10 into a killer handling machine using the brand-new QA1 complete suspension system.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 20 years, you have heard of the three hottest engines in all of motoring, the LS-based Chevy V-8, the Toyota turbo six-cylinder 2JZ, and the beastly 5.9L Cummins Turbodiesel. These engines are absolutely legendary and have been swapped into every chassis under the sun, but they’ve never gone head-to-head. On this episode of HOT ROD Garage, watch Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa hop up each one of these engines and put them to the test on the same dyno!

On this episode of HOT ROD Garage, we build the ultimate getaway car! Watch hosts Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa take a very plain 1979 four-door Chevy Malibu and make it ready to outrun anyone and anything. The guys install the 500hp LS-based V-8 from the engine comparo episode and run all that power through an American Powertrain TK0600. The result is a whole lot of tire smoke and lots of giggles. Stay tuned to see Part 2!

On this episode of HOT ROD Garage, Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa take a mostly stock 1985 Ford Mustang 5.0 to a dragstrip! They set up shop at the track for two days to install a ton of go-fast parts to see just how much faster the car will go after each upgrade! The guys install all the typical mods: exhaust, intake, carb, cam, and even cylinder heads in their attempt to go quicker and quicker!

Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa shoehorn the 5.9L Diesel Turbo Cummins engine from an earlier episode, which made more than 400 hp and nearly 1,000 lb-ft of torque, into a 1970 El Camino! Is it a tow truck?

On this episode of HOT ROD Garage, Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa revive our old lightweight runabout, the 5.0 MG! This is a ’64 MGB roadster that we crammed a 5.0 Ford V-8 into last year, resulting in one sketchy little rocket ship that didn’t handle, or stop, but it sure did GO! This time, watch the guys fabricate a complete three-link rear suspension, convert the front end to a coilover suspension, and drop the car on seriously sticky rubber. Then you’ll be given a killer introduction to suspension tuning while they tear up the Streets of Willow Springs International Raceway!

On this episode of Hot Rod Garage, Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa put together a killer street Big Block Chevy engine on the CHEAP! The guys try to commandeer the exotic ZL1 427 From Project X that’s been sitting in a cage and get denied by the big bosses. So, instead they take a run of the mill Vortec 7400 from a junkyard, and try to make the same power numbers as the Zl1 for about 25% of the price! Watch as a bunch of go-fast bits turn this old truck engine into a killer street/race engine!!

On this episode of HOT ROD Garage, Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa dream of a 1969 big-block, widebody, four-speed Corvette, but they just can’t afford it! Watch the guys transform a beat-up 1974 Corvette into the ’69 widebody they really want. Installing a low-buck, 475hp big-block with killer side pipes is step one. Step two is to cut the entire body off and get the car ready for a complete 1969 changeover! Before the new body parts go on, though, there are lots of burnouts!

On this episode of HOT ROD Garage, Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa give you the lowdown on drag racing! Watch the guys take our 10-second turbo Camaro project and a bone-stock 1986 Ford Thunderbird Turbo Coupe, prep them for action, and hit the racetrack! There’s a full rundown on exactly how to do everything at the strip—burnouts, launching, nailing the tree, and even how to shift and slow down. Whether you are a total newbie or have been down the strip a million times, there’s lots of great info in this one.

On this episode of HOT ROD Garage, hosts Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa take a bone-stock 150hp 1986 Ford Thunderbird Turbo Coupe and bring it into the 21st century! Can you extract modern performance from an 80s engine by applying liberal amounts of new turbo technology? Can this 2.3L Pinto engine hang with the new Ford 2.3 Ecoboost? Watch and see! The guys will install high-flowing manifolds, a dual ball bearing turbo, big intercooler and exhaust, and one serious modern computer to control it all!

Big block. Big fenders. Big smiles. After months of cutting glass and gluing panels, painting uglies, and stretching dollars, Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa finally finish backdating their ’74 Vette with a ’69 look, proper power, and real driveability. On this episode of HOT ROD Garage, watch as they transform it from a tire-shredding husk of car to a fit-and-finished (and still tire-shredding) cruise night star.

On this episode of HOT ROD Garage, hosts Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa are going to take on the legendary Aussie engine, the Ford Barra. It’s a beastly 4.0L six-cylinder turbocharged unit that churns out enough combined tire smoke yearly to blot out the sun! These engines are the best that Australia has to offer, and they reign supreme in the land down under. The boys think that Chevrolet might have just built something in the Vortec 4200 that could be a better Barra! Both engines are around four liters, both are inline-six cylinders, both have 24 valves, so there’s only one thing to do, and that’s build a couple of these Vortec engines up, bolt turbochargers to them, and see what they can do!

Tony and Angelo pick up a complete running and driving 2004 Mustang GT on the cheap, with the goal of turning it into a really fun car. They install better suspension and brakes, give it more power, and throw in some interior and exterior upgrades.

The T-Type, Grand National and Turbo Regal were 80s monsters with their turbocharged V6 engines. Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa buy the absolute cheapest turbo Buick they can find and piece together a 1984 T-Type, overcoming much rust, corrosion and awful previous repairs.

Tony and Lucky fastest project ever is the 1,000 hp 2006 Chevy Impala SS, with an entire second V8 drivetrain crammed into the back. The front engine needs work, so the guys pull it out and use this chance to upgrade everything, including new headers, intake manifolds and EFI.

Our C10 short-bed conversion truck has been in need of a serious power-up for years now, and it’s finally time to cram some big power into this killer street truck. Hosts Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa are stuck on opposite coasts, but they aren’t going to let that stop them from getting the job done. Watch Tony grab a 1968 Chevy big-block and do a complete top-end upgrade. Aluminum heads, a big camshaft, and killer accessories all go onto this 454 in Tony’s Pennsylvania shop. Once it’s up and running strong, it gets shipped over to Lucky and current owner Mikey P for install with a killer Gearstar 6L80E transmission. Once it’s in and running, watch Mikey P tear it down the dragstrip with all that new power!

On this episode of Hot Rod Garage we put our C5 through some new, sideways paces! The 2000 Corvette has already been pumped to around 500 hp and ripped down the dragstrip in an earlier episode by host Lucky Costa. This time, Tony Angelo and his buddy Mike Edwards get it all set up to handle the turns.

Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa put together a cheap rear-end package for our 1973 Gen-3 Hemi-swapped Plymouth Duster. Once the cheap rear is built, the guys swap it into the Duster, and then drive it across LA to the 1/8 mile track at Irwindale, where it goes faster than ever!

Were kicking off Season 9 in a BIG WAY. 1,000-horsepower BIG. The guys set out to build a 1,000-hp Street car, using a 2014 Caprice Police Patrol car, a built 5.3 LS, and a turbo big enough to boost three cars. Tony Angelo is on the East Coast building the giant turbo system, and co-host Lucky Costa is in L.A. building the 5.3 to killer spec. Can the boys build a car with more power than anything coming out of Detroit? Who knows. The fun is in the finding out.

Hosts Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa have set out to turn a run-of-the-mill 2014 Chevy Caprice PPV into an insanely powerful street car making over one thousand horsepower. Thats more HP than literally any American car produced today. (OK, Tesla Plaid makes 1,020 electric horsies.) We take one built 5.3 truck LS engine (of course), and bolt one giant Garrett turbocharger on there and let those things sing. This is the nastiest car weve ever built, period.

This time on HOT ROD Garage, we take our rowdy 401 AMC V-8 engine that we built a couple years ago and cram it inside of our very crusty 1974 Javelin. On the way in, we pair the V-8 with a proper four-speed Super T-10 Transmission, longtube headers, and a ton of other hot parts. The goal is to have this package turned into a 1971 Trans Am tribute racer, so once its running and driving the first step is to take it onto a road racing course and see just how far we have to go with this car.

This time on HOT ROD Garage, we dig back into the Grand Trashional, the cheapest running turbo Buick EVER. We scooped a 1985 T-Type for 3800 bucks, fixed a ton of rust, cleaned up the interior, and took it to the track, where Tony Angelo promptly blew the non-intercooled 3.8-liter engine up. Watch Tony and guest host Jimmy Caldwell attempt to get this thing making serious power. The guys swap in a much-preferred 1987 intercooled engine and then bolt up a ton of modern performance parts: a dual ball-bearing Garrett turbo, Holley EFI, flowmaster manifolds

This time on HOT ROD Garage, we take our Coyote-engine-swapped 2004 GT and upgrade the chassis and suspension to handle the 400+ horses the 2015 F-150 Coyote V-8 puts down. Watch our host Tony Angelo and guest host Jimmie Caldwell replace the entire rear four-link suspension with a Griggs Racing torque arm setup with QA1 custom coil-overs. After the suspension and chassis are sorted, they upgrade the whole interior, seats, harnesses, and belts then take the car out to Willow Springs to set some fast lap times with a pack of quick track-day racers.

This time on Hot Rod Garage, watch hosts Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa stray way off the beaten path when they get their hands on a 1990 Plymouth Voyager five-speed, turbocharged minivan. These cars are super rare and as 80s as it gets. Tony scooped this project sight unseen off the internet, and its time to get it back to 100. The boys refresh the suspension, engine, and accessories until this 250,000-mile van is as good as new. Stock is never good enough at Hot Rod Garage, and they dont stop there. A custom exhaust, upgraded ECU, and more boost is applied to the

This time on HOT ROD Garage, hosts Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa dive back into the 72 Javelin project. The guys built a ripper of a 401 AMC motor years ago then finally dusted it off this year and shoved it under the hood, which proved two things: This motor sings at 7,000 rpm, and the rest of the car stops, steers, and handles like a flaming dumpster on wheels. But hot garbage no more. This time, the guys pull out everything old underneath then upgrade it with tubular, heim-jointed, rack-and-pinioned, four-wheel-disced, and Ford 9-inched goodness. Then, like all good

The Grand Trashional gets one more shot at making the power it deserves. Alex and Lucky put all their faith in heads, a cam, hopes and a dream. And because theyre gluttons for punishment, they introduce another creampuff to the fleet -- yet another must-have GM turbo V6. But at least this one will be fast, right?

Having near-zero experience in the sport of drifting, Alex and Lucky bring a pair of unexpected stock into the HRG stable -- the catch all of entry-level drift cars, two Nissan 370Zs. Drift-prepping the twin-Zs with ultra basic upgrades, these once abused and beaten Zs will continue to be abused and beaten, except this time under the watchful tutelage of an actual pro drifter.

On this very busy episode of Hot Rod Garage, the gang gets sick, loses the shop, and still manages to finish the Savoy. Not just finish it, but transform it from its shell of a self into a blown, injected, six-speed, tube-chassised, big-tire Savoy. Its a feat of endurance and one heck of a sight to behold.

Freshly stoked off of their win at Roadkill Nights, Alex and Lucky take on double the cars for double the seat time. A broken but Coyote-swapped 04 Mustang and a leaking but eager 74 Javelin track screamer are both just barely on the disabled list, and its time to get them off. When some friendly sparring on the road course is just a few wrenches away, how do you not?

The MythDusters Gen III Hemi has been resting in pieces ever since Engine Masters report card showed it down nearly 100 hp from its later brethren. Alex and Lucky upgrade this early version of the engine with much-improved later Eagle heads to get the MythDuster making some actual power and some actual passes!

Lucky tells a lot of stories, so when you hear a new one, you listen. Alex loves surprises, so when she heard the story of the vehicle that got Lucky into cars, she hatched a plan to find him one. A light tune-up and a few lies later, Lucky finally gets whats coming to him -- a super secret 63 Ford Galaxie Country Sedan.

The 92 Typhoon is back; rod knock will be a thing of the past as Alex and Lucky refresh the drivetrain and pit it head to head against todays top-of-the-line people-mover.

Alex and Lucky explore new territory in the world of land speed racing and continue down a well-worn path with the Bonemaro; more than the cars, this one is all about goals, setting personal targets and breaking personal bests.

The teams long disappointed Grand National has finally earned its keep at Hot Rod Garage; with whiff after whiff at the dragstrip, the team has pulled out all the stops, called a few friends and finally got to the bottom of whats holding them back.

Lucky Costa and Alex Taylor join forces to build hot rods in every shape imaginable; from the American RWD V-8s that would be expected to oddball and niche performers that wouldnt, they build them fast, build them cool and build them right.

Alex and Lucky set out to answer if a dim-a-dozen Beetle can be called a hot rod as they take a well-worn Beetle and start it down the road to a Cal-look cruiser; theyre cheap, easy to modify and have parts support galore.

Dereks Roadworthy Rescued Trans Am may have been destroyed before, but the crew is trying to make it right; enter 455 upgrades for power, a T-56 for shifts, and EFI for all of those hairpin turns.

HRG Day is back and features friends, horsepower and tacos; lining up the newest members of the fleet for dragstrip duty.