After you build an engine, you can run it on a stand first. That lets you check that everything is working and that the new parts “seat in” correctly before you put it in the van.
Lifters are parts that help the cam open the valves. If they don’t break in right or get contaminated with debris, the engine can need to be taken apart and cleaned.
The camshaft is like the engine’s timing controller for the valves. If it isn’t broken in correctly, it can wear out faster and make the engine unhappy.
A roller rocker is part of the valve train that helps the cam open the valves. The roller design reduces rubbing, which can help the engine last longer.
“Mopar” is the name people use for Chrysler’s cars and their performance parts. Here it’s being used because Mopar engines have some specific head/valvetrain quirks.
Term
roller lift
A “roller” valve-train setup uses rolling contact instead of sliding contact. It can help parts last longer, but you still have to assemble and break it in carefully.
The hosts mention testing a funnel/duct-tape setup at “40 miles an hour,” which frames the discussion as a high-risk stunt rather than a casual craft. It’s relevant because it explains why they call it “plenty dangerous” and why they later mention near-misses.
“Four by four” means a 4x4 drivetrain—power sent to all four wheels. In a van build, it’s a styling and capability choice that changes how the vehicle is perceived (more rugged) even if the build is mostly for show.
A “chop” is a custom-van/truck modification where the roof is cut down to lower the overall height and create a more aggressive, streamlined profile. It’s commonly paired with other styling changes like flares and wood trim, and it affects interior space and visibility.
MythBusters was a science/engineering TV show that tested popular myths with real-world experiments—often involving vehicles and improvised engineering. Mentioning it here signals that the “chop” and funnel/duct-tape ideas were tested in a media/stunt context, not just imagined.
Bondo is a brand name commonly used for fiberglass-reinforced body filler. It’s used to smooth dents and reshape panels before paint, and the speaker notes that the fans’ builds had “a lot of Bondo,” implying heavy metalwork/reshaping.
“Flares” are wheel-arch extensions that cover wider tires and add a classic custom look. On chopped vans/trucks, flares also help visually balance the lowered stance and can accommodate changes in tire width.
A visor is a piece on the front of the vehicle that sticks out like a small roof. It can help with sun glare and also makes the van look more customized.
Term
wiper cow
Think of a wiper cow as a custom cover that dresses up the area around the windshield wipers. It’s mostly for looks, but it can also help the front end look cleaner.
A “big rig look” means the van is styled to look like a truck, usually with bold front-end parts and lighting. It’s a visual theme, not a performance change.
Curved side windows are shaped like a curve instead of being flat. If you change the door/window opening, curved glass can be harder to fit, so people sometimes switch to straight glass.
“Light and bright” refers to a judging segment focused on lighting and visual effects—how the vehicle’s lights look, how they’re controlled, and how impressive the display is. It’s commonly paired with electronics/audio categories at custom shows.
A Dutch door is a door split into two parts. You can open the top for airflow while keeping the bottom closed for privacy and security.
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Emily EP39: No, just publishing it. Just, I get up, special on Wednesday, I log on to Libson, which is our platform, and then I publish it every
Emily EP39: And you do learn a lot because Rose is like an infinite well of knowledge, but it's nothing compared to actually putting it together.
Emily EP39: Yeah. We just
Rose EP39: all doing it wrong.
Rose EP39: Okay. It's a speed master, so it's kind of a pile of shit.
Rose EP39: I mean, oh my God, they don't finish that surface it, that's as cast. Oh.
Emily EP39: oh yeah. That's discouraging.
You wanna break it in on a stand and then if the cam or lifters, because that's what this is all about. If the cam and lifters don't survive and break in properly, you're taking it back apart. 'cause you've got trash in the oil pump, possibly, most likely
Rose EP39: torque. It's just more risk than I personally wish to take. I like to build a stand that has a low center of gravity, the motor's down by the ground
Rose EP39: You know, like 22 or 2300 RPM, like maybe maybe like 2,500 RPM.
Emily EP39: and one of the reasons that you've mentioned of why this part is so critical and also a little bit nerve wracking, is because lifters you, you can't get good lifters.
Rose EP39: Yeah. So one of my coworkers, yeah, his, his brother-in-law or whatever, fired one up that he'd had built and he'd already spent, you know, the normal money building it and then yeah, they ran all this trash through it and had to take it apart and go get it flushed out again.
You know, I mean that's part of what we're talking about, you know? 'cause you're probably gonna go roller lift or roller a rocker. You're probably not, I don't know. You can end up in all kinds of places. Mopar has that weird
Emily EP39: yeah. How much would that be?
Rose EP39: Oh yeah. If you went to a machine shop, they'd probably want you to go ahead and do that. I mean, the thing is with like a Mopar head, if we're talking Mopar, you've got a, a rocker shaft and there is a roller rocker shaft, or you can convert the head.
Emily EP39: Mm-hmm.
Emily EP39: We've been working on some other stuff too.
Rose EP39: Which we talked about extensively before the show, just to let people in on our, you know, pre-show preamble, preamble, premble.
Like I think that the engine can run downhill with the frame rails. Like you should have a little, in my opinion, frame rake, like the back should be a little higher than the front it, you know, excluding like tail draggers, you know? Duh. Otherwise, I think, yeah, we're always talking a little bit of rake to the front of some sort and I think it's okay when the engine goes downhill with all that.
Rose EP39: So we're like taking sweeps to the door opening and defining radiuss across the top of the roof. And door opening is the main thing right now.
Rose EP39: It's gonna have, it's gonna have an eighth inch thick skid plate just in case we find something so Emily EP39: Okay. So we're going straight.
Rose EP39: it's gonna be really wide track, so, yeah. I mean, that's what, Dan Woods said about the ice truck. He was like, it was like a giant go-kart. He is like, the, the footprint was so wide and the roof was so low you, couldn't turn it over.
Rose EP39: Yeah. Anyway, yeah. So anyway yeah, maybe we will take it to a track or something,
Rose EP39: sculpting it out. We've got some, certainly got some work to do on it, but it's I'm, I think we're looking at a natural on the body work side and that just doesn't come along very often.
Rose EP39: I don't know, I think we've made progress on it. It's good to be in the shop and do stuff and like be working towards a goal with friends and. I think the car is pretty cool.
Emily EP39: Oh, Tanner.
Rose EP39: Yeah. Thankfully he didn't, he like asked for my water halfway and I, like, I brought two waters. 'cause I knew drunk throw
Rose EP39: Oh my God. It's the Dream Van episode. Yep.
Rose EP39: Do you think We live in a world of infinite wealth where people can have more than one of something It's the sliding door wall. That's the short wall.
Emily EP39: Oh, it'll be strapped in. Okay. It'll be strapped in. So they'll be swivel chairs, a pull pullout table for drinks and games. So maybe there is like a living room table sort of in the middle of the L-shaped lounge.
Emily EP39: I think. See, I didn't really think about stance on this one or actually any, well, no, I thought about stance on one of them. This one is just more, a lot of them are more just the decoration that I would go with.
So small and large, like small, like a disco ball. Small and large. It'd be a lot of glass, a lot of mirror, not sorry, glass mirror, mirror tile. So that's one of 'em. That's my party palace sex machine.
Emily EP39: That's the mural. Or they'll be r raring at each other, but they'll have their jousting poles, of course, 'cause that's what they did. But the color scheme is gonna be. Lisa Frank or Pop Princess or Pastel Wet Dream.
Okay. And then the duct tape is like taped to it. Okay. And it's hanging down. And then you have a broomstick with a funnel. For your hand. We learned to do the funnel eventually. 'cause the duct tape roll kills your hand. Okay. And you, drive up and you try to get it on your broomstick and then the funnel rips it off the thing and you come away with it.
And then we went like 40 miles an hour. 'cause we just were like, yeah, let's just do it. Gomer came up with it and. We tried it at Midwest and then we were doing the nationals at the same place a month later or two months later. And like, so we test ran it at Midwest and it was plenty dangerous.
Rose EP39: started putting the funnels on the Yeah. I almost took the guy's head off and that was pretty terrible. I don't remember who it was, but um, he took it quite well.
Emily EP39: You know, not the gorilla hair. Yeah. Don't you all always want it to be thick and long? And probably some like dragons and swords and medieval weapons. I love, I love how decorative medieval weapons can be. So, um,
Prop stuff. And this is, okay, the next one, it is a four by four and it is a 64 corvera van. It's, and it's a four by four and it has it, even though it has windows all the way around. The other two are shorty with no windows except for bubble windows. But this one has windows all the way around, which I will let slide because it was so cool looking.
Emily EP39: oh, really? Originally it doesn't have one in the front. Okay. I didn't know that. Yeah,
Rose EP39: Well, yeah, but oddly specific I should say on the corvera.
Rose EP39: chop mid dodge. I think that's
Rose EP39: Well, hell, we did 12 inches when we chopped that dodge on MythBusters. That's too much.
Rose EP39: And those, fans had a lot of Bondo, but people just wanted to do it and they did it. So I love, I think that the Chopped Dodge, mid Dodge chopped is like, so many good show trucks are done with that.
Rose EP39: like when you look in at shag, it's like, yeah, it'll have Rose EP39: you got the low roof and then you need to split the three rooms up. The cab is a room all its own. The middle is the living room, the back is the bedroom. So like something that I see in the seventies, van magazines, that's like how they shoot it. You know, the cab is one spot, living room in the middle and that's where like your stereo or your reel to reel is, and then the back is the bedroom. That's the private vault. So, you know, compartmentalize that way. I think in this, for me, like in this dream van, it's like the like the bed rails, you know, type type thing. Like not a full wall, but like, um, the same uprights you'd use on a staircase. Okay. Like, I like that wooden and uprights. Especially in a chop. 'cause you still get visibility to the back of the van, to the bedroom.
Emily EP39: yeah. Ooh, whiskey glasses are a nice little touch.
Rose EP39: Yeah. But so, but with the idea that you would sit your butt on the floor and lean against the wall of the bed like so many people do.
Rose EP39: and I think it's hard to say. I think it would be, it would be the move probably to try to put a four 40 in it. Like, I mean, the four 40 fits it is huge and it jams in there.
Like the dodge has that waterfall front end that is just, ugh, it looks so good. But yeah, I think flares and wood running boards are like, just nice.
Rose EP39: Maybe, yeah. Maybe it would be something like, um.
things? I think,
Rose EP39: Um, something really deep. Okay. I think if you were gonna do black gold leaf and maroon, that you could perhaps have a pink line in there somewhere too. I think Coop would do something like that.
Emily EP39: Well, because it's functional, right? Doesn't it? Get the sun outta your eyes?
Pfizer's visors changed the front end a lot. And another thing that was similar is like cow, cow covers were similar where they like cover your, they cover your, it's called a wiper cow.
visors and stuff. You know, they're an attempt, like eighties van and is an attempt to make the truck look like a big rig, like the orange lights across the roof or across the visor. The wiper cow, double bumpers, like people would do stacked bumpers.
Emily EP39: I think they're really cool. I think if you can do the molded, you should do molded.
those damn Rose EP39: Curtains aren't enough. Back door maybe. Yeah. But still probably not.
out? Well, it was like, it's like a futuristic mural. And so when he saw it, he goes, damn, welcome to the future.
Emily EP39: define mod?
Emily EP39: Um, the thing is, is I don't know enough about Vans to be like, oh, this is a mod that I would do that nobody else has done Rose EP39: Well, there is an astro called Tub Thumping that is like, it's a hot tub in the Emily EP39: Oh yeah. Okay. Like a hydro tube? Yeah. Okay. See there, you, helped me somewhere. Yeah. Now we're getting somewhere.
Be facing you. And then you're driving in the middle and they're like
Machine. You know, uh, one of the guys in our club, Brad had a really clever idea. He wanted his interior to be like a hot tub, but carpeted.
it, that was, his core interior idea was like carpeted hot tub. I like
Rose EP39: He also had a really good idea in that like he put his battery by the door opening. Yep. But then he cast that rubber rat fink pad so that when he puts his knee there, he is not killing his
but I love, I love how much Marshall loves the van, and I love the van because it's a second gen Chevy, but it's got a full flare kit and it's molded and it looks sick.
It does hit a category like in judging, that I dislike sometimes where the interior is like, we have this as a theme and we filled the interior with this. And like Blackbeard's Van is like that, where he is like, he, you know, he'd be like, I did 10 new things this year. And it's like he just bought like 10 new things and glued them to the inside
So like in the shape of the econoline bezel, that's one of the best treatments I've ever seen. It is such a mean looking van. And then eventually they wrecked it and they built a clone and it's just sick. I mean, the one thing that I think lacks on that is the lettering. But it's also pretty good for a drag car.
Emily EP39: it was very bizarre if it would be that that Rose EP39: and welding through window tracks and a chop is a pain in the ass. Having a, like that model era, you know, you would have a curved glass side window, so you might like modify the way the track goes through the door so you can just use straight glass. 'cause you're gonna have a shorter window or like, maybe you use acrylic, but like a lot of people would.
Rose EP39: each. And then the same thing that the, like those running boards came through, sorry, the exhaust came through the running board and had heart shaped tips. Whoa.
Rose EP39: really, it's, it's pretty The other van was loaded with graphics, nice paint job. Both interiors, were sorta just okay.
The big thing with that is like, best in show. Like if you win best in show and you somehow got second in your class, what sense does that
Emily EP39: So you would know if you judged somebody in second place, then you'd be like, we Rose EP39: okay. Best engineered. There's best electronics which comes during the light and bright like best sound system. There's some weird stuff in the light and bright one that is like best animation.
Rose EP39: Maybe not everybody agrees with that, but I think that when, I go out and do the judging and people would see me doing it, they would think that like we were spending real time looking at their stuff because I would get under the vans a lot and look underneath.
Emily EP39: but sometimes your van looks better with the hood not popped, even if it's clean on the inside.
Rose EP39: Yeah. I don't wanna be rude, but I think he just thought we had seen like the craziest thing we've ever seen. And we were like, man, you're supposed to be here at the show at this time to be judged. Like,
Rose EP39: I don't know. 'cause I would do a class and a class can have 10.
Rose EP39: Well, at the shop, once Tommy wrote down that we had like 15 vans on the ground. I mean, I didn't own all of those. But at one time, yeah, I, uh, I guess at the shop when I had all those carcasses, I had, you know. Eight or nine vans. Yeah. Several of which were like, you know, I had titles to 'em and stuff. Yeah. But you know, they were for the picking
Rose EP39: Time is money too. You're giving up time to work on your own thing. And it's like, yeah, I probably should have done one and followed through. But again, I was, I, you gotta be working to make money.
that you like the best about? Why do you like the first gen the most?
of cool. It's a really cool door. Yeah. My friend Denny would talk about taking a second gen, putting a first gen nose on it, but having the Dutch doors on the back, that would be cool.
Emily EP39: It's got so, so much. You have so many plans
Emily EP39: and then you just do that.
About this episode
Dream Van No. 2 turns into a wide-ranging shop-and-show discussion: the hosts swap stories about building engines and the risks of break-in, lifters, and oil-pump trash—plus Mopar-specific rocker/shaft options. The conversation then pivots to van design fantasies, including a 4x4 Corvair van with full windows, chopped/“mod” styling ideas, and themed interiors split into cab/living/bedroom zones. They also debate best-in-show judging, class placement logic, and why some builds feel over-glued with theme parts.
