<VV> Painting push rod tubes(pt2)

[corvairs]

      Friends - There is a curse in the Corvair world. In the 1960's 
there was an excellent, first class book, unique at the time, by Bill 
Fisher named HOT TO HOTROD CORVAIR ENGINES. Of course the book covered 
much more than engines. It was filled with excellent advice - and was 
also filled with technology and opinions of the 1960's.

. In the mid 70's Richard Finch wrote a book called HOW TO KEEP YOUR 
CORVAIR ALIVE.  It had many good ideas, and was sort of a competitor to 
Bill Fisher's book. Unlike Fishers book however, there were a number of 
rather odd opinions - the painting of draintubes just one of them.

Part of the curse in the 21st century is that way too many people quote 
every word in these books as eternal fact. This ignores two factors - 1) 
Human beings, with thier own personal opinions wrote these books and 2) 
A LOT of time and water has gone under the bridge. HTHCE is 40 years 
old, HTKYCA is 33 years old.

What's interesting is that, in Fishers book, many of the brands and 
techniques mentioned are never given as the only way to do something - 
they're just mentioned as what the author did or someone else did. I 
talked to Bill Fisher a number of times prior to his death and he told 
me he was surprised that so many Corvair people hinged on his every word 
in his book. This was in the late 80's early 90's.

If you are truely going to build a state of the art performance Corvair 
wouldn't you want to use everything that has been learned and developed 
the past 40 years, rather than rely on old, outdated and even 
opinionated information?

The fact is, both HTHCR and HTKYCA were seriously outdated by the late 
1970's. For example, we now know (thanks to Fred Leary and the Ultravan 
people) that cleaning out the casting flash on your cylinder heads will 
do VASTLY more to help cool your engine than painted pushrods, remote 
oil coolers etc. This is only one in a long line of examples.

The two books mentioned are not bibles that will stand the eons of time. 
In 2007 they're historic collectors items with some good theory and 
practices - but hardly the current the word on much of anything.     Lon


www.corvairunderground.com

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