he collector car market continues to grow year after year, making a lot of the cars we know and love harder to obtain. While spit balling one night, The Installation Center owner Craig Hopkins and friend Bill Crabtree were hanging out after a long day’s work and started discussing this very topic. In the background sits a derelict ’78 Chevy Camaro. Hopkins looks at Crabtree and sees the wheels turning. Hopkins asks, “What’s the scheme?” This is where it gets good. Crabtree suggests, “Why can’t we take that old Camaro and turn it into a steel bumper car?” Hopkins, with his vast experience, immediately knew that this had to be done. Why not? The ’74-81 Camaro is vastly more available than that of the ’70-73 cars. Anyone who has restored an early second-gen Camaro knows that the entry point on one of these cars continues to climb. Crabtree continues, “If we can swap the front and rear and turn that car into an earlier version, that opens a whole realm of cars available at a considerable cost reduction.”

he LS engine has long been the king of high-output budget builds. Grab a junkyard truck engine, add a cheap turbo, and make quadruple-digit power. We start our supercharged 1,200hp LS build with a short-block capable of considerable, reliable power on a budget.

There are millions of forum pages dedicated to the topic of LS budget builds, so tread lightly. The sloppy fans will tell you the true budget LS is one that goes straight from the junkyard in between the fenders of your hot rod. There’s some truth to that, as the LS features many architectural improvements over its predecessor, the small-block Chevy. Advancements include a Y-block design with six main bolts (four vertical, two horizontal), extra-long head bolts, a taller deck, better flowing heads, larger cam journals, and a cam centerline that’s higher in the block. “The GM engineers have done a very good job. If you don’t get too far off the map from OE, you shouldn’t have to make many more changes,” Dennis Borem, owner of Pro Motor Engines (PME) says. “These engines are built to last hundreds of thousands of miles.” 

Record chasers have made around 1,200 estimated flywheel horsepower with stock bottom ends, and around 1,800 hp with stock blocks. But, we want this engine to remain versatile with the ability to street drive and use for later testing, so we need a better rotating assembly that can reliably handle the abuse. “You can make that kind of power with a stock engine, but it takes a very skilled tuner and an optimized setup,” Tick Performance owner Jonathan Atkins says, who volunteered to build this engine in conjunction with PME. “The better rods and pistons may survive a tuning misstep that stock parts would not, but really they’ll perform better and last much longer.”

It seems 1,200 hp is that rough maximum for the basic aftermarket support. “When you start climbing over that power range, the price of the components goes significantly higher,” Atkins says. Companies like Summit Racing and ARP make bolt-in components to help bring us to that level of reliable power.

rom the day of the first dead car battery 100 years ago, resuscitating a flat battery requires a set of jumper cables, a secondary power source (like another car), and sufficient room to place the cars close enough to connect the cables. Even then, the effort was not always successful. Often, cables were either too short or featured such tiny cables that amperage just didn’t flow, and the inert battery remained flat. Worse yet was the feeling of helplessness when you’re standing there with jumper cables in your hand and no one offers to help.

All of that should now be placed firmly in the past. With the development of powerful lithium-ion batteries, a sharp engineer came up with the idea to build a portable battery pack that could fit in your hand with enough power to crank a near-dead battery even when hooked to a large V-8 engine. When these units first appeared, we were skeptical, but performance has actually proven their worth. We’ll take a look at how these units can deliver tremendous starting power from a small package. We chose one of Antigravity’s XP-10 jump packs from Summit Racing as our test unit.