The November 2004 issuse of American Rodder magazine has an article titled "Rod Power: 50 Good Engine Choices for Your Street Rod." It includes pretty much what you'd expect; mainly various small block and big block American V8s. There's Chevys, Fords, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, Cadilacs and Mopars, from flatheads, nailheads and early Hemis to LS6's, Northstars and Modular V8s. There's also a few Viper V-10's and a pair of Jaguar engines, one of which is a V-12 and the other represents the only inline six I saw listed in the entire article.
But there wasn't a single inline six from any American source. No 300's. No 250's. No Slant Sixes. No sixes from AMC or Chevy. Not even one.
Now I post this not so much to complain about that as I do to make note of the obvious reason why this is so. People just so rarely built rods around inline six powerplants that they didn't have much reason to show any pictures of them.
Now having said that, I want to openly state here that I am a bit of a closet inline six fan, and Ford's venerable old 300 cubic inch light truck engine is one for which I have a particular affection. This is because the very first "truck" I ever drove was my father's 69 Ford Chateau Club Wagon van, which he ordered with heavy duty everything and power nothing. It had the upscale interior, but no radio. It had a three speed manual transmission with a column shifter and a heavy duty clutch that you needed a strong leg to disengage. And powering it was a 300 cubic inch inline 6.
As it happens I'm also a closet hot rod enthusiast. I buy scads of various magazines and linger over photos of and articles about early Ford highboy roadsters and various coupes and other rods. I've been noticing that virtually all of them (with a few notable exceptions) have v8 engines of one sort or anther, and thinking, however, that it might be an interesting variation to build something with a Ford 300 under the hood.
Now I've been lurking here for a while ... Quite a while ... More than a year, actually. I've pretty much figured out that such a project would be feasble and not unreasonable in that a properly built 300 would provide adequate power and torque for such a vehicle, but that it would probably require a few special things like a frame that was a bit longer than normal between the radiator and the firewall, and a custom built set of headers because the only ones I've seen for that engine are designed to fit between the fenders of relatively late model trucks rather than in the context of a street rod. Has anybody here ever built such a rod or know of one for which there are photos out on the web?
[I also posted this over on the Ford Six Performance forums, by the way. I hope nobody minds the crosspost.]