OH, 'CHUTE!

Mounting a parachute on any car is time-consuming and carries a potential for disaster. You have to be awfully careful in putting this item on your door car, dragster or roadster, because your life is literally in your own hands when doing so. It has to be done right.

First, some advice about a parachute. No. 1, don't even think of buying a used one. Again, it's your life, and how much is it worth? Say, $50 for a flea market used one, or $300 for a new, never-used one? My life is worth much more than that, and I gladly paid the proper dough for our new Stroud Safety 'chute.

No. 2, follow all instructions that come with your new parachute. And No. 3, if you're in doubt, find yourself a friend like we found in James Webb, a Top Dragster racer from Acworth, Georgia, who was over at Tommy Harris's FabCon shop when wife Fran and I were about to mount our Stroud on the back of my new front-engine dragster.

Mounting the parachute involves drilling four holes into the small aluminum mounting plate that came with our Stroud parachute, and Webb showed us the proper way. First, he found dead center, penciled it in, then measured from there to line everything up with the four bolt holes in the round stock that will serve to hold our parachute in place on the back of the dragster's roll cage. Drilling of those four holes through the aluminum mount was no problem once we determined exactly where they should go.

But what about the four holes needed for the cloth parachute pack itself? Do we use a knife and dig them out, or use the same drill and bit for the aluminum holes and drill the pack with that? Neither, Webb said. Take the parachute pack, and once you've determined exactly where the four holes are going in it, place the pack on a block of wood and drill away. "Drill all the way through the pack and into the wood," Webb said. "That way you won't have any frayed edges in the chute pack, and it will last nearly forever." We let him do the drilling on our Stroud, and the results turned out nice and safe.

BG'S NEW IDLE-EZE MATCHES CAM TO CARB

High-performance camshafts and carburetors sometimes don't get along. Install a high-lift or long-duration cam in your engine and your carburetor idle often goes to the dogs, with engine rpm either way too high for proper starting line staging or

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way too low for driveability. And throttle response? Forget about it.

Valve overlap is the culprit here. In many racing cams, intake and exhaust valves are open simultaneously, and that leads to different pressures above and below the carburetor butterflies. The carb's "idle signal" becomes lost, and idling and responsiveness suffer. The carburetor is being deprived of engine vacuum, and no amount of idle screw adjustment can solve that problem.

The solution has often been to drill holes in the carb's butterflies, which allowed the natural atmospheric pressure above the butterflies to effectively solve the problem. But now, you say, that doesn't seem right. After all, your argument might go, I just paid "X" number of dollars for this new carburetor, so why should I drill a bunch of holes in its bottom when I haven't even bolted it onto my engine yet? And how big a hole? And exactly where? Many a carburetor has been rendered useless by the wrong size drilling.