Valve Cover Racers

This article originally appeared in the January-February 2024 edition of the Seaway Cruisers Classic Car Club, Inc. Newsletter. 

Ask a Tech – Valve Cover Racers

The object of a race is to win. In valve cover racing, going fast is the goal, but looking cool while winning is even better. 

 

Brandon Baldwin invited me to the Seaway Cruiser’s annual meeting and valve cover races at SUNY Canton a few years ago. I was curious, so I attended the event and watched a few of the heats. 

 

The cars are unpowered small vehicles constructed to traverse down a ramp. It’s like the auto-enthusiast version of the Boy Scouts of America’s Pinewood Derby competitions. 

 

I loved the uniquely innovative creations, all brightly painted like little street or rat rods. The creative and sometimes downright weird engineering decisions fascinated me. One racer used CDs as wheels. Another used Tonka truck components. Superfluous spoilers, splitters, and air dams added style points and enthusiasm credits, although likely did little to improve performance. I decided that I could build a competitive car. Let me revise that last sentence – I decided I needed to build a winning car.  

 

Brandon, who is notably very good about enthusiastically sharing his knowledge, had built a bright red creation resembling a steam train. At race time, it still smelled of fresh Rust-Oleum spray paint. It was also quick off the line and traveled far. He imparted the primary concern was alignment as cars that don’t travel straight do not win races. 

 

Unlike the Pinewood Derby, rules seem vague. I usually look to rules as an instruction guide for success, so here’s what I found out. Cars can only be 30 inches long, 10 inches wide, 9 inches tall, and have a 10-pound weight limit. There are no restrictions on wheelbase, material type, or mechanicals (bearings, spindles, axles, or wheels). Seaway Cruisers members didn’t conduct a tech inspection for the race, so I would advise building yours to 10 pounds and ensuring it’s fast, travels straight, and has miles of style. “Appearance makes a difference to the group,” Brandon said. 

 

At my first race, one guy took a cheap Walmart skateboard and cut it to fit as a chassis for his valve cover. This seemed like an excellent solution because I’ve ridden skateboards longer than I’ve owned or pretended that I could work on cars. I understand more about urethane wheels, metal trucks, and ABEC-rated bearings than I ever will know about internal combustion engines. 

 

My first car was built out of the driver-side valve cover from a 1984 Corvette. I selected this
model as a homage to my lifelong love of Chevrolet vehicles (mostly because I had some in my garage after swapping them out for snappy chrome covers on my father’s C4). They also boast superior aerodynamics in the form of small cast heatsink ridges, at least as much as any other brick shape with rounded-over corners. 

 

I began by stripping the hard tar coating off the aluminum valve cover. This was the least satisfying and most time-consuming portion of the project. I don’t know what General Motors used for this process, but if they coated their cars with this stuff, we’d still be awash in mint Caprices and Celebrities from the 80s here in New York’s rust region. I used a wire wheel and every solvent available at the hardware store over a day or so to remove the cruddy grayish-beige paint. I recommend skipping this step unless you are overly neurotic about your paint scheme. 

 

Next, I built the chassis out of plywood. I selected a scrap of half-inch seven-ply oak that I found on the woodshop floor and cut it so it would fit recessed into the bottom of the car. These are stylistic decisions and don’t impact speed. I don’t want to know if they do because I like making fast things that look cool more than I like doing calculations. 

 

I selected my daughter’s neglected penny board that we bought at K-Mart before the empire crumbled as the donor for trucks and wheels. I mounted both to my scrap wood chassis. The wheels and bearings were inadequate for my vehicle because they looked stupid and were slow. I had some in-line skate wheels around from when I wore out my old ones, which led to the most expensive purchase of the build, fast Yellow Jacket Stripes ABEC 9 bearings from Amazon ($14.99). 

 

For skateboarding, the best bearings tend to be new and cheap. They are to be replaced or cleaned frequently for smooth and fast operation. I selected Yellow Jackets based on my extensive research (about 5 minutes) on a blog post about the fastest inexpensive bearings. Ceramic bearings are excellent, but I felt they weren’t worth the investment for this build.

 

Once the whole car took shape, it was far from the 10-pound limit, so I asked a tech again about the weighting. Brandon hooked me up with a bucket of wheel weights from the auto-lab. Referencing back to the Pinewood Derby, my friend Neil Haney from SUNY Canton’s Mechanical Engineering Technology program told me to place the weighting as close to the top rear of the car as possible. I had previously thought it would be towards the front of the vehicle, but I accepted his recommendation on faith and because I’ve no interest in the physics of push vs. pull on a declining plane. 

 

Neil was full of helpful information from his Pinewood Derby experiences. There are numerous hacks to make gravity racers go faster, including decreasing the surface area of contact with the track, which I had already done by switching to rollerblade wheels. You could also use fewer wheels or lift one up slightly so there are only three points of contact to reduce friction, but that’s an experiment for a future car. 

 

All the weights were secured using hot glue. My burned fingers healed in about a day or so. I’ve since begun melting and recasting the ballast into the top rear of the car, thanks to a small propane-fueled foundry given to me by Jeff Stinson from the Auto Lab. If you try to do this, I’d recommend not painting your car until after casting the lead. Burnt paint does not look cool and smells terrible.

 

The most math I did was to figure out the total weight. I used a digital scale with all the components to make the car shy of the 10-pound limit in case the official race scales were off. Then, I set to making the thing go in a straight line. 

 

My youngest child, Mars, and I built a makeshift official acceleration device by propping up a piece of plywood on my trailer hitch. We would do a run, adjust the trucks, and do another run. It took about 60 minutes to get it not to hook right or left, but we shared 100 smiles per hour in fun. 

 

My first effort is too tall for my liking, so I’m now building a second car out of the passenger-side valve cover from my dad’s Corvette. The wheelbase will be longer and lower to the ground with larger Razor scooter wheels. I’m simultaneously painting the old car in the discount paint equivalent of Aztec Copper as a homage to Corvettes, and because that color was on the clearance rack. I’m also constructing a drop-through chassis for the new racecar from new reclaimed scrap plywood. 

 

When both cars are complete, I’ll race them. If I have two of anything, I must determine which is best. The victor will be determined by its speed and style, which brings me back to what I love the most about racing. 

I became interested in valve cover racing by asking a tech. The tech then asked me to write an article about building fast valve-cover cars.