While Captain Chrysler McTaggart gets tight pants over the Plymouth he posted, I figured I would post something truly interesting from hot rodding’s past that some of the younger guys (and girls) may not know anything about. See, in the earlier days of mounting Roots style blowers on top of V8 hot rod engines Gilmer belts were not part of the program…but chains were. That’s right, the majority of blowers back in the golden days had chain drives spinning them around and as you can imagine that caused some unique issues. Firstly, unlike a belt that has some give, a metal chain has virtually none and worse than that, when one broke it didn’t just flop harmlessly to the side. Oh no, a busted chain at big RPM was a bad, bad deal. What do to? For starters, put a guard on it and that’s exactly what this Howard’s/Cragar piece did. It was an enclosed drive for the chain that also maintained a provision for driving the water pump. We have seen fancier looking cast aluminum looking pieces before but this is the first one we have seen in this rather rudimentary condition. We’re not knocking it and frankly if someone had the balls to use it and spin their blower with a chain, we’d recognize their awesomeness from miles away.
The seller claims that he got this piece directly off of a Nailhead engine that a friend had. All the sprockets and adapter pieces appear to be there. Buick guys will have to tell us if that is a true Nailhead water pump of something that is used in this application because it fits? The cover could be unbolted by removing about 4,323 small bolts or screws and that would have been important because like all chains, you need to keep them oiled to be happy. We have never actually seen one of these things in the wild on or off an engine. Seen the photos, heard the stories from the old guys but this is the first unit we have seen that someone could buy.
SCROLL DOWN FOR SOME PHOTOS AND THEN HIT THE EBAY LINK FOR ALL THE PHOTOS AND INFO ON THIS HOWARD/CRAGAR BLOWER CHAIN DRIVE SETUP –
Brian – It looks right though I didn’t wander out to the shop to look at my 322. The part of the adaptor that bolts to the timing cover mount sure look about right. I once heard one of these run (must have been 1960 or so at Detroit Dragway) but never saw the setup up close as I was in the stands. It was noisy!
Dan
This guy has quite the collection. Always a gasser for sale (Willys-Anglia ect.) and a ton of collectible wheels. How about the 32 3 window parts collection for $50K. Will need mucho body work- took a good hit above the back window on the top. $50K?
Definitely not a Buick pump, Buick pumps all have the back half of the pump built into the timing cover. That looks like an SBC pump that’s been hacked up to use the stock timing cover based locations to feed the block. The timing cover looks right.
You’re right about the cool stuff he has, and some of it is at quite reasonable prices (for these days anyway!).
SoCal guys, go for it!