Dubbed “America’s Greatest Hot Rod Show” the annual Detroit Autorama is held over a period of 3 days and features hot rods, custom cars and rare finds. Custom car builders from across the country come here to compete for the Detroit Autorama Great 8 and the prestigious Ridler Award. This event is the ultimate representation of craftsmanship, creativity and custom style which takes place each year at the TCF Center Downtown Detroit, and the 68th annual edition on February 28 – March 1, 2020, did not disappoint.
Classic Auto’s, Rick Drewry, attended this year’s Detroit Autorama with the project C10 truck and spent a few minutes giving a detailed review of the engine put in this 1965 Chevy C10.
Project C10 Truck Showcases at Detroit Autorama Custom Car & Hot Rod Show
Video Transcription
This is Rick Drewry with Classic Auto Insurance. I’m here at Detroit Autorama 2020 and I’d like to talk to you about a couple of things. We brought Project C10 which is having a pretty good showing. People are actually digging the truck pretty well. But I want to go over some of the key features under the hood that kind of differentiates it from other trucks of the similar make and model.
Of course, you see the radiator sticking out at the top, but normally, on a stock truck, you’ll have a battery mounted right here in the front, and you’ll have a big airbox against the firewall for the heater and the blower motor and everything else. We did not want that clutter under the hood, so what we did was we relocated the battery. It’s actually welded in a bracket on the frame rail under the cab on the passenger side, used a dry cell battery, and that way all the juice is coming from there.
And what we did was on the inner fender well, there’s a pocket in there. Well, we cut that out and fabbed up a piece to go in to replace that and welded that in so it looks factory. The right inner fender, it looks factory like it never had that pocket. So we did that just to clean it up and make it look clean, make it look like it’s stock.
The other thing that we did, where the airbox is, we went with a vintage air kit, and it works real well. The kit is absolutely great for these trucks and it’s just got a nice clean inlet for the hoses. The kit that I wanted, I wanted to make sure that we used one where the compressor is on the passenger side. That way, the alternator can be on the driver’s side to spread things out a little bit and open up the view of the engine.
The other thing is doing the bodywork, smoothing out all the spot welds, factory spot welds on the inner fenders and the firewall; cleaned that and painted that. And then going right into the engine itself, it is a small block, 350 bored 30 over, and we went with the sniper intake. It’s got a Street Avenger carburetor, Holley carburetor, as well as aluminum heads on it. So it’s a nice design.
We also ended up going with an interior piece or a hood insulator. We did that for a couple of reasons. One, even painted and everything, I didn’t like the look of the underneath of the hood. It looks okay, but it doesn’t look finished, so we wanted to get something that looked finished, and we were able to find this kit that we put on.
But the whole overall appearance, we wanted to have the engine bay the same color as the rest of the truck. So it’s all white. Corvette white. And it really showcases the engine itself. So when you open up the hood, you can tell that the engine itself is the feature of this truck. So that’s the whole idea. You didn’t want your eyes being pulled away from other things. It takes a lot of work to make things look simple, and I think we did a pretty good job on that.
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