Where the Hemi Went Next: A Harbor Freight Small Engine Gets the Hot-Rodder's Treatment

The cheapest engine on the shelf has just been given the same medicine Detroit used to sell on the showroom floor. A builder working with a Harbor Freight single-cylinder has coaxed additional output from it by reaching for the oldest tricks in the American speed catalog rather than anything exotic. The recipe reads like a 1950s dry-lakes shopping list: a stubby tube header to let the exhaust breathe, a carburetor with more to give than the stock unit, and combustion chambers reworked toward the domed, hemi-style shape that made a certain Chrysler V8 a legend. None of those ideas is new, which is precisely the point. The lesson for anyone in a Los Angeles garage with a budget engine on the bench is that the fundamentals of making power have not changed, only the scale on which they are applied. We have not run the engine ourselves and will not guess at its final figure.

With reporting from The Drive.