Y-Block SOHC (Single Over Head Cam) Drive Found

By Bob Martin

From the initial find of the SOHC Y-Block drive by Harry Hutten, when he and Barb were going thru Dennis Carpenter’s Museum in North Carolina – and the subsequent mention in Y-Block Magazine, I’ve gotten response back from two Y-Blockers with information.  Richard Gaston, from Mississippi, who worked for Holman & Moody in the mid-‘50’s crewing for Curtis Turner (how he got the job is another story), saw two of those motors on the H&M dynos – he has since confirmed that this was the SOHC drive he saw, and wondered what became of them.  Harry said that Dennis Carpenter is going to have them assembled on a 292 or 312.  When I showed the pictures to Gordon Payne (Parham & Payne supercharged ’57 wagon), he said that when he worked for Western Gear Corp. in Seattle, ’59-’61, he ran the Monarch Tracer Lathe that was purchased new during WWII to produce the bevel gears used in the cam drive system for the Ford OHC V-8 tank engine. He said that this cam drive arrangement is a copy of those.

Richard Gaston went on to say that when Ford pulled out of Racing in 1957, that Ford went so far as to even eliminate the part numbers of the racing parts out of the manuals.  He also said that Holman & Moody bought up all those parts for 10 cents on the dollar – and that was the last he seen of those motors – until Harry and Barb stumbled across them – and I reported about it in the Jan-Feb issue of Bruce Young’s Y-Block Magazine.

To be continued as the reports keep coming in.  I included the above information in the Mar-Apr issue of Y-Block Magazine and included a couple of the following pictures: