Stu Hilborn

(19 October 1917 in Calgary, Alberta - 16/12/2013)

Stuart Hilborn in his legendary 150 MPH streamliner. Photo courtesy Wally Parks NHRA Motorsport Museum.

Stuart Hilborn (left) with Eddie Miller. shows Stu’s flathead V-8 with an experiment that led toward fuel injection. Miller developed a special 4-carburetor manifold using three Dodge D-7 1-bbl carbs to cover three of the four intake ports, and a Buick Duplex carb to cover the port where cylinders 1 and 2 fired consecutively.
The next step was Stuart’s first fuel injection manifold with eight separate injectors.
Sadly, Stuart’s lakester disappeared many years ago, and no one knows where it is. But that special manifold is still in use on a car from Oklahoma. Photo courtesy Kustomrama.

Photo courtesy Hilborn Fuel Injection.

August 10, 1947, the same day it was crashed. Photo from the Trompers collection. Kustomrama

After the crash.

Fuel injection pioneer Stu Hilborn dies at 96

Hemmings Daily, l Dec 16th, 2013 - Daniel Strohl

Most young hot rodders who know nothing about auto mechanics tend not to go anywhere fast, but Stuart Hilborn had a couple aces up his sleeve – a neighbor who ran at Indy and a college education – and he would use those to good effect to become a legend in high-performance automotive fuel-injection systems. That legend died Monday morning at the age of 96.

Born in October 1917 in Calgary, Alberta, Hilborn moved to the United States and made his way down to Southern California as a child with his father, a migrant worker. He told Jim Donnelly for an interview in 2003 that he moved a total of 43 times, yet his schooling was unaffected throughout that time. His introduction to hot rodding came in 1938, when he joined some friends on a trip to the Southern California dry lakes to watch the speed trials there and came away impressed. “There were fellows up there with no tools or mechanical schooling who were making twice the horsepower that Detroit was putting out.”

Full of ambition, he decided to build a flathead V-8-powered Ford Model A, and had bought both the engine and a suitable engineless Model A roadster, but discovered he knew little about how to actually build the car he wanted. Fortunately, he could count on a neighbor and friend of his, garage owner and former Indianapolis 500 driver Eddie Miller, to show him the ropes. “He was the opposite of me – he could do anything,” Hilborn told Robert Genat for Genat’s book, The Birth of Hot Rodding. “He was a good driver, an excellent engine man, and he could weld sheet metal. I had never done any of those things, or even seen them being done. It turned out to be a godsend for me to learn from someone who had all those skills.” Along with that practical education, Hilborn enrolled in college and began to study math, chemistry, and physics – tools that he would put to good use while building his hot rod.

Over the next three years, he and Miller built a perfectly capable hot rod – one capable of 123 MPH speeds on the dry lakes – but Hilborn, enchanted by speed, wanted more. At the same time, Bill Warth had decided to get out of racing, so he put his Chevrolet four-cylinder-powered streamliner up for sale. Hilborn negotiated to buy it without its engine, for $75, planning to stuff his flathead V-8 into it, according to Genat, but he picked it up on December 7, 1941 – Pearl Harbor Day – so promptly put it into storage. He served out World War II as an aircraft gunnery instructor, and while some sources claim he got the idea to adapt mechanical fuel injection to automobile gasoline engines (fuel injection was already in widespread use in diesel engines) from his time in the U.S. Army Air Force, as he related the story to Jim Donnelly, he developed his first mechanical fuel-injection system to combat issues with running methanol in hot rod engines after the war.

“Running carburetors with methanol was a constant problem,” he said. “The methanol reacted with the pot metal in the carburetor and turned into a white powder that clogged the jets; so there was no venturi effect, and you lost power.” Seeking an alternative to the old carburetors the hot rodders were then using, he then applied his knowledge of fluid dynamics to calculate necessary pump size to get precise amounts of fuel to each cylinder in his flathead V-8. Using a surplus aircraft fuel pump and a homemade system of nozzles, he then built and tuned his first fuel-injection setup, which he proved in 1948 by taking his streamliner to when his streamliner ran 150 MPH at the dry lakes, becoming the first hot rodder to break that mark. (As Ron Kellogg wrote, Hilborn was able to drive his streamliner to 144.92 MPH; it was Howie Wilson who took Hilborn’s streamliner past the 150 MPH mark.)

A subsequent crash that broke two of his vertebrae quickly ended his racing career, but the results of his tinkering brought other hot rodders to his doorstep asking him to build fuel-injection systems for their engines. It didn’t take long for the racing world to catch on to the benefits of Hilborn fuel injection, and the setups would soon find their way under the hoods of not only hot rods and lakes racers, but also midgets, drag racers (according to legend, Tom Cobb, who participated in what is considered the first drag race, ran a Hilborn-injected engine), and Indy cars. For his innovations, he was inducted into SEMA’s Hall of Fame in 1996. As well as the HOT ROD Magazine Speed Parts Hall of Fame.

Hilborn’s business, Hilborn Fuel Injection, remains around today. According to Hilborn Fuel Injection’s Facebook page, which announced the news of Hilborn’s passing, Hilborn is survived by his wife Ginny of 60 years, along with his daughter, Edris, and his son, Duane, four grandchildren and two great grandchildren.