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Pink Sees Red, 1948 The First Ed Pink Racing Engine Wouldn’t Start By Dave Wallace
If and when Ed Pink retires next February (as announced to this writer last February), on his 75th birthday, hot rodding will be missing The Old Master’s personal touch for the first time since 1948. An estimated 5000 to 6000 powerplants have followed that first Ford flathead — which refused to fire for the frustrated teenager. Here’s how Ed Pink became an engine-builder, in his own words: "I first started going up to El Mirage [dry lake] when I was 16, 17 years old, watching. I had a ’37 Ford coupe with a V8-60 in it. If I went to run it, it would take an hour and a half to get to the other end of the track, so I just watched. Then I bought a ’36 Ford. It had a V8 — an 85 [horsepower] — in it, and I started fixing it up, and I met Lou out at the lakes. I liked him and he took a liking to me. a
d v e r t i s e m e n t "I was working for my dad in his paint store after school and weekends, and I just didn’t like the paint business. Financially, I’d have been better off if I’d have gone into the paint business, but I had to do my own thing, so I went to work for Lou after school and weekends, and Lou had to put up with my bullshit, and taught me. I was still in high school. "I used to hang out at Edelbrock. I knew Vic Senior real well, and Bobby Meeks, and Don Towle, and Fran Hernandez. I’d say that Vic took me under his wing. I’d go there at three, four o’clock in the afternoon. After five o’clock, when the place would shut down, there’d be Vic and Bobby and Don, and sometimes Junior and myself, and out would come the VO. Mostly, I was listening, and they were talking about engine problems they’d had that day, and how they were gonna solve them. A lot of the engine stuff at Edlebrock’s got solved in the evening, over cocktail hour.
"Lou Baney’s shop was on 53rd and Normandie in Los Angeles. It was in a Golden Eagle gas station. It was called Hot Rod Heaven. It had a repair shop in the back the size of my office here. And there was a men’s bathroom and a woman’s bathroom. Well, we didn’t have any women there, so we left the men’s bathroom alone, and the women’s bathroom, we took the sink and commode out, and we closed it over, and that was our little engine shop, the women’s bathroom. We would work on the engines there, and out in the repair shop would be the cars we’d work on. "The first engine I ever rebuilt was a flathead, for my own car. I took it all apart, and put new bearings and rings in it, and put a Winfield cam in it, and put an Edelbrock two-carburetor manifold on it. I had it all back to together and spun the starter, and it wouldn’t start. I jacked with it. It had a Lincoln-Zephyr ignition, and I checked the points, and the points were right. I probably spent two days on it. And it wouldn’t start. It would not start! "Finally, I had to swallow my pride, and I went down to Edelbrock to see Bobby Meeks. I didn’t know what else to do. I had all this money in it. My parents were looking at me, like, ‘What have you done? You’ve rebuilt this engine and now it doesn’t start?’ I felt like the village idiot. a
d v e r t i s e m e n t "I said, Bobby, I got my engine together, and it won’t start. And he’s going through all the things, asking me, ‘Did you do this?’ Yes. ‘Did you do that? How did you do this?’ And I’d tell him. Finally, he said to me, ‘Where did you set the cam?’ And I said, set the cam? What do you mean? He says, ‘Well, how did you set it?’ I says, I don’t know what you’re talking about. "He said, ‘Well, let’s make it simple: On the crankshaft gear, there’s a little dot, on one of the teeth, and on the cam gear, there’s another dot. Did you line the dots up?’ I said, I didn’t see the dots. He said, ‘Well, go home, pull the front cover off, and turn the engine over until the two dots line up. You may have to turn it over a few times. If they don’t line up, that’s the problem.’ "The cam was so far out of time, I was lucky that the engine wasn’t overhead-valve, or I’d have bent all the valves. I’m lucky it didn’t backfire; that’s how out of time it was. Then it started up, and it ran fine. That was the start of Meeks’s school teaching with me. a
d v e r t i s e m e n t "Bobby was very blunt. I mean, it would be nothing for him to say to you, ‘You damn dummy, what the hell’s wrong with you?’ But that’s okay, that’s just him; that’s just his way. With Bobby Meeks, there’s no bullshit to it; it’s all straightforward stuff. We’re friends today. "It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t know you can’t
do it. I didn’t know, so I did. I didn’t know enough to build motors,
but I was doing it." |
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