Horsepower

At the heart of every great car, there lies a great engine. The high-performance muscle car; the high-mileage family car; the high-speed race car: no matter the vintage or voltage, the torque or the task, the car with the power to move Americans—and the world—boasts an engine of remarkable ingenuity, dependability, and power. American Horsepower: 100 Years of Great Car Engines pays tribute to 25 outstanding American-made engines valued for their raw horsepower or their design simplicity, their longevity or their design innovation—or, in rare instances, all of the above. Bringing an auto enthusiast’s touch to the subject, author and photographer Mike Mueller details each engine’s conception, creators, specifications, performance records, and more. His knowledgeable, accessible text, accompanied by historical images, crisp detail shots, and studio-quality photographs, conveys with precision and unfailing interest the driving power of the great American engine.

Priest’s debut collection, Horsepower, is a cinematic escape narrative that radically envisions a daughter’s waywardness as aspirational. Across the book’s three sequences, we find the black-girl speaker in the midst of a self-imposed exile, going back in memory to explore her younger self—a mixed-race child being raised by her white supremacist grandfather in the shadow of Churchill Downs, Kentucky’s world-famous horseracing track—before arriving in a state of self-awareness to confront the personal and political landscape of a harshly segregated Louisville. Out of a space that is at once southern and urban, violent and beautiful, racially-charged and working-class, she attempts to transcend her social and economic circumstances. Across the collection, Priest writes a horse that acts as a metaphysical engine of flight, showing us how to throw off the harness and sustain wildness. Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, Priest presents a non-linear narrative in which the speaker lacks the freedom to come of age naively in the urban South, and must instead, from the beginning, possess the wisdom of “the horses & their restless minds.” FROM "RODEO" The four-wheeler is a chariot. Horse-wraiths Kicking up a plume of spirits in the dirt behind us. Her arms kudzu around my middle. Out here, In the desert, everything is invisible. Only the locusts’ flat buzz gives Them away. Everything native & quieting Perennial & nighthawk black As we ride through: the cowgirls, The witch & the water sky-mirror-split, The severity of squall lines. Also, the lips Parting air like lightning & the girl Blowing bubbles—in each one a rainbow.

Honda performance enthusiasts all have one basic question when it comes to making their cars faster: "What parts work, and what parts don't?" The only way to answer that question is to install various parts on a car and test the power output on a dynamometer (dyno). Richard Holdener has done that in High Performance Honda Dyno Tests. Holdener's extensive testing provides dyno-proven data for all popular Honda performance parts, from air intake systems to exhausts, cams and cylinder heads to nitrous, turbos, and superchargers. There is even a chapter on engine build-ups. In addition, dyno tests on nearly every Honda model, from the single-cam DX to the 2.2L Prelude, are included. Acura models are covered as well, from the 1.8L LS through the GSR and Type R all the way up to exotic NSX. There is no better place to find performance answers than in this book.

Extracting maximum torque and horsepower from engines is an art as well as a science. David Vizard is an engineer and more aptly an engine building artist who guides the reader through all the aspects of power production and high-performance engine building. His proven high-performance engine building methods and techniques are revealed in this all-new edition of How to Build Horsepower. Vizard goes into extreme depth and detail for drawing maximum performance from any automotive engine. The production of power is covered from the most logical point from the air entering the engine all the way to spent gasses leaving through the exhaust. Explained is how to optimize all the components in between, such as selecting heads for maximum flow or port heads for superior power output, ideal valvetrain components, realizing the ideal rocker arm ratios for a particular application, secrets for selecting the best cam, and giving unique insight into all facets of cam performance. In addition, he covers how to select and setup superchargers, nitrous oxide, ignition and other vital aspects of high-performance engine building.

The 4.6- and 5.4-liter modular Ford engines are finally catching up with the legendary 5.0L in terms of aftermarket support and performance parts availability. Having a lot of parts to choose from is great for the enthusiast, but it can also make it harder to figure out what parts and modifications will work best. Building 4.6/5.4L Ford Horsepower on the Dyno takes the guesswork out of modification and parts selection by showing you the types of horsepower and torque gains expected by each modification. Author Richard Holdener uses over 340 photos and 185 back-to-back dyno graphs to show you which parts increase horsepower and torque, and which parts don't deliver on their promises. Unlike sources that only give you peak numbers and gains, Building 4.6/5.4L Ford Horsepower on the Dyno includes complete before-and-after dyno graphs, so you can see where in the RPM range these parts make (or lose) the most horsepower and torque. Holdener covers upgrades for 2-, 3-, and 4-valve modular engines, with chapters on throttle bodies and inlet elbows, intake manifolds, cylinder heads, camshafts, nitrous oxide, supercharging, turbocharging, headers, exhaust systems, and complete engine buildups.

This is a follow-up and companion to the successful How to Build a Flathead Ford V-8. This new edition describes the build-up of a 1946-1948 model 59 engine with a 4-barrel carburetor, a blown French flathead engine, and a blown Ardun engine-designed for street use. Many French flathead engines have been purchased by flathead lovers in the United States. There is a strong demand for those engine blocks, and the purchasers are desperate for any build-up information. The popularity of the Ardun is amazing, and this second volume contains a load of new information about the Ardun, as well as information and photographs of the lastest flathead goodies, such as crankshafts, connecting rods, intake manifolds, and cylinder heads.