For many years, all the information about this van was limited to a single photo on my hard drive. Of course, this is not enough for an independent article, and therefore I planned to attach a photo to another article, which has now also been written, and sign something like: “look at what a cool car; it’s a pity that we don’t know anything about it.” But, following my modus operandi, before writing the article, I uploaded the photo to the search engine, and… now we have two articles. Actually, welcome to the first of them.
Most of the photos of this van are of very poor quality. And this is despite the fact that at least one of them clearly shows the inscription "50th National Truck-In", which specifically indicates the year 2023. Make your own conclusions - well, I just can't figure out why such nonsense turns out from time to time.
Heartbreaker, or Heartbreaker, is apparently a very old machine. It’s not even about the fact that it rolled off the assembly line back in 1977 – no, I’m talking specifically about its current configuration, which, according to the Internet, has existed since at least 2007. Urban legends say that the van has been living in this form for more than forty years, and that it can be seen, for example, in the movie Forrest Gump. Personally, I did not notice this car there, and in general, such information sounds extremely doubtful, because there is not only little information about the car, but the absolute minimum.
It wasn’t until July 2023 that a relatively informative video appeared on the YouTube channel of FantasticTelevision: in a couple of frames, a sign with the technical data of this car is clearly visible. In several other small videos – already from Facebook and Tiktok – someone briefly looked under the hood of the Heartbreaker. And here, first of all, it is worth noting the following: it is very gratifying that over all these years the Heartbreaker has remained alive, unharmed; the owner clearly looks after his van and keeps it in perfect condition. And secondly, it was thanks to such a long period of trips to various exhibitions that we finally had the opportunity to learn at least some details about this truly magnificent car.
I love, can, and will, in the name of Mayakovsky and all other futurists, call superchargers superchargers, not compressors, superchargers, and other boring, non-super-words.
The most interesting thing about the Heartbreaker is its stroker engine (that is, an engine with a stroker whale installed; in Russian, I would call such an engine a “walker”). The stroker kit is the main tool for increasing engine displacement without boring the cylinder block. If my memory serves me correctly, this method has never been mentioned on the pages of our magazine, and therefore it is worth describing it in a separate paragraph.
So, in short, everything is extremely simple: a crankshaft with a longer stroke is installed in the engine, and a “walker” engine is obtained. The Heartbreaker clearly uses a configuration popular for Chevrolet engines: a 5.7-liter crankshaft was installed in the factory engine, designed for a larger 6.5-liter engine. In this simple way, the engine’s displacement increased by 0.6 liters at once, resulting in a 6.3-liter power unit. Of course, all this is just in words – in fact, installing a crankshaft that differs from the original one is even more difficult than boring the cylinders. In addition, as in the case of boring, new heads and pistons will probably be needed, and at the same time it is advisable to sort out at least the fuel system. However, the power obtained after replacing the crankshaft can be much higher than after the cylinder block boring procedure – and, moreover, the stroker kit allows you to maintain the original thickness of the cylinder walls, which can be a very important factor for some engines. However, no one prevents using both methods on the same engine – without a doubt, the largest and most powerful engines in our category were with both a new crankshaft and a wasted cylinder block.
Special thanks to the @kaleidoscopekenna channel from TikTok for asking us to cover the trunk and taking a close-up and detailed picture of the magnificent mural on the back door of the van. I spent two hours searching for these images and I was already afraid that I would never see what exactly the artist had depicted on the back of the car.
The owner of the Heartbreaker didn’t drill the cylinders, but in all other respects, the van’s engine is fully equipped. Of the most important things, the coveted nameplate with the technical stuffing indicates such things as the Dart Sportsman cylinder head, the Comp camshaft with a 12.2 mm lift, forged pistons with a compression ratio of 8.5:1, the Edelbrock 750 carburetor (which translates to our values means a capacity of approximately 21 cubic meters per minute), the Turbo transmission-The Hydramatic 400, as well as the luxurious 4-71 supercharger from the company whose name was emblazoned above the hood of the Mad Max itself, Weiand. All this mechanical luxury adds up to about 700 horsepower, which is certainly more than enough for an old 1977 Chevrolet Van.
To be honest, before I found the entire photo album posted in this article, I strongly doubted that the supercharger on this car was real. My suspicions were very strong that the air intake was just a dummy on the hood in the style of street freaks, and not part of a real power plant. The fact is that the engine in American vans is usually installed very deeply, and even buried under a whole bunch of hoses and wires. So, when watching the video, I was very pleasantly surprised, and at the same time amazed: compare the footage with the under-hood space of the Heartbreaker, for example, with what is happening under the hood of Lord of Dragons Ed Beard Jr.
Where all the wires and hoses went is a great mystery, but this is clearly a very powerful sorcery that required a lot of rituals, prayers of the Omnissiah and other dances with a tambourine. Such a clean under-hood space always makes you shake your head respectfully, and in a van full of electronics it just seems like a miracle. And pay special attention to how the air intake is unusually connected to the supercharger.
And not the least of any custom van is, of course, its interior. It seems to me that in this case, photos and videos are better than a thousand words.
All in all, Heartbreaker looks like a unicorn in my eyes. It is very, very nice that this car is still among us, that someone was finally able to get some information about its technical stuffing, and someone else looked under the hood of this handsome man. Writing this article was a very pleasant surprise for me. Unfortunately, it will have to end on a rather sad note: as it turned out, the man who built the van and its permanent owner, Monte Kunz from Black Forest, Colorado, passed away just a few days before writing this article.: November 20th, 2024. In this regard, the further fate of the Heartbreaker raises serious concerns, and this text is entirely dedicated to the memory of Comrade Kunz: he was one of the billions unknown to us, but the beauty he created made the life of everyone reading these lines a little brighter.
