I hate heat waves. We’re locked into a miserable one here in New England currently. Temps over 90 degrees and humidity to match, it’s like we’re in bayou country. The flipside of course is winter, which has it’s own form of brutality in bitter cold and snow. That doesn’t stop hot rodding though.

I took this photo on 12/29/08. It was colder than hell and we were in the midst of swapping an RV-spec 440 out of my father in law Tom’s killer Plymouth GTX for one that was built to factory correct HP 440 standards. We were performing this operation in a garage with no heat and one of the doors open as the lengthy bustle of the GTX needed to be hanging out in the breeze so we could get the engine crane around the front of the car. At this point, I was probably hoping for one of these dastardly heat waves.

By the end of the day we had the new lump lowered into the car and by the end of the next day we had it fired up. Needless to say, the new mill really woke the car up and it can now back up those famous call out letters GTX.

When’s the last time you had a pair of big block Mopar engines on the garage floor?