Corvette Book Guide - The Top Shelf: Volume Three

Now, Tom--with help from photographer James Mann and the folks at Motorbooks--have published Collector's Originality Guide: Corvette Sting Ray 1963-1967. There's a chapter for each year of the second-generation Vette, explaining and showing off the year-to-year changes as well as available powertrains, options, factory documentation (including numbers marked on various components during its manufacture) and plenty of other information you'll need to make the task of authenticating your midyear--or one you're interested in buying--that much easier.

The book's final chapter covers restorations--explaining why they're done, covering what areas of the C2 tend to need the most attention, what's involved with restoring each component and sub-assembly. Instead of the usual assembly-manual writing, you get passages like, "When the body is finished, ten friends and neighbors is the ideal number to help with the body drop, and then celebrate with a barbecue. Completely 'un-car' people can become quite enthusiastic after this enabling experience, and even confirmed A to B people start to tell the office about how they helped to build a car."

Carbureted or Injected? These Vette Books Have You Covered
Now for some Vette Books for you hands-on Corvette owners/devotees. This first bunch deals with those devices that many swear by while others swear at: Carburetors and fuel-injection systems.

Our very own Dave Emanuel weighs in with How To Rebuild and Modify Carter/Edelbrock Carburetors: Performance, Street and Off-Road Applications. Each chapter covers a specific area such as carburetor types, carburetor selection (for your specific application--how to go about it the best); carburetor function, modifications and tuning; rebuilding tips; plus appendices showing "exploded" views of the Carter ThermoQuad, AVS, AFB and WCFB.

It's of particular interest to restorers--whose pre-'66 Corvettes came with Carters as standard equipment--as well as to Vette Rodders. For the latter group, it includes info and images covering also the Edelbrock carburetors that came about as the result of Edelbrock's acquisition of what was left of the Carter Carburetor Company during the '80s.

If your Vette came with one of these atop its engine, or you think it'll be an improvement over what's on there now, you need this book in your reference library (i.e. the one out in your garage above your workbench, where you've got your old GM and Fisher Body manuals stashed).

If you can remember when GM's Rochester Carburetor Division came up with the Quadrajet four-barrel carburetor, you likely remember the jokes you made about The General's "imitation Holley," or you put it down for its supposed lack of performance and ability to modify into a serious piece of high-performance hardware.

CarTech Books has these covered in Cliff Ruggles' How To Rebuild and Modify Rochester Quadrajet Carburetors. Not only will you get the basics of Q-jet design, assembly and operation in this book, you'll also get detailed tech info on rebuilding them, as well as how you can turn a much-maligned, mass-produced item into a carburetor that can flow the volumes of air and fuel you'll need to make big power out of that V-8 below it. It doesn't contain jokes and put-downs you can tell about people who used to joke about and put-down Quadrajets. But, after digesting what's in this book, you'll come up with plenty of those yourself.