Blastolene's Piss'd Off Pete - Jay Leno's Garage

Welcome to another episode of Jay Leno's Garage after a couple of weeks of sensible cars like Vipers and Corvettes and various assorted motorcycles now being dumb again. If you've been to this website before you've probably seen my tank car which is the one with the Patton m47 tank engine that car was designed by my friend Randy Grubb he did the body and is a designer with outrageous styling this is his latest project I'm not sure what it is he brought it here to show me I'm going to Let me explain it to you Randy, come on, this is Randy Grubb.

I didn't see Randy. He is also a classy. I'm almost as smart as I am. Randy, like I said, was the man behind the vision of my tank car. We made a It's had a lot of modifications done to it since we got it from it, but it wasn't really intended to be a road car, what's more, it didn't have brakes and stuff when we got it. I see myself as a crime automobile artist. size sculptures that you can drive that's what it is anyway we checked that car we changed a lot of things this he drove here this is a car that runs and runs it seems to have 12 cylinders tell us what drives well this particular vehicle is a Detroit Diesel 12v 71 two stroke diesel, so they were made in the 70's and disappeared in the late 70's.

It's a single 12v 71 engine, which means each cylinder is 71 cubic inches, so 71 times 12 is a lot. now the twin and the superchargers that are standard are fully stocked, this one is fully stocked from here on down and those two inline 671 superchargers are stock and what kind of horsepower did that make? Well this is the non-turbo version where they actually run turbo. Wow, yes, that was the high-power version, this is the lower-power version, it had just under 500 horsepower, but we have almost a thousand pound-feet of torque. That's what the diesel has, you get that tremendous torque and the transmission.

What I use is a very large Allison, like a Greyhound bus, it's a four speed automatic so it's easy to drive now, if you come around the back of the vehicle you'll see the true genius of Randy's work, it has a wonderful sculptor just how he did this gas tank what was the vision here well obviously I'm a big study of old cars and the beautiful boattail roadster of the past so I wanted to introduce a little bit of that boattail flavor, obviously, the The gas tank is a real feature because it's in the back of the car and a lot of those classic cars that we love and in the beautiful spots, and you like nickel more than chrome, don't you?

It has a warmer young appearance. random nickel now this body, did you start with an existing truck body and modify it? It's actually a Peterbilt that I started with a model 351 cab that was a long narrow nose Pete that I started with and it really has beautiful proportions to boot. okay and of course we cut it out we made a five inch cut back and an eight inch cut from the front to create that wedge cut look that we have here and I like all the rivets that make it look like it doesn't did it. I don't know what it looks like, it looks like something you'd see in a Terminator, it almost comes out of a plane, right?

And these seats look at the leather work here. Did you do the leather work on this? No, I worked with a saddle. Creator in southern Oregon where I live and work, I was very captivated by his beautiful work and thought why the equestrian didn't understand it. How many of these creations do you have? I think mine was the first in a number. You've known for many years that there are four out there. This is vehicle number four that I created from scratch. I remind you, we made one more recently, it was blue and you had a glass grill because you were a glass blower by profession.

Well, yes, for many years and that glass grille on the B 702 was a unique feature. Well, it's interesting that we see this combination of styling and engineering and it's really exciting that this car was built from the ground up by you and your shop. Yes. On your own, how long does it take to do something like this? Well, these are the basic 3000 of our project. I have a thousand hours in the last 15 months once, so when you do the math, it's really a serious medical condition, this is ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week and how does that work?

Do you go out and find a vehicle like a Peterbilt? Oh, I would like to modify it. Would you sit down with a pen and pencil and draw something and try to build? Where does the inspiration for this particular vehicle company come from? It all starts with the engines you know, like with your car, that big giant tank engine. We started with that huge tank engine and we had to scale the vehicle to fit the engine and that's basically my job. As an artist, it's a scale project, the engines are so big the trick is to create something fluid and beautiful that's in scale with the engine we have here and in the economy we live in, this is probably the smallest vehicle we've ever seen. you have built.

This would be like an economical vehicle. The wheelbase is social. It's like the smallest one you've ever made. This is one of the most user-friendly and best-driving vehicles I've created to date. What kind of mileage do you get with this diesel? engine well, we prefer to measure it and smiles per gallon miles per gallon yes, and we get a lot of smiles per gallon from this baby the radiator now the radiator is yours, no it actually started out as a long narrow nose Peterbilt radiator they looked at ten inches and average distance. I think to create the proportions, this is my version of one of the old Top Fuel altars.

Remember the short wheelbase. All the turrets and altars had certain design elements like the bug catcher, for example, the zoomy tubes. and the 12 spoke axle mounts and those critical design elements that I brought to this giant size altered sculpt these thermostatically open all the time, they're actually originally thermostatic, they opened and closed to let air in and out and right now It's nice the manual, so the manual with the electric fan that I can really modulate, that axial looks familiar, it's just that the same accent is very similar to yours, just a little more off center, what's that GMC?

Is this a GMC 7000 series truck? what I'm planning on is nine inches right out of my car well you know that's a good idea and the brakes are off what well everything is custom made. I work with bear brakes where we create the wheels from scratch. These were 375 pounds of billet aluminum. when we started, but the 12 spoke axle mount is critical to capturing the flavor of that ultra ride, so it's the gauges on a truck, of course the speedometer never got to 160, but you know, a little hot rod, we had to modify it to accommodate that hundred 60 mile per hour speedometer and also the RPM we accommodated a little bit more rpm than the engine would normally spin normally.

This engine was governed at 2150 but we can hum up to 28 without problem. The dual temperature gauges on both heads are very important that if this motor reaches a temperature of up to 220 degrees, it will not last long. Temperature is very sensitive on these engines, so we only have the basic gauge cluster. The interesting thing about this is that it removes the fuel and to turn off the engine, you actually have to pull out this lever and it mechanically cuts off the fuel to the engine, so the normal operating temperature is very good, 180 about 180. Now we see that it just has a very short window, it's a very short window and that's why with the electric fans and the grills. we can modulate it between 160 and about 180 pretty easily and it's working pretty well so far okay and you've got a removable steering wheel turn signals everything else yeah tell me about the windows well the window obviously with we have many cuts.

Attitude off the deal and I call this piece

piss

ing off Pete because he really has a lot of attitude and the key to that is that front windshield. We shaped the windshield to match the hood instead of directly crossing it with a windshield as it was. Originally we've done a lot of subtle modifications to things and this is the transmission here and tell us it's a 4 speed automatic like you would find in a Greyhound bus it's a 4 speed so this is first second third drive and then to put reverse or go into neutral, remove this lock and to put reverse, remove this lock, so it's a dual lock and a four speed automatic, but it's very easy to drive, let's go down the road. rear. of the vehicle now tell me about these springs well the springs are quite a unique approach they would be called a quarter elliptical and we have them mounted on the frame which is something unique as opposed to putting the spring pack on the axle which When transporting it in an unsprung weight situation, we have moved it up the frame so that it is now part of the sprung weight, which makes the car handle a little better.

The rear parts of the semi-trailer are somewhat interesting, the driveline is always centered. a truck, that means the shell of the pumpkin is slightly off center, so on a sculpture like this, where the back is such a visual feature, I started by cutting five inches off the long side to center the pumpkin so that visually you have that cute pumpkin centered as it is such a dramatic feature and the disc brakes are also stopped semi trailer units and how many gallons does this thing have? We're 35 gallons so it would take you about a hundred miles if you're going okay yeah it's downhill most of the way okay let's see anything else we need to know about this when we turn this thing on yeah let's shoot those now They are redheads.

Oh, the vehicle one with its normally empowered angel, really, as you can see, it's a little noisy that's why we closed but you build lease now you build them and then you sell them do people come to you and say this is what I want ? you like to make them first and then sell them. I like to do them first and that way. I can have control over the project. I got you, yeah, so if you're interested in seeing more of Randy's work, his website is blasto lean comm. See you next week Mike, he'll still be here next week.