Download Volume One in PDF format here. 

Written by Jim Hill

(From conversations with)

Harvey J. Crane, Jr.

November 21, 2007

Name: Harvey J. Crane, Jr.

Born: August 17, 1931

Birthplace: Hallandale, Florida

VOLUME 1

It seemed inescapable that Harvey J. Crane, Jr., was destined to follow a career in the metalworking industry.  Precise machining and the fabrication of iron, steel and aluminum into useful, saleable items was an ingrained part of the Crane family's genetics.  At a very young age, Harvey chose to pursue the Crane heritage, albeit in a somewhat different direction.  That unique path ultimately made the Crane name an icon in the world of products designed and manufactured for high output racing engines.

Harvey's grandfather, Ernest Willard Crane, grew up on the plains of South Dakota.  It was there that he learned the trade of blacksmithing and later, the machining of iron and steel into useable items.  These skills were indeed timely, as the still young nation was beginning its emergence from the Industrial Revolution into the greatest manufacturing economy in history. A few years prior to America’s entry into World War I, Ernest Crane got the urge to move to an entirely different area and climate.  Yearning for a major change of scenery, he took his family and craft across the continent, to the very young city of Miami, Florida.  With the City of Miami chartered only a few years earlier, in 1898, Grandpa Crane and his clan became Miami pioneers.  To earn a living for his family he opened Crane's Machine Shop, a business reputed to be the first commercial machine shop in Miami.

The need for a competent machine shop was already acute in Crane's new home.  The only other machine shop facilities were nearly 400 rail miles north, in Jacksonville.  When something broke it meant several days before the item could be shipped to Jacksonville, repaired or a new piece fabricated, and then returned by FEC train.  The existence of a local machine shop helped Miami grow from being little more than a riverhead trading outpost for Everglades Indian tribes.  The city quickly became a thriving seaport, the railhead for Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railroad, and ultimately, the economic engine for the growth and development of the entire South Florida Atlantic coast.

In 1918, following the end of The War to End All Wars, fast and spectacular growth came to the Miami area.  The land boom of the 1920's brought increasing congestion to the area.  This did not set well with Harvey's grandfather Ernest.  He preferred more wide-open spaces and a quieter lifestyle than that offered by Roaring 20's Miami.  To solve this he moved his family and his machine shop up north, to the northernmost reach of Dade County.

He chose the tiny town of Ojus, just south of the equally diminutive town of Hallandale.  There, near the Dade-Broward County line, he built a new home for his family and Crane's Machine Shop.  The new Crane homestead was located on Old Dixie Highway, across the road from the Florida East Coast Railroad's main north-south tracks.

It was on this new homestead that Harvey James Crane, Sr., learned the true meaning of the family creed:  Make it right and make it accurate, the first time.

On August 17, 1931, Harvey J. Crane, Jr., was born.  This provided a third generation of Crane sons to embrace the Make it right guideline.  Ironically, it would be Harvey Jr., who would take the family tradition of accuracy to microscopic millionths of an inch for his products.  Harvey, at the same time, would redefine the science of designing and manufacturing camshafts and valve train components for automotive racing engines.

From his earliest days, young Harvey showed a fascination and great aptitude for making items right, and accurate, and the skill necessary to do this right, the first time.  By the time he reached      his 13^th year he had also acquired the need for speed.  To satisfy this urge he began acquiring the parts needed to increase the power output of engines found in cars and trucks locally available.

It's interesting to note that Harvey's dad, Harvey Crane, Sr., had little interest in the automotive side of his machine shop business.  Instead, he directed his attention towards traditional, non-automotive machine shop work.  Harvey, Jr., recalled that his dad knew almost nothing of engines, and had no interest in acquiring such knowledge.

An Early Hot Rodding Mentor, Bud Swanson

As a "hot rod crazy" teenager he soon found a mentor in local garage owner, Bud Swanson.  Not only was Swanson a solid auto mechanic, each summer he closed his shop and headed north, to go racing.  Bud Swanson shared with young Harvey the tales of moving from town to town, track to track, in search of the next big win and the adventure of life on the road. Harvey proved a keen and eager student, and in Swanson he found an equally enthusiastic teacher of the hot rodding culture.

Bud Swanson was a local circle track racer who owned a midget race car.  He built and maintained his race car in his garage in Ojus, an unincorporated area near Hallandale.  Swanson's garage and shop was housed within a former gasoline service station, from the days when most gas stations had service bays, for repairs, tune up's and other service work.

I was about 13 years old, and barely into high school.  I used to get off the school bus and on my walk home, I would stop off at Bud's shop, to watch him work on his midget race car.  He was always willing and interested in teaching me anything he could about his race car, its engine, chassis and drivetrain.  When I was about 14 years old Bud taught me to degree-in the camshaft in his flathead Ford V-8 "60" race engine.

That was my first exposure to a camshaft, and the cam and valve train area became immediately fascinating to me.  Soon after that, I asked my dad, Harvey Crane, Sr., to teach me how to raise the lift on a stock camshaft.  My dad was a largely self-taught, but highly skilled machinist.  We went into his shop where he showed me how to use his Brown & Sharp cylindrical grinder to grind the heel of the camshaft lobes smaller, which would raise the lift on a camshaft.  My dad was strictly a machinist.  He knew nothing about camshafts, engines, or race cars, but in his shop he could repair or make practically anything made from metal!  It was my dad's skills; my curiosity and Bud Swanson's guidance that helped me get started in learning how to grind camshafts.

Bud was not only a great engine man; he was also very knowledgeable about setting up and tuning a racing chassis.  He showed me how to adjust the "wedge" on a circle track car to help it get around the corners, and how to increase or decrease the weight on the four wheels by using a spring wedge. Bud was a great influence and source of information for me at an early age.  He knew a lot about race cars and was willing to share his knowledge with me.

During those early years I tried to make a camshaft for Bud, but with my lack of knowledge, I ruined it.  Several years later, one of       my early employees, Don Hubbard, took that same small camshaft I made for Bud, had it gold plated and mounted it on a plaque.  It was OK for use as a display piece, and I still have it, hanging on my office wall.  It was the first of many other gold cams we awarded to significant racers or distributors of my products at Crane Cams.

Another Early Influence, Cotton Hodges

In the late 1940's and early 50's the authority and expert on flathead Ford racing engines in the South Florida area was Harold Wilcox.  He was known as "HC" to everyone, and H.C. Wilcox Engine Rebuilders (located on N.W. 27th Avenue, in Miami) was a South Florida fixture for more than 60 years.  When HC died just a few years ago, he was well into his 90's and continued to work in his shop up until only a couple of years before he died.  HC was known for his friendliness and willingness to share information with anyone who asked.

H.C. had built flathead Ford racing engines for Miami area racers Cotton Hodges and Jim Millard, both of whom were well known for their skills on local area circle tracks. They soon decided to head north, to race for much larger purses than were available in the Miami area, and they decided that eastern Iowa would be their base of operations.  I had become friends with Cotton Hodges from the local South Florida tracks, and Cotton knew I was capable of fabricating, welding and doing most anything needed on a race car.  I helped Cotton finish his car before he left for Iowa, and Jim Millard stayed behind.  Millard had a business and it kept him from putting in the time to finish his car and head for Iowa.  That's where I came in.  I stepped in and began working on finishing Jim Millard's new race car.

During the "warm weather months" the racing action on northern tracks was hot and heavy.  There plenty of area tracks and you could run six and seven times per week. Some racers were running two different events at two different tracks, on the same day! (Saturday afternoon and Saturday night).  Not long after Cotton got to Iowa I got a long distance telephone call from him.  Cotton asked me to finish Jim Millard's car and come to Iowa and help maintain the two cars.  Both of the cars were 37 Ford Tudor Sedans, Numbers 7 and 77.  In those days everyone called them "jalopies", and they were jalopies in every sense of the word!

The deal I made with Cotton and Jim was that I would get 10% of whatever the cars won, with no salary other than what the cars won. It might seem that I placed myself in a really pressured situation, knowing that we had to win so that I could afford to stay on with them.  I was a young man of 18, full of confidence, and the challenge didn't seem too much for me.  I packed my clothes and tools and left with Jim Millard for Moline, Illinois, where Cotton had set up his base of operations.

I worked on building both the cars right there in my dad's shop.  I stripped them of all unnecessary weight, remounted the bodies, fabricated and welded in the roll bars, braced the frames, and set up the suspensions with adjustable wedges, like Bud Swanson had taught me, so we could jack the weights on all four corners.  I did a basic wiring and plumbing job and then dropped in the H.C. Wilcox flathead Ford V-8 engine.

Those engines H.C. built were very good engines, with plenty of power for the Iowa bullring tracks in the area.  The tracks were set up for cars that had plenty of torque, to pull them off the corners and have enough horsepower to run hard down the short straight's of the quarter mile banked dirt tracks.  HC's flathead engines were really good at that!  We ran a lot of races and we ran the engines hard enough that we started wearing out the original Wilcox engines.  We couldn't take time out from racing to go back down to Miami and have H.C. rebuild the engines, so when that happened I did the rebuilds for both cars.  I must have done them right, because we kept on winning with the engines I did!  A local Moline machine shop machined the parts, and I assembled them right there.  In those days the engines had to be "stock", and they were, except for my taking a lot of time with clearances, ring sealing and all the little tricks I knew to  squeeze just a bit more power out of our flatheads than those we ran against.

Cotton Hodges ultimately became a very successful real estate salesman, and specialized mostly in land acreage sales.  He and his wife Betty Jane are still married, and they live outside Greenville, South Carolina, at a Fly-In Community, similar to where I live, here at Spruce Creek Fly-In.

The Norman Johnson Connection

Up in Iowa, where we were racing, several of the tracks were promoted by a guy named Norman Johnson.  In the late 1950's Norman moved down to South Florida and became acquainted with a wealthy real estate broker and housing tract developer named Steven Calder.  Calder built a number of South Florida subdivision projects as well as a horse racing track that he named Calder Park.  It's still open, and the Florida State Racing Commission lets them run the thoroughbred race dates for the old Tropical Park in Miami there at Calder Park.  One of Calder's notable achievements was that he built a house completely upside down, as a gimmick to promote his subdivisions.  The roof was on the ground, and when you walked through the house everything, including the furniture, was upside down.  The idea was clever, because Calder sold thousand's of homes and his "Upside-Down House" was featured in Life Magazine.

Norman Johnson became involved with Steven Calder, and Johnson somehow convinced Calder to use about a hundred acres of swampland he owned out on Hollywood Boulevard to build a racing complex.  I say swampland, because the entire tract was covered with Everglades’s water and tall sawgrass.  To build the track they dug a network of canals to drain the swamp, and they used the limestone rock from the canals and ponds to raise the overall level of the complex, so it wouldn't flood-over during the rainy season.   Development in the Everglades wetlands is now strictly regulated, but in those days there was little resistance to draining the swamp for commercial development.

The location was miles west of Hollywood and nowhere near Miami, but they named it Miami-Hollywood Speedway Park.  Getting out to the track seemed like a really long drive out in the swamps to reach.

The track was opened in 1966, and the drag strip was first to open.  The facility had been designed to use the drag strip return road and service roads as a road racing course.  One of Johnson's ideas was to run late model stock cars on the road course.  Today NASCAR ® runs several road course races, and they are very popular, but those tracks were far more sophisticated in their design, and not just dropped into action as a makeshift road racing track.  Many of the turns at Miami-Hollywood were protected by concrete walls Norman called "Cushion Walls", claiming that their design would do minor damage to a car when hit.  Of course, those walls were just steel reinforced concrete and the only "cushion" was in the name Johnson coined for them!  He managed to post a big enough cash purse to attract a lot of the local cars, but a lot of cars were heavily damaged after hitting his "Cushion Walls".  The stock car guys told him they wouldn't be back because they couldn't afford to destroy their race cars trying to race on a road course track with left and right turns.  I believe these guys were also more comfortable with circle track racing and didn't like the idea of left and right turns.  That ended the stock cars on a road course, at least in South Florida!

Later Johnson built a high banked, one-third mile, paved circle track and then a large auditorium, to hold concerts and similar events indoors.  The circle track was only marginally successful, but his "Sportatorium" was a really big money maker.  Norman and his son Bruce Johnson promoted and booked in many of the top music acts in the nation at that time, or leased the facility to other rock promoters and it became well known as a rock music venue.  It also developed another reputation for the open drug use of many of the concert goers.  Many referred to it as "The Dope-A-Torium", and the local police and Broward County Sheriff's Office were constantly struggling with drug problems and often unruly crowds that attended the concerts there.

Calder was Norman Johnson's partner for many years.  For the last eight or ten years it was open, the track was leased and operated by Dick Moroso, who also owns Moroso Motorsports Park, in West Palm Beach.  Moroso ran the track until the property was finally sold in the early 90's for a housing development.  They bulldozed everything, and today the Miami-Hollywood Motorsports Park complex is "waterfront" homes now located on the renamed Pines Boulevard, just west of I-75.  In 1966, when it opened, the track was many miles from any type of civilization.  Today, with the rapid growth of South Florida, it's prime housing neighborhoods.  When progress comes and areas grow, race tracks are usually the first victims of new residents who don't care for the noise and traffic congestion that race tracks bring.

Norman Johnson is dead now, but back in the days when he was a race promoter in Iowa he lived up to all those negative reputations of "promoters".  If you were due money at one of his races you'd better get it fast, before he disappeared and moved on to the next track he was working.  Of course, we never took checks, it was cash-only.  You can easily guess why we always insisted on cash!

Racing Back To Iowa

Because we were running seven times per week and winning, we were making a lot of money.  That same year, 1951, we made over $100,000 running those ’37 Ford jalopies!  We flat-towed the cars to the tracks using a tow-bar and personal cars for tow vehicles.  If we crashed we had to fix the damage before we could hitch-up and flat-tow back to our home base, in Moline, Illinois.  We were lucky because Moline was a fairly large city, and one of what they call the "Quad-Cities", on the Mississippi River.  (Editor's Note: Moline, Illinois; Rock Island, Illinois; Davenport, Iowa; and Bettendorf, Iowa.)  If we needed parts or machine shop work we were sure to find someone who could provide what we needed in one of the three cities.

Back Home Again, Early South Florida Tracks And Mildred

Harvey's racing association with Cotton and Jim ended after Harvey found that they weren't living up to the terms of the deal made when Harvey decided to go to work for the team.  That involved an agreement whereby they would give Harvey 10% of both cars’ purse winnings in exchange for his work.  In their first year together, the team earned over $100,000, an astounding sum, and Harvey got his 10% share.  Later, the association ended when Harvey found that they had failed to disclose some other winnings the team earned.  Suspicions grew and soon after Harvey severed their racing association forever.

While they were racing out of Moline, Illinois, the team frequented a local restaurant.  Harvey was particularly keen on one of the young waitresses, a vivacious and charming girl named Mildred Carrington.  The pair soon began dating and they were married in the spring of     1952.  For a time they lived in an apartment in Moline.  That same year they moved to Hallandale Florida in their 1939 Ford Coupe.

He resumed working for his dad, in his Crane's Machine Shop.  Harvey's father rented him a small house that sat behind his dad's house.  It had been Harvey's grandmother's home, but the young couple found it suited their needs just fine.

Harvey and Mildred's marriage lasted more than 20 years until they divorced in 1973. The marriage produced four Crane children, David, Steven, Mona, and Susan.  Harvey and Mildred agreed that they wanted to have four children, two boys and two girls, and that they wanted to have them as close to two years apart as they could.  Somehow that plan worked out almost exactly.  With one exception, all four Crane kids were born two years apart, and there were two boys and two girls.

Soon after the couple returned to Hallandale, Harvey began street racing his 1939 Ford coupe.  There was no legal, organized drag racing in the area, so he sought out other local hot rods for illegal street racing.  Local drive-in’s served as the staging areas for these contests, and they were usually run for little more than bragging rights plus an occasional cash bet.  Fortunately, these contests took place on far-off highways, in the late night hours, when there was no traffic "or police" to interfere.  To make his 39 Ford more competitive, Harvey began building a new hopped-up, stroker flathead Ford.  He wanted a real "racing cam" instead of the stock flathead camshaft.  That prompted Harvey to contact Howard Johanssen, at Howard's Cams, in California, and buy a Howard M-8   grind camshaft.

I degreed all 16 lobes on that first Howard cam, and it ran really great.  That stroker flathead impressed enough other local racers that I started getting orders locally to build similar engines. I ordered four more Howard cams and began my usual degreeing-in procedure, the way I learned it from Bud Swanson.

I found that not a one of the four cams had all the lobes ground correctly!  I called Howard Cams and told them what I had found.  I spoke to Howard himself, and he probably thought I was just another punk kid.

He told me I didn't know how to degree a cam, that I should just stick it in the block on the timing marks, set the valve lash and run it!  That wasn't the answer I was looking for, and that's what made me get into the business of making camshafts that I knew were accurately made, because I made them myself!

After trial and error cam grinding, Harvey arrived at what he thought was good enough to sell.  Of this he was sure, because he'd checked each lobe on each cam, so he knew they were accurate!  He set out for the only organized racing he could find, the local South Florida circle tracks.  Armed with a hastily prepared, hand typed, mimeographed "catalog", Harvey began talking with racers, handing out his new "catalog".  The first circle track race he attended was held at Opa Locka, Florida, near the Masters Field Marine Corps Air Station.  The track itself was rough, and the pits were filled with even rougher characters.  The entire scene was reflected in the fact that the track was located next to a junk yard, complete with a pair of snarling, snapping "junk yard dogs" intent on protecting the merchandise!

After Opa-Locka came Palmetto Speedway, a scarcely banked, 1/3 mile oval in the town of Medley, just west of Miami and Miami Springs. Palmetto Speedway was on the south side of the Miami River Canal, near what is now the Palmetto Expressway.  Plenty of drivers got their start there, going from Palmetto to become well known in Big Bill France's young NASCAR organization.  Drivers such as Rags Carter, Pee Wee Griffin, Rod Perry, Charley Monk, Al Powell, Banjo Matthews, and the principal members of what became "The Alabama Gang" Bobby, Donnie and Eddie Allison, and the ageless Red Farmer.  These and other drivers got their first circle track, turn-left rides at Palmetto Speedway, and Harvey sought out these racers to convince them to try one of his cams or the Lincoln Zephyr transmission gears, spools and axles he made for Ford rear ends.

Growing industrial development forced the closing of Palmetto Speedway, but that loss was supplanted by the building of Hialeah Speedway.  Hialeah Speedway was located just west of Medley, but on the north side of the Miami River Canal.  It was also mildly banked, paved with asphalt, and 1/3 mile on the outside dimension.  The track soon had lights and Saturday night at Hialeah became a mainstay with racers and fans for more than 50 years.  Hialeah Speedway's long history ended in 2005, when the grand old lady was abandoned for the construction of a Home Depot big-box development!  Hialeah attracted the same Medley racer crowd and later added drivers such as Bobby Brack, Vince Pantuso, Doug Day, Nokie Mallory, Buddy Griffin, Herbie Tillman, Gary Balough, Gene Wynn, Dumont Smith, Roy Clanton, Hardy Maddox, and Dickie Anderson.

Another local circle track, called Hollywood Speedway, also attracted Harvey Crane to promote and sell his new camshafts.  Located on Pembroke Road, just west of what is now I-95, "Old" Hollywood Speedway was a tight, quarter mile bullring that was also a popular racing plant for local racers.  About an hour's drive north stood another well known and frequented circle track, the Palm Beach Fairgrounds Speedway.  This was a high-banked, half-mile, deadly narrow track located south-west of West Palm Beach.  Palm Beach attracted all the racers from Hialeah as well as many others from other areas of the state.  Racing was very fast and Harvey made the rounds of Hialeah and Palm Beach tracks, spreading the word that he had hung his camshaft factory shingle and was open for business.

His small yet focused company began to grow, and with it the reputation for his racing camshafts and the powerful engines he built. This growth was steady, and by 1957 the camshaft segment of the business had grown to the point that Harvey knew he would have to choose between complete engines or camshafts.  In 1957 Harvey discontinued his engine building business, concentrating instead on his vision of becoming the east coast answer to the need for accurately made, powerful racing cams.  Stepping away from the engine building business required a leap of faith, but his instinct told him there were greater challenges and achievements just over the horizon.

The Smith Brothers, of North Miami

The Smith family had three brothers, all from North Miami, Florida, Dick, David and Sheldon Smith.  Their father founded and operated Southern Wire Cloth, a manufacturer of wire screening for window screens.  In those days few buildings and still fewer homes were air conditioned, and most people in South Florida chose to cool their homes using flow-through ventilation.  Most doors and windows had wire mesh screens, and their company was always busy weaving and selling rolls of wire mesh screening.  I believe that Southern Wire Cloth was the only maker of screen wire product south of Jacksonville (northern top of the state), and it was very prosperous.  When the founder of the company, Mr. Smith died, he left the business to his three sons, Dick, David and Sheldon.  Of the three brothers, only Dick wanted to continue to operate the screen wire business.

I wanted Dick to come and work for me, and made him what I thought was a good offer.  At the time I had a growing business and needed someone with Dick Smith's education at GA TECH and experience to help me continue to grow Crane Engineering, but Dick decided he would continue to operate the business.  His younger brothers, David and Sheldon, sold out their interests to Dick and went in different directions.  Sheldon, the youngest, bought a service station in the heart of North Miami, on N.E. 2nd Avenue, and was very successful with it for many years until he sold the station and retired.

David was very much involved with hot rods and race cars, and wanted to come to work for me.  To do so David offered to buy a share of my business.  I needed the capital as well as the help, so I agreed to sell David Smith a 20% interest in Crane Engineering.

He began working for me October 1, 1963, at my shop on Old Dixie Highway, in Hallandale, and ultimately retired from Crane Cams in 1992.

David Smith's Race Cars

David Smith built and raced a number of different race cars, first a flathead Ford powered 1934 Ford three window coupe, and later he went drag racing with a 1929 Model A roadster.  A couple years later he built a Modified Roadster, with a small-block Chevy and six Stromberg carburetors.  From there he ran several different dragsters, most of them with Chevy small-blocks for power.

In the mid 1960's he decided to build a 221 cubic inch, small-block Ford V-8, supercharged, for NHRA's CC/Gas Dragster class.  He followed that with an injected 289" Ford running 98% nitromethane, in C/Fuel Dragster.  David's last dragster race cars were an injected big-block Chevy 427, that ran A/Fuel Dragster.  David's race cars served as test vehicles for the many new products that Harvey was developing.  Among those were his U.S. Patented roller lifters, needle bearing fulcrum, full-roller, gold anodized, aluminum rockers, high-rev kits, valve springs, Crane's famous Super Port-Flow modified cylinder heads and many other products were field-tested in David Smith's various race cars.

At the time I had my 1939 Ford Deluxe coupe, and I did a lot of street racing around North Dade and South Broward Counties.  I built a big-inch flathead Ford with a 3-7/16" bore and 4.125" stroker crankshaft.  It was a whopping 309 cubic inches, which was big in those days.  This was the engine in which I installed that first Howard Johansen camshaft into.

That big flathead ran really strong.  I bought the engine block from a guy named Ralph Moody, in Hollywood, Florida, which is just north of Hallandale and south of Ft. Lauderdale.  Ralph later became famous for his part in making Holman & Moody Racing one of the best known names in racing.  The block had been made in Canada.  These Canadian blocks were hard to find and very popular with racers because the Canadian foundry cast engine blocks with thicker cylinder walls that were stronger than the U.S. made flathead blocks.  The thicker castings allowed us to overbore the cylinders, to gain displacement.

In January of 1953 Harvey talked his dad into renting him a small corner of his dad's machine shop and there he installed a used lathe for making spools and axles for early Ford rear ends.  It was in that corner of Crane's Machine Shop that Harvey J. Crane, Jr.'s legend began.

The First "Real Cam Grinder" Machine

In February, 1953, Harvey attended an automotive show in Miami, at the Dinner Key Auditorium.  This was the same site where Pan American Airways had launched their worldwide Clipper seaplane service to all points across the world.  While at the show Harvey saw a brand new, Storm Vulcan, purpose-built cam grinding machine and knew he had to find a way to buy one.  I was talking with a salesman at the show and I told him I wanted to buy one of his cam grinders.  When he told me the price I said it was too expensive for me.  This guy was a good salesman and wasn't about to let a sale get by him.  I must have really looked like I wanted that grinder bad, and he asked me:  "How much have you got in your checking account"?  I told him $500.00, and he immediately said that was enough for a down payment, and he sold me the machine on credit.  What I didn't know was that he planned to ship it freight collect!

My new cam grinder came in the back of a truck, and the driver said I could have it when I wrote him a check for $900.00.  I didn't have that much money, and I had to go to my dad and beg him to loan me the money to pay for my new cam grinder.  I paid him back as I was able, and began trying to using the new Storm-Vulcan cam grinding machine I'd just purchased.

Let me tell you right now, that Storm Vulcan grinder was the biggest piece of junk ever made!  That's right, anytime someone asks me what kind of cam grinder to buy I tell them never buy a Storm Vulcan.

I struggled and struggled with that thing.  It was OK for grinding cams, but it just couldn't create an accurate master cam plate.  Of course, without an accurate master you can never grind an accurate camshaft.

Then in March, 1953, one month after I bought my new Storm Vulcan cam grinder I was drafted out of the Florida National Guard into the U.S. Army.  Oh boy!  I had a new wife (Mildred, Harvey's first wife that he married in 1952), a growing business and machinery payments to make, and I was drafted!  Luckily, the Army stationed me at Ft. Benning, Georgia, and not Korea, where a lot of other draftees like me were sent to fight in the Korean War.  I spent my military tour of duty working on tanks and trucks at Ft. Benning.  Every Friday night I would jump into my 39 Ford coupe and drive home to Hallandale. I slept a few hours and started grinding cams on Saturday morning.  I drove back to Ft. Benning on Sunday evening and reported for duty Monday morning. Mildred ran the business while I was away, and she did a great job of keeping it going those two years I was in the Army.  The day I was discharged (September, 1955) and returned home she told me she was finished with running the shop.  She meant exactly what she said, because she never set foot in the shop again, except to visit!

During the time I was in the Army, I hired a guy named Harry Horlic to help out in the shop.  Harry stayed a couple years and then I believe he went to work for Jim Rathmann, when Rathman had his hotrod shop in Miami.

In those days Rathmann specialized in installing Cadillac and Oldsmobile V-8 engines in Fords.  I had also hired a guy named Bill Pohle, (William H. Pohle) to machine the Lincoln Zephyr transmission gears and 3/4 ton Ford truck rear end spool conversions I made for Ford rear ends.  Bill was a great machinist and very good at designing and prototyping parts.  He could picture what he wanted to make, sketch it out and then go out to the shop and machine it.  Bill stayed with me for many years, and I consider him to be my first real employee.

Harvey & Family Take A "Working Vacation", 1957

In 1957 Crane Engineering Company was really thriving.  We were grinding cams, plus making the spools and Trans gears.  I needed a break and I bought a brand new, 1957 Ford station wagon and Mildred and I took off for a vacation.  We weren't alone, because we had our first son, David, along with us as an infant.  Our vacation was mixed with work, and we headed first for Connecticut, so I could see a man I had talked to on the telephone.  He had a Storm Vulcan cam grinder like mine, and he said he had found how to fix it to make it grind cams better and faster.  His name was Caesar Laterio, and he offered to show me how he fixed his own Storm Vulcan cam grinder.  We spent a couple days with him and then headed west, for Michigan.  We drove to Muskegon, which in western Michigan.  There in Muskegon I met a man named Duane Quigg.  He was then working for Muskegon Camshaft Company, an old-line company that made cams for original equipment engine manufacturers.  Duane soon left that job and opened his own cam company.  I was one of the first customers of Duane Quigg's Camshaft Specialties.  Duane later brought out a line of camshafts under the brand name of Engine Dynamics.

Caesar Laterio, (Laterio Racing Cams) who showed me how to make my Storm Vulcan cam grinder better, was one of three east coast cam grinders who specialized in cams for flathead Fords.  Another was The Ambler Brothers, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and John Schooler, who had a company called Schooler Engineering, in Jacksonville, Florida.

The End Of The Flathead Ford

By 1957 Harvey's business had seen a steady increase in production and sales of camshafts, but a decline in the assembly of flathead Ford race engines.  Much of that was due to the tidal wave of     popularity of the small-block Chevy V-8.  In fact, by 1957 the original 265 V-8 had grown to 283 cubic inches and could be bought in a new 1957 Chevy or Corvette with 283 horsepower!  The new engine began to   dominate the racing and street performance world.  By 1957 the flathead Ford was rendered all but obsolete.  Harvey began to grind cams for the new small-block Chevy, as well as other overhead valve V-8's such as Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Buick and Cadillac, Ford's Y-Block V-8, the new "FE-Series" 352 V-8, and some Chrysler 331-354 Hemi's.

By 1957 I had developed a strong reputation for making cams that were not only very fast, but compared with the California cams, my cams were cheaper too!  Much of my business was with circle track racers in the Carolinas and Virginia, and some of my early customers were racers like Ralph Earnhardt  (father of Winston Cup Champion Dale Earnhardt), Speedy Thompson, Ralph Moody, and a guy named Speedy Spears.  Speedy was the mechanic on the cars Fireball Roberts drove up until he became associated with Smokey Yunick.  Speedy Spears was also involved with the development with the Fish variable-venturi carburetor.  Those people and others were some of my early camshaft customers.

"Sneaky Pete" Wins The NHRA Nationals, Crane Cams Becomes A Major Brand

Harvey first ran across Pete Robinson while he was a young engineering student at The Georgia Institute of Technology (better known as "Georgia Tech"), and a native of Atlanta, Georgia.  Pete was a hot rodder who did a considerable amount of street racing with his "Nail head" Buick V-8 powered, 1940 Ford Deluxe coupe.  Although fairly successful street racing around the Atlanta area, Pete decided that he wanted to go faster.  He also wanted to test some of his own theories on engines and tuning.  That meant only one thing, build an all-out, purpose-built race car.  The obvious answer was to build one of the hybrid machines designed purely for all-out acceleration, a slingshot dragster.  Pete had bought a previous Crane cam for the GMC super-charged Buick engine in his 1940 Ford, making it a feared competitor among the serious street racers of Atlanta.  Pete liked Harvey Crane's obsession with product accuracy, so to get what he felt was the best camshaft possible, Pete again called Harvey and explained his latest project.

Pete's New Dragmaster Dragster Has Early Success

After doing research, Pete found that a California company named Dragmaster offered a complete dragster chassis for sale, to finish as a kit or completely assembled and ready for any engine, transmission and rear axle you selected.  Pete sold his hot rod 40 Ford and placed an order with Dragmaster for a chassis.  For power Pete chose what he thought offered the most potential with the least possible weight.   While the 354-392 Chrysler Hemi was certainly capable of producing huge horsepower, that power came with a weight penalty. Pete decided that a properly prepared, small-block Chevrolet V-8, stroked to 350 cubic inches and installed in a lightweight chassis was the ideal choice.

When he began assembling his first small-block Chevy engine he called upon many of the "standard" speed equipment items, and added a few of his own homemade components, first to save cash, and to have the parts he felt were necessary to making the kind of power he needed to be competitive.  His engine would have a 4.00" bore Chevy block, and a crankshaft with journals "stroked" to 3.48".  With a moderate .020" overbore and hone, this produced an engine of 352     cubic inches.  These "stroker" 350's had to be assembled from aftermarket parts because they weren't available from the Chevrolet factory until the 1967 Chevy 350 V-8.  Pete also insisted on another of Harvey Crane's special cam grinds.  Pete bought a used Racer Brown, steel billet roller cam and sent it to Hallandale, for Harvey to regrind. 

The lobe profile Harvey ground on the camshaft was quite radical for its day, with 298 degrees of advertised duration (262 degrees measured at .050" tappet rise) and .512" valve lift, intake and exhaust, with a lobe separation of 108 degrees.

The grind number was R-298HI Ramsonic Roller.  The R-298HI was one of my best sellers for many years because it worked well in many different types of cars and small-block Chevy displacements, blown as well as unblown.

Pete used Racer Brown roller lifters because Harvey's own patented roller tappets wouldn’t be available for another year.  After that, Pete always used Crane lifters in his Chevys and later small-block Fords.  Harvey also specified the valve seat pressure, installed height and open pressure of the springs to be used with the new Crane roller cam.  Pete built his own supercharger drive system for a GMC 6-71 blower, and at the same time began offering these drive kits to other racers under his "Pete's Engineering" brand name.  (In 1961 these kits sold at racer net for $349.00!)  Atop the 6-71 blower mounted a Hilborn "Two-Hole" fuel injector and a Hilborn PG-150 fuel pump.  The use of direct-port injection was unknown at the time.  The entire fuel load was delivered from a pair of Hilborn 7-A fuel nozzles mounted in the injector.

Since Pete's goal was to run gasoline, and compete in NHRA's Top Eliminator category, he built his engine with a relatively high compression ratio.  Most other engine builders considered high compression a sure path to detonation and engine failure.  As an engineer Pete knew otherwise, and made sure  his Chevy was never bothered by such problems.

Pete Takes A Chance And Captures NHRA's "Big Go" At Indy

In the spring of 1961 Pete entered the new and mostly untested car in an NHRA "Points Meet", at Covington, Georgia.  He came away with a surprising Top Eliminator victory and his first-ever eight-second, 170 mph time slips.  Not wanting to venture too far from his home base with a new and still relatively untried race car, Pete ran a few more regional Southeast Division events, with promising success. 

In August, and on a whim, Pete filed an entry for the biggest drag  racing event in the nation, the 1961 NHRA Nationals, "The Big Go" at the brand new drag strip built at Indianapolis Raceway Park.  Pete was accompanied by friend and crewman Bill Word, whose business was refinishing antique furniture.  The unlikely duo headed for Indianapolis and a date with destiny that defined not only Pete Robinson's life and career as a drag racer, but literally lifted Harvey Crane and his racing camshafts into national prominence.  Virtually unknown outside the Southeast, Pete rolled his little Chevy powered car to the line at Indy Raceway Park and immediately set the mammoth track abuzz by posting Low Elapsed Time and Top Speed!  This from a small displacement, single engine dragster in a field loaded with California superstars and their twin-engine behemoths or other single engine cars with twice the displacement as Pete's little 352" Chevy.  Drag racing wags immediately yelled "Fluke!, demanding that tech inspectors take a magnifying-glass look at the nobody from Georgia and his unlikely little dragster. 

They found nothing out of line save for a homemade water injection system that Pete had rigged to provide a little extra cushion against detonation in the hot, humid, late summer Midwestern weather.  Pete removed the water injection system and the car clocked even quicker times!

Labor Day Monday's final eliminations found Pete working his way through the field, defeating such luminaries as Dragmaster's own "house car", the "Dragmaster Two-Thing", a twin-Chevy car that regularly ran 180 mph blasts, along with other well known cars and drivers.  In the finals he met and defeated Tom McEwen, driver of the Adams-McEwen Oldsmobile powered AA/Dragster.  Two-Thing finally captured Top Speed at 180+ mph, but Pete's little Chevy was close behind with a run of 179+ mph.  Pete also captured Low ET of The Meet at 8.68, an astounding feat among all the big-time "killer cars" assembled at the Nationals.

Crane Cams Becomes The New Cam Buzz

By early next week the telephone began to ring at Crane Engineering.  With Pete's victory the little Hallandale cam shop had suddenly made a breakthrough.  Other Crane cars from South Florida also ran well and their success also noted.  Among them were Ollie Olsen's West Palm Beach based, Chevy powered, 1940 Willys A/Gasser, and Harvey Collins's Chevy powered A/Dragster.  All were running Crane Cams and sporting the distinctive red, white and blue, oval-shaped decals with the long necked crane bird straddling a six-carb dragster.  After Pete's win things would never be the same for Harvey Crane and his suddenly famous company.

Pete Robinson was introduced to me by another Atlanta racer named John Reed.  The two were, I believe, both former students at Georgia Tech, and they were both just starting out in dragsters.  John Reed was every bit as enthusiastic a racer as Pete was, and he was also fairly successful.  He and Pete both bought cars from Dragmaster, shared ideas, and traveled to meets together.  John Reed bought many camshafts, roller lifters, valve train components and aluminum roller rocker arms from me.  John later decided to go into the cam business on his own, focusing on the circle track business and in particular, NASCAR's Grand National and Sportsman Series.  For a time Reed Cams were a "hot brand" among circle track racers.  I always liked John Reed.  John was a very personable and likeable man, even though he chose to go into direct competition with me.  Later he bought steel cam cores from me, to grind into his own roller cams.  John was killed in a plane crash a few years ago.  It happened while he was test flying a stunt plane, not far from where the Atlanta Speedway is located. It was a terrible tragedy because John was a good guy.

Pete Robinson and I became very good friends over the years he was racing, right up to the day he was killed, at the NHRA Winternationals, at Pomona, in 1971.  He was an extremely intelligent man and easily one of the sport's greatest thinkers and innovators.  Pete applied his engineer's formal training and knowledge of physics to what he considered to be the science designing, building and tuning drag race cars.  Many of the things that current racers assume have been around forever, especially in the areas of safety, were developed, tested and run by Pete Robinson.  Pete was always extremely safety conscious, and dedicated to making his own cars as safe as possible.  I guess that makes it all the more ironic that he would be killed in an accident in one of the biggest events of the year, the Winternationals. There's no telling how great Pete could have become had he not been killed at a fairly early point in his career, but I'm sure his name would be as well known as any of today or yesterday's stars.

Fanatical About Weight Reduction

Pete Robinson's quest for the lightest yet safest cars possible took him in some fairly odd directions.  He was fanatical about removing all unnecessary weight from his cars and even his own body, all in the quest for a lower ET.  Pete was known to spend hours with a die grinder, grinding away all unneeded casting lines and bosses on an engine block.  He used hollowed-out bolts, components made from then exotic alloys such as magnesium and titanium, and he made sure that every strut or reinforcing plate serves dual duty, all in the name of weight reduction and quicker ET's.  Before donning his rules required firesuit he would strip down to only his undershorts, leaving two or three pounds of unnecessary clothing in the trailer.  Pete at first didn't believe in parachutes as a braking aid.  His cars were built light, and carried brakes sufficient to stop the car at the speeds Pete planned to reach.  When tech inspectors insisted he mount a parachute to his car he responded by having a mini drag chute made that was one-quarter the size and  weight of a typical cross-form chute,    parachute pack and shroud lines.  It complied with the rules, at least as they were written at that point, but he never released the chute after a run.  This was not an act of defiance, but more to prove that his concept of having adequate, reliable brakes was superior to drag chutes for stopping.

The Switch To Even Lighter, Featherweight Fords

Following his early success with the small-block Chevy's Pete discovered that a small-block Ford V-8, then a skimpy 289 cubic inches, could be lightened enough to save as much as 70 pounds over a comparable Chevy.  He abandoned his Chevys and began a program with the small-block Ford engines.  After reaching what Pete felt was the potential maximum for the Fairlane 289, he worked out a deal with Ford's racing group to use one of their new 427, SOHC V-8's in a lightweight, slingshot style dragster.  The huge valve sizes and ports of the heads and their obviously superior overhead cam, no-pushrod design offered what Pete felt was the ultimate powerplant for nitro-fueled drag racing.  At last Pete had an engine that offered tremendous horsepower potential plus rpm capabilities that could maybe reach the unheard of point of 10,000 rpm.  By 1966 drag racing tires had improved enough to handle the 1,500+ hp that nitro engines that the Cammer Ford was capable of producing.  He began running the Ford Cammer in early 1966, sliding his new 6-71 blown, Enderle injected engine into a new Woody Gilmore, Race Car Engineering chassis that was typical Pete. . . bare bones and ultra functional.  Initial runs were made at the newly opened Miami-Hollywood Dragway, and Pete's new Cammer ride immediately found the seven's during testing and shake down runs.  By year's end he had qualified for the World Finals, which that year was held in Amarillo, Texas.  Pete was in familiar territory, running a new engine against a field dominated by 392 Chrysler Hemi's, an underdog once again, just as he was in 1961.  Pete surprised them all       again, winning Top Fuel Eliminator and the NHRA World Championship.

Innovation Gained From Engineering

Pete believed in the Ford SOHC 427 so much that when company wags reduced the factory support to a strangulation point Pete forged ahead.  He knew that the OHC design and Hemi configuration was the ultimate for a nitro engine and he continued to perfect it.  In the early days of running the SOHC 427 Pete encountered an alarming tendency of the engine to hang open a valve, creating a backfire situation and instantly launched blower!  Because the Cammer drove those wonderful SOHC camshafts via a long chain drive arrangement, Pete suspected that the chains were creating a "tolerance stacking" effect, lengthening during operation and creating a serious retardation in timing that was resulting in blower explosions.  To prove his theories to himself Pete brought his car, trailer and of course the massive 427 SOHC engine to Harvey's Hallandale shop.  Harvey had recently installed a then state-of-the-art, Heenan-Froude  dynamometer with all the instrumentation, for cam and component engine testing.  Pete dropped his Cammer motor onto the mounts and set up degree wheels on each bank, and a strobe timing light, to measure the chain stretch and valve timing retardation.  He also duct taped an 8mm home movie camera to a stand, aiming it directly at the degree wheel on the bank he suspected.  With this very rudimentary set-up he fired up the big Cammer and ran a couple of   conservative power runs.  Harvey recalled Pete's first fire-up test of the nitro-fed Ford:  Our dyno cell was located on the North side of the Hallandale shop, with a concrete block wall separating it from the main cam grinding shop.  The first time Pete fired up that blown, nitro 427 Ford engine our guys in the shop thought the building had exploded!  They all ran for the fire exits, sure that the whole side of the building was destroyed!  A couple days later, after we had the movie film developed, Pete had his proof.  The chain was definitely stretching and retarding the cam timing, causing the blower explosions.

Pete went back to Atlanta and during the drive home, decided that a gear-drive system was the most accurate, most reliable means of making the Cammer engines work to their full potential.

Again, when railbirds first saw Pete's amazing solution to the chain stretch problem, they crowed that Pete had "finally lost it".  His fix eliminated the long, unreliable chain completely and replaced it with a series of intricately machined, spur-toothed gears, all designed to fit inside a front cover fabricated from lightweight sheet aluminum.

It looked like Godzilla's pocket watch, and Pete's gear-drive solution remains one of drag racing technology's most intriguing achievements.

Early in his career Pete devised a method of using stored energy to launch his dragster in a very unconventional fashion, using chassis jacks.  Pete's jacks lifted the rear tires enough off the ground to clear the pavement.  When he let out the clutch the engine's rotating mass and that of the drivetrain, including the tires themselves, acted like a large flywheel.  Pete ran his jack system at several tracks before making a run with them at the 1962 NHRA Nationals.  When his tires began to grow, from centrifugal force, they barely skimmed the pavement surface, but enough so to begin smoking, before the car left the starting line!  At Indy, this so unnerved NHRA's announcer Bernie Partridge that he screamed into the microphone:  Oh my, look at that!  The tires are smoking and the car's just sitting there!

Pete's jack-assisted ET was officially quashed, nor did he get a time slip for the run.  After a few minutes of "dead air" silence came another announcement:  "Pete Robinson report immediately to Ed Eaton at the base of the D-A Tower!"  Eaton was the Event Director and      NHRA's No. 2 man behind Wally Parks.   Ed immediately ruled that any device that lifted the car off the surface of the track was from that time forward, illegal!  Pete's fertile mind for innovation had again run afoul of the rules as written, forcing a rewrite to suit the latest "Pete incident".

Because he had witnessed death and injury to drag racing drivers, and had himself been injured in crashes, Pete became obsessed with making drag racing safer.  Among his innovative ideas were a cup made from the same material used to make helmet liners.  It was secured to the inside of his car's three-point roll cage and designed so that the driver's own helmeted head fit comfortably inside.  This provided an additional cushion to protect the driver’s head from impact during a crash or when the mysterious "tire shake" phenomenon knocked several drivers unconscious.  In one crash, Pete's arm came outside the car during a violent roll-over, fracturing it in several places.

While recuperating, he worked up a pair of "arm restraints" that limited arm travel during a crash and roll-over.  During his recovery Pete continued to run his car with hired driver Steve Carbone.  He performed nearly all the maintenance on the car and engine while his arm was encased in a full-length, plaster cast!  Having seen several nasty incidents where push-started dragsters were run over by their own push car, or pushed into a fire-up crash, Pete designed and built the first "remote starter".  This used a drive mechanism that attached temporarily to the blower's drive snout and could be removed after the engine had safely fired.  It was powered by compressed air stored in welding gas tanks, a device that forever ended the dangers of push starting dragsters and fire-up road accidents.  His distrust of relying on drag chutes for stopping led him to adapt a disc brake system used on Indy cars to fit his dragster's rear wheels.

Many of Pete's advanced ideas and innovations were initially ridiculed by his fellow racers and the drag racing media.  After proving their worth, most of Pete's ideas became rules mandated and were credited with saving the lives of numerous drivers.  Many of these safety advancements continue to be specified in current rule books.

Harnessing The Air For Traction

Pete was also an early proponent of and user of aeronautical technology to adapt the very new race car science of "ground effects" to his dragster.  Texas racer and engineer Jim Hall was one of the earliest to try devices to increase the track "grip" of a powerful chassis, to gain faster speeds.  Pete was equally intrigued, and devised an under-car, ground effects device that was intended to provide increased traction at mid-track to top-end on a quarter mile drag strip.  He first tested the device in July 1967, at an NHRA Points Meet at Warner-Robins Dragway, outside Warner-Robins, Georgia.  Results were inconclusive, but he forged ahead with a more advanced ground effects package that he felt would stabilize his car at the 230+ mph speeds then being attained.  Although some claim it was Pete's ground effects device that failed him that day in Pomona, close examination of the various photos recording that exact run show that something far more sinister was drawing the car towards the right side guardrail.  Pete was giving it his all, as usual, trying to steer the car back left, and the long steering drag link is bowed from the extreme stress he was creating, trying to steer out of trouble.  Sadly, Pete Robinson, the engineer who spent hours calculating every aspect of getting a high powered race from "A to B" in the least time possible, would fall victim to an unexplained component failure, most likely in the rear end, that drew his car into the guardrail and a horrific crash.  Pete died soon after rescue crews reached him.  The irony of Pete's accident and death was that he hadn't planned to drive the car at the Winternationals, or many other races.  He wanted to find another driver while he devoted all his considerable talents to identifying and solving the mysteries of drag racing.  He came to Pomona with another driver scheduled to drive the race.  His name was Bud Dabler, and for a variety of reasons, none of the previous runs he made were quick enough to qualify Pete's car for the Winternationals Top Fuel Eliminator field.  One run remained between qualifying and being forced to head home to Atlanta.  Frustrated, and knowing he had only one last shot at making the field, Pete climbed into the light blue, full bodied "Tinker Toy" dragster and pulled the belts tight.  The run showed promise as the car left the line accelerating hard as it headed for the quarter-mile finish line timers.  At about the 1,000 foot mark things suddenly began to go terribly wrong.  A second or two later whatever evil was happening reached critical-mass.  Photos of that fateful run show that Pete was desperately fighting to steer away from the looming guardrail and disaster.  His efforts were to no avail.  The car made contact and began a series of violent rolls, tossing pieces large and small in a shower of debris and dust.

An NHRA top-end official who reached the roll cage section of the car, with Robinson still strapped inside, immediately knew that the end had come for Sneaky Pete.  Shortly after the crash Pete Robinson was pronounced dead and arrangements made to transport his remains back home to Georgia.  The remains of the car were loaded into Pete's enclosed trailer, driven outside the gates and reportedly never seen again.  That ended any possibility of a mechanical examination of the wreckage to determine if what had been responsible for the loss of control and crash.

Pete was the first and one of the very few drag racers I actually paid to run my products.  Over the years I worked closely with him, but Pete would probably have used my cams and components even if I didn't pay him.  Still, Pete's winning the 1961 Nationals really did make a national name for my company, and I felt that the modest amount I paid Pete every year was well spent.  I was deeply saddened when I heard that Pete had been killed in California.  It was like losing one of my own family members.  I hope the drag racing world never forgets Sneaky Pete Robinson, and what he meant to the sport and industry.

Harvey Reads The Funnies

Although the dragsters remained "The Kings Of Drag Racing", a new wind was beginning to blow, and it claimed the South as its origin.  Perhaps as a throwback to their moonshine-running, stock car racing heritage, Southerners have always been especially keen on full-bodied vehicles for race cars.  This may explain why the early Super Stocks took a firm root in the region as early as 1961, when Chevy 409, Dodge Ramcharger 413 and Ford 406 powered stockers were drawing record crowds to drag strips large and small.  When the mid 60's muscle car craze struck it was an easy jump to take the stockers into Factory Experimental territory, and shortly afterward, to trump the field with supercharged, nitro burning engines and then all-out, purpose built "Funny Cars".

Overnight, favorite drivers garnered near-legendary status by competing against each other in open competition events and the hugely popular match racing events that established many of these early barnstorming drag racers.  Names such as "Dyno Don" Nicholson, Phil "Daddy Warbucks" Bonner, Ronnie "Mr. 4-Speed" Sox, "Fast Eddie Schartman", "Dandy Dick" Landy, "Hue-Baby" Hubert Platt, Gas Ronda, "Tasca Bill" Lawton, Al "Batman" Joniec, Don "The Kid" Gay, Al "Lawman" Eckstrand, Roger "Color Me  Gone" Lindamood, Arnie "Farmer" Beswick, and others tickled the imagination and made drag racing a new form of entertainment.  These early drivers were as much carnival stars as racers, and perfected elaborate rituals prior to lining up alongside their competition to settle the issues.  The over-the-top promotion and AM radio blasting "Sunday! Sunday!" commercials made Funny Cars the most popular "act" in drag racing.   Crane Cams was in on the ground floor of this movement.

I sensed early on that all the match racing, promotion and factory interest in these types of cars was going to be big, but I honestly didn't think it would ever reach the size it did, and so quickly!  I began grinding cams for the early FX cars, then jumped up into the Funny Cars, from gasoline and carburetors to injectors and alcohol, then to nitromethane until finally they were running all-out, blown, nitro burning engines, just like the dragsters.  The Funny Cars kept getting more and more sophisticated, and faster until Ford's Lincoln-Mercury Division changed the whole ballgame when they had Logghe Stamping Company build the first tube-framed, flip-top, fiberglass bodied, Mercury Comet for Don Nicholson.

Nicholson's car had an unblown, 427 SOHC Ford engine running on a big percentage of nitro fuel, with a Ford C-6 transmissions.  It was deadly fast and quick.  Nicholson got the first car in 1966.

Soon after Kenz & Leslie, Eddie Schartman and Jack Chrisman got theirs.  In 1966 Nicholson had an unbelievable win-loss record because his car was so far advanced.  To catch Dyno Don several of the others went to blowers and fuel, and that launched a whole new round of changes.  I had been working with Ford, and in particular with Lincoln-Mercury Division's Al Turner, developing cams for their new SOHC 427.

Like the racers, I began with gasoline and carburetors, then fuel injection, then alcohol, nitro, and finally, blown engines on nitro.  As engine and cylinder head improvements came along I designed and ground more sophisticated camshafts.  The SOHC 427 was itself a great engine to work with.  It had the advantage of big displacement, large valve sizes, heads with huge intake and exhaust ports and that wonderful, single-overhead cam design that allowed us to stretch engine speeds way beyond what the Chevy big-blocks and Hemi's were capable of.  It's no wonder the Mercury Comets and Ford Mustangs had such an edge for several years of those first Funny Cars, Harvey noted.

Full-Page, Full-Color, And Finally, Full-Circle

Crane Engineering Company was growing along with the drag racing market.  During the 1950's and early 1960's Ed Iskenderian's Isky Cams was the Number One cam company in the country, but not for long.  After the Funny Car craze swept across America's drag racing community, Crane launched a national ad campaign.  That enhanced awareness, a growing product line and outstanding, race winning performance boosted Crane Cams to the position of No. 1 among cam companies in 1967.

At the time, full-page, four-color (full color) advertising was rare in the drag racing and hot rodding enthusiast magazines.  Those full-color ads were usually reserved for big-budget companies.  Ads from the Big-Three new car companies, tobacco ads and some of the oil companies were often done in full-page, four-color layouts, but not those of automotive performance aftermarket companies, like Crane Cams.

In 1964 two ex-racers and would-be publishers from the Washington, D.C. area, brought out a new magazine dedicated to the fans of the Super Stocks, Factory Experimentals and Funny Cars.  Jim Davis and Monk Reynolds called it Super Stock & Drag Illustrated, and the brash young upstart magazine had a lot of things the California books didn't. Things like features on the wildly popular Funny Cars, in-depth driver feature stories, tech stories by well-known journalists, and a special series titled "Match Race Madness".  Suddenly Super Stock Magazine was one of the fastest growing, hottest magazine titles in the automotive enthusiast publishing and hot rodding world.

Sensing a unique opportunity, Harvey made a deal with Reynolds and Davis and bought the rear cover of their magazine for an entire year's publishing schedule.  He filled this ambitious space every month with a full-color, full-page ad featuring a Crane Cammed Funny Car or FX hero racer delivering a testimonial proclaiming how great Crane Cams were.  The biggest circulation magazine of the day was Hot Rod Magazine, from Los Angeles’ Petersen Publishing, founded by hot rodder and industry pioneer Robert E. "Pete" Petersen.  Davis and Reynolds's Super Stock Magazine seized upon a niche that worked tremendously among the huge audience of drag racing fans east of the Rockies.  Super Stock's single-copy, newsstand and subscriptions sales leap-frogged its previous record every month, and it quickly became the most popular magazine of its type "back east".

The preeminent position of Crane Cams's rear cover, four-color advertisement, took Crane Cams's message to a new, powerful and growing market.  This premier exposure also boosted Crane Cams's perceived image among racers and street enthusiasts, and quickly shoved Crane into a position of leadership among the cam grinders of the era.

The New No. 1 Cam Company, And A Pay-Off For Racers

Because most of the cam companies were located out west, in California, we were able to grab the lead by capturing a huge slice of the market in the South, Southwest, Midwest and Northeast, and we did it so fast that we caught the others off guard.  NHRA's annual Nationals in Indianapolis was the year's biggest drag race.

I spent hours going over the NHRA published Official Event Entry List, checking each car in competition to see what they were claiming for their camshaft.  I also offered an unheard of award for all Crane Cammed class winners at the Nationals, in 1966. I refunded the class winner's purchase price of his cam and kit, in full, when they showed me their original purchase invoice.

Winning your class at Indy was a major honor among racers in those days.  A class winner trophy meant bragging rights as National Champion for that year.  This was the first class winner contingency awards program ever offered at an NHRA event, and I did it first, but without seeking official approval.  Rather than have the other cam companies use their political influence to kill my awards program before it could happen, I did it on the sly.  The racers loved it, and I wrote a lot of cam and kit refund checks after the race. I still remember that a small-block Chevy roller cam and kit cost $239.40 at Racer Net-Resale price.  I wrote a bunch of checks for that exact amount and some for a greater amount to the big-block Chevy, Chrysler and Ford winners.

The next year NHRA took over and established $100.00 per class winner as the maximum they allowed, but my program set the pace for years to come, and is still in use at some of NHRA's major events where they have class run-off’s.  I wanted to provide some give-back to the racers who bought my products and supported me, but I also knew that a program like that would return many more times the sales and customer loyalty. It was almost a sure-thing, can't lose program from the start.

I will always be proud that I did it first and remember all the good-will it earned Crane Cams with those racers!

The cash contingency awards programs currently offered by the major racing sanctioning bodies mirrors the effort Harvey put into making sure the racers who supported him by buying his cams and products were themselves rewarded.  Close examination of the actual racing cash purse posted (especially in drag racing) shows that the majority of the posted purse comes from contingency awards posted by sponsors.

Since then most other racing parts manufacturers have utilized cash contingency sponsorship programs as a way of marketing to those who buy their products.  This same program for creating "brand awareness" carries over to selling products to more casual street performance enthusiasts, who are influenced to purchase the products they see winning at local and national events.

During the 1960's, the Detroit auto manufacturers were heavily involved in racing competition.  The car companies used to paraphrase this concept with a universally accepted slogan:  "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday!"  This was equally true for cam and valve train sales as it was with selling new cars.

Editor's Disclaimers:

1. Crane Cams (R) is a Registered Trademark of Crane Cams, Inc., A Division of Micronite Inc.

2. NASCAR (R) is a Registered Trademark of The National Association For Stock Car Auto Racing