I am working on a story for Power and Performance News on how to convert a big-block Chevy over to a hydraulic roller cam and it got me to thinking about the first time I helped my friends work on a mechanical roller cam in a small-block Chevy. This was 1974, I was 20 years old and helping my friends Tom Sorenson and Bob Cryder work on their ’57 Chevy drag race car, Murphy’s Law. The car was loosely inspired by Rick Voegelin’s efforts on the white Clockwork Chevy in Car Craft magazine in 1974 but our car certainly lived up to its moniker as we had plenty of problems just repairing breakage. I grew up in Boone, Iowa and our favorite drag strip was Neita Raceway now called Cedar Falls Raceway in northeast Iowa. The car ran in AHRA D/HR-1 which was the D class in Hot Rod Eliminator Formula 1 which called for two four barrel carburetors on a tunnel ram.

Bob and Tom were street racers who wanted to go racing with the big dogs and decided to build this ’57 Chevy. I was a punk kid trying to build a ’55 Chevy while also saving enough money to return to school at Iowa State University in the fall. Tom, Bob and I were high school friends and Bob and I worked for his father in a water well drilling and repair company.

The guys built a new 331ci small-block Chevy for the ’57 with lots of compression, aluminum rods, and a big mechanical roller camshaft. Tom Sorenson took the lead on the engine but none of us had any experience with mechanical roller cams. So Tom built it just like his other small-blocks. In addition, Accel had just introduced a distributor dubbed the Breakerless Electronic Ignition (BEI), so we had one of those on the car as well. Once the engine was assembled, we ran into difficulties.

It seemed that every time the engine ran up over 4,000 rpm or so, the ignition timing would retard – and not just four or five degrees. If memory serves me, it was more like 20 degrees. At first we blamed the ignition system –especially because we didn’t really understand the new technology. But when Accel returned the ignition with a clean bill of health, we tried a dual point distributor with the same retarded results. We never really resolved the issue and had to resort to over-advancing the timing so that it would retard back to the desired timing.

We were less than successful in the two years we ran the ’57 and the partnership eventually split up. It wasn’t until several years later when I was doing a story on roller camshafts that I realized that we probably had not installed a cam button in the front of the gear to prevent it from walking forward. Roller cams “walk” due to thrust imparted to the camshaft by the distributor and oil pump drive. Of course, a couple of car guys in Boone, Iowa weren’t aware of this back then and so we never addressed the problem. We were never very successful with the car and I’m sure it was frustrating for my friends to have spent all their money on the car only to be rewarded by weekly first-round loser status. While we all learned valuable lessons (mostly about what not to do), I think I benefited the most since I learned so much. I couldn’t afford to invest in the car so I invested the only thing I had in abundance – my time and free labor – which I was more than happy to donate.

My friend Bob Cryder still owns the car. It sits in the small garage behind his house in Iowa and is virtually a time machine for the way it was 40 years ago. We’ve talked about putting the car back together even though it would not be legal to race now due to the multiple safety rules it now violates. The car didn’t even have a roll bar! But those small issues aside, it was a great time in my life and it helped launch me into a career in automotive journalism.