Art's Servicenter

10/06/2026

𝐋𝐞𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐡 𝐕𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐲 𝐖𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲
5 Day Outlook
10/05/2026 Monday 6:00PM

This forecast proudly sponsored by:
Zottarelli Home Improvement
David the Handyman
G Contracting and Design
G Outdoor Living & Design
Blue Mountain Resort

10/06/2026

Can-Am had almost no engine rules. Any displacement, any material, supercharging and turbocharging permitted. McLaren was dominating with enormous big-block Chevrolets, and Porsche wanted in.

The flat-12 in the 917 was not enough on its own, so Hans Mezger took the existing engine and added two cylinders to each end.

The result was a flat-16 with centrally driven camshafts, canted intake valves that made the intake trumpets sit at a distinctive angle, and eventually 7.2 litres.

Eight hundred eighty horsepower at 8,300 RPM, naturally aspirated. The most powerful engine Porsche had built without boost, weighing around 706 pounds.

It was tested in a 917 PA chassis, number 027, with the rear of the car lengthened by more than ten inches to accommodate it.

That lengthening is the problem.

A flat engine is already wide. Adding four cylinders makes it longer, and in a mid-engined car the engine sits between the driver and the rear axle. Stretching it pushes the weight distribution around and lengthens the wheelbase, which changes how the car handles everywhere.

Porsche had a choice: solve the packaging problem, or get the same power another way.

The other way was a turbocharger on the existing flat-12, and that worked immediately. The 917/10K made around 900 horsepower in 1972 and George Follmer won the championship, ending McLaren's five-year run.

For 1973 the 917/30 ran a 5.4-litre twin-turbo flat-12 making roughly 1,100 horsepower in race trim, and considerably more in qualifying. It remains the most powerful sports car ever raced.

The flat-16 never competed in a single event.

One complete engine and the prototype survive at the Porsche Museum.

10/06/2026

Thursday is the day: Breast Cancer Awareness month begins. 🩷 This year, we've decided to partner with Brakes for Breasts again to support a vaccine to prevent Breast Cancer through research at the Cleveland Clinic!

Did you know that "Dr. Vincent Tuohy and his team at the Cleveland Clinic have successfully tested a Breast Cancer Prevention Vaccine in his lab are are working to take it to human trials"??? 🤯 [www.brakesforbreasts.com/about-us] This was made possible in part by the 100+ shops participating in Brakes for Breasts nationwide! 👏🏼

How does Schearer's Sales & Service, Inc. fit into all of this?
From October 1 through October 29, any brake replacement completed with us will result in a $75 donation from Schearer's Sales & Service to Brakes for Breasts!
Want to help but aren't due for a brake replacement? No worries! We'll help facilitate a donation from you to Brakes for Breasts!

Join us on this road to a vaccine by participating in Brakes for Breasts! If you have any questions, we're here to help! Don't forget to check into our socials throughout the month of October to see how our Team is participating in Breast Cancer Awareness month in the shop and office! 🩷

10/06/2026

It's spooky season 🎃👻

10/06/2026

Eight cylinders in a row, and beside each one a pair of valves sitting in the block.

That is the flathead layout, and photographs like this are the clearest way to understand it. On almost any modern engine, removing the cylinder head exposes the valves, because they live up there. Here the head is just a flat cover with the combustion chambers cast into its underside, and everything else stays in the block.

Cadillac chose that for 1938 deliberately, and it is worth understanding why, because the engine it replaced was an overhead valve design.

A flathead has no valvetrain above the combustion chamber. No pushrods, no rocker arms, nothing moving where a passenger can hear it. For a car whose entire purpose was silence, that mattered more than the airflow the layout costs.

It is also simpler and cheaper to build, which mattered in 1938 for reasons that had nothing to do with engineering.

The second thing visible here is the width.

This is one bank of a V16 with a 135-degree angle between the banks. That extraordinary angle is nearly flat, which keeps the engine low enough to sit under a long, low hood, and it is why the block spreads out the way it does.

Sixteen cylinders at that spacing fire every 45 degrees of crankshaft rotation. The impulses overlap so completely that the engine does not deliver pulses at all. A passenger could not tell it was running.

Nine main bearings support the crankshaft underneath.

Four hundred thirty-one cubic inches and around 185 horsepower, which was never the figure anybody cared about.

Cadillac built it from 1938 to 1940 in very small numbers, and no American manufacturer has built a sixteen-cylinder passenger car since.

09/28/2026

Did you know? We're on Spotify! Listen to a playlist of some of the Sunday worship music we love. Let us know what else you'd love to hear us sing on Sunday. 🎵 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/446JFO1VgynlwnOKEIOBHc?si=fdfd94d5c5b04a93

09/28/2026

09/28/2026

Most people trying to get more from a small-block Chevy add stroke. Put a longer crankshaft in a 350 and you get a 383, which makes more torque and is one of the most common builds in American hot rodding.

The 372 goes the other direction, and that is what makes it interesting.

It starts with a 400 block, which has a 4.125-inch bore, the largest Chevrolet ever used on a small-block. Then instead of the 400's own 3.75-inch stroke, it gets a 3.48-inch crankshaft, the same one out of a 350.

The result is 372 cubic inches with an unusually large bore and a relatively short stroke.

Two things follow from that.

The big bore gives room for larger valves and leaves the valves less shrouded by the cylinder wall. More valve area and a clearer path means the engine breathes better at high RPM, where airflow is the limiting factor.

The short stroke keeps piston speed down. A piston travelling less distance per revolution puts less strain on the rods, the bearings, and itself at any given engine speed. That means the engine can safely rev higher and stay there longer.

Put together, you get more displacement than a 350 with better high-RPM behaviour than a 383, which is a genuinely useful combination for road racing, autocross, or any car that spends time at the top of the tachometer rather than launching off a line.

The trade is torque. A shorter stroke gives the connecting rod less leverage on the crankshaft, so a 372 will not pull off idle the way a 383 does. If the car is heavy or the driver wants low-end grunt, the stroker is the better answer.

Typical builds use a forged rotating assembly, aluminium heads with large valves to exploit the bore, a performance camshaft, and modern induction. Naturally aspirated, a well-sorted one makes somewhere between 425 and over 500 horsepower.

The 400 block does have one known issue. Its cylinders are siamesed, meaning there is no coolant passage between adjacent bores, so cooling needs attention. Most builders address it with steam holes drilled in the block and heads.

It shows up in pro-touring Camaros and Novas, light hot rods, and anything built to be driven hard rather than just quickly in a straight line.

09/28/2026

Every four-barrel carburetor you have ever worked on has its throats arranged in a square. Two primaries at the front, two secondaries behind them, sitting on a manifold that distributes air and fuel outward to eight cylinders.

Ford's Autolite inline four-barrel put all four throats in a single row.

The reason comes down to what happens between the carburetor and the cylinder.

On a conventional square-bore setup, the air leaving each throat has to turn and travel different distances to reach different cylinders. Some runners are longer, some have sharper bends, and the result is that no two cylinders receive exactly the same mixture. The engine has to be tuned around whichever cylinder is worst off.

Put the four throats in a line directly above the runners of a single-plane manifold and the air has a far straighter path. Less turning, more even distribution, and better flow at the RPM a road racing engine actually lives at.

The manifold was called the Cross-Boss, a single-plane design built specifically for the Boss 302 in Ford's Trans-Am program.

Trans-Am is exactly the application where this matters. The SCCA capped displacement at 305 cubic inches, so Ford could not add cubic inches. With displacement fixed, the only way forward was to make the engine breathe better and rev harder, and induction was one of the few areas left to attack.

The Boss 302 already had cylinder heads borrowed from the Cleveland family with canted valves and large ports. The Cross-Boss and inline carburetor were meant to feed them properly.

It worked on the dyno. It was also complicated and genuinely difficult to tune, because a carburetor with four throats in a row behaves differently from anything a mechanic had experience with, and the transitions between throats had to be calibrated carefully.

That difficulty is why it never spread. Racers had proven combinations that were easier to live with, and the inline carburetor remained a rare piece even within Ford's own program.

Today it is one of the most sought-after items in Boss 302 restoration, because so few were made and so few survived.

An idea that was right on paper, hard to use in practice, and almost forgotten because of it.