Boosting Engines for Cheap! | Engine Masters | MotorTrend

this is what's called a roots supercharger, the design where you have two rotors here that spin together, it's actually a positive displacement compressor, it has 174 cubic inches every time it spins all the way, it pushes that amount of air into the

engine

, you can see how. They roll around here and are sealed with Teflon. The only reason any supercharger including a turbo makes more power with boost is because you are putting more air into the

engine

, when you have more air you can burn more fuel and with more fuel you get more. Turn on the carburetor, let's check it, probably put the carburetor in the right direction.

I have none. People always ask us why we don't use EFI. You know, a lot of that is what we have. to play these videos very quickly and this way we don't have to hook up a bunch of sensors or do any wiring or create a tune up for anything, this is just simpler for initial start up and running and a wide open throttle tends to They make the same horsepower either way and also for this particular test we are talking about entry level superchargers and entry level superchargers often don't have efi and this is rudimentary technology.

Let's be real and see if I can pour this as good as a fried hamburger damn I'll quit before I make a mess if you see some smoke in the room that's just a small oil leak we have coming out of the steering wheel bolts on the rear end, so don't don't worry about that, okay, oh, 5.6 5.9 pounds of boost, but at full power, yeah, that's about five and a half pounds of boost, let's see what kind of power we made with the wine blower with five and a half pounds of boost. made 473 pound-feet of torque and 522 horsepower, here's the problem, although 520 horsepower is not a number you want to throw out when you have a blown small block, but because the boost goes through the carburetor and also through the tubes of the float bowls. that hold fuel and the fuel comes from the fuel pump, you have to have what's called a boost reference fuel system because imagine seven psi of fuel going into the canister and seven psi of boost going into the vent tube, seven psi working against seven. psi is zero psi, you would get no fuel flow, so you need a regulator that can reference boost from the hat and increase fuel flow in direct proportion to boost.

In English, you want seven psi more fuel pressure than boost at all times, exactly. and if you're referring to boost, just add seven and you'll always have enough fuel. What would I do without you? I think I'd get out my calculator. Seriously, you can be replaced by an iPhone. Oh man, this is going to be it. In our first test with the Paxton supercharger we tried running it with the off-the-shelf Holley Ultra XP carburetor and it basically didn't work. We're not exactly sure why he was too rich or too poor, he just failed. was having a hard time, it's hit or miss as to whether a carburetor is going to work out of the box with one of these offerings or not, it can be made to work I'm sure, but we happen to have a carburetor in the cabinet that I already know it works well with these blow-off things, so we opted to take the easy way out and put in the other carburetor.

Do you think this works with stevo? Yes, I'm pretty sure this carburetor is a Holley 850 twin pump, but it's been worked on by a company called csu, it has annular impellers and a bunch of other tricks to make it work specifically for a step-through application like this, are we doing to save? Yeah, yeah, we're good right now, okay, belt slip, yeah, you really could. Look at it wiggling, yeah, the long side every time 6.75, this is what just happened in the last race, we didn't have any belt slippage and that crap made 573 lb-ft of torque, which is kind of just because It generated 675 horsepower.

This is a professional charger. centrifugal supercharger now I have never used the procharger brand before but so far I am impressed. The quality of this thing is good. They are made in the USA. They have a billet impeller, they have a billet gear drive configuration and the company makes blowers. from you know, a small unit capable of 850 horsepower up to 3500 horsepower, which is great, the particular model that we were asked to drive today is an f1 a94, it has a nine inch volute, it's nice and compact , can flow 1625 cfm. It can generate 1200 horsepower. It is a self-contained unit, meaning it does not need oil connected to it from the engine.

That's a big problem for me. I hate having to run a pressure line and return to the oil pan by making a hole in it. all that the other thing that's good about having autonomous lubrication is that it stays cooler but the part I like is that when we disperse this engine we won't send oil full of shrapnel from the engine through the supercharger and kill it at the same time one thing about this unit is that it has a step-up ratio of 5.4 to one, which means that for every turn of this belt-driven pulley, we turn the impeller 5.4 times, let's see that this unit is capable of turning 74 000 rpm yeah, that's a big deal, we're probably not going to spin it that fast in this particular test, now we're going to run this with a blow-through carburetor, you need a special carburetor to do that, efi is just a It's one way Smarter to do it, although you can do it and if you're going to try it, I recommend one of these modified carburetors from a shop called CSU.

This is an 850 Holly. They have set it up with their magic for blowing applications only. You've had a lot of luck with this unit here and that's what we're going to execute today and when we do that, we're going to start small and go big. That's how the bigger the pulley you put on the supercharger, the slower you turn on the supercharger and the less boost you make, so we're going to start slow, figure out how many smaller pulleys we can put on before we send this 350 to the kingdom, come here, let's go , wow, get out of here, what?

We just saw our end there with the 3.7-inch pulley and 18 pounds of boost with a little belt slip: 653 pound-feet of torque at 5,800 rpm and 733 horsepower at 6,000 rpm. I have complete confidence in this engine, now I can continue. eight hours with that 118 rocket is a reasonable amount of time and good gas and all those things that a lot of guys don't do while you guys are celebrating we have one more pulley we can fly, I know it and we have to make that belt like a piano wire, one small pulley, piano wire, seven, eight and then two more degrees of timing, oh no, yeah, you just want to kill it, don't you, let's put the pulley on.

I thought we were going to give him a break after seven. five oh yeah that was this morning yeah cool yeah when I let go of the mic the belt still slipped when I saw 25 psi you had 765 horsepower? Wow, I didn't do 700 lb-ft, even though I did 6.93, that's the comparison of the naturally aspirated power to our boosted power, that's crazy. Sweet, yeah, okay, look at that 562 pound-feet of torque and 545.9 horsepower, so you got 210 horsepower. The thing is, that's less than 10 pounds of boost on a stock engine and we're not trying to take the crank off, we're not. trying to generate a ton of boost, this is a combination that would be crazy to drive like our little truck or something, yeah, I mean, we remember what it had stock, I mean, it was 330 horsepower, that's a big one. difference, 60 percent.

That's so simple why wouldn't you do this? Why have you resisted this all your life originally? It cost in the past you know you just didn't have immediate availability of turbos and you didn't have efi yeah and even if we would you have rejected it for philosophical reasons and well these early efi systems weren't as good as the Ford Muscle Truck and it was just unviable practically, yeah, while it also didn't burn out some carburetors back then, right, and you know there are a couple? from the builders, but they were not very common now, the next thing we are going to do is remove the turbo and upgrade it with the typical naturally aspirated boosts, then we will see the difference in the power curves between stock with boost versus boost without boost I can only wait for the results I would predict somewhere between those two curves in our quest for giant power we have changed the spring on the wastegate and we are looking at 18 pounds of boost now it's steve's I've been tuning it, it's not up to 7000 yet rpm, so we're on our way, but now I'm you, this is the one, okay, here we go, our last run of glory with over 950 horsepower.

I'm going to be the voice. right at this point and come on, that's good enough, look at the heat on that crossover, it's glowing, yeah, I think we're at the backpressure limit of what these manifolds and that crossover want to do. I'm pretty impressed that we got to 950 and that's good, yeah, 956 horsepower at 6900 rpm and 774 and a half pounds of torque and what was the 18 and a half boost that comes right at 18. So, that's a 18 pound spring on the wastegate that actually runs at 18 psi right at the top so now we'll compare that to our conservative test okay let's take a look why would you ever run on shock gas and can you put battery boost on it and make big power, but again, this thing is 325 cubic? inches and we generate 950 horsepower.

I'm doing the math and you know I hate it. Now I see why the turbo thing has become so popular in the latest three-horsepower cubic

engines

. Why did I think you were going to stand here and say. Tell me all the reasons why the turbo was too complicated and not worth it, look I'm not even going to discuss this turbo on its own, the whole 5.3, I hate the five three, oh you did it, it was the chevy 307 from ls

engines

. you know, a small diameter, right, it's not a five seven, it's not a six liter, so I'm just talking about the engine that proved it's worth it, even in the

cheap

est ones, you can get them anywhere, look how much power generated with the turbo, but not alone. that look, how much power it can handle, yes I know, and it had more to give, I know, but the point is built versus momentum versus both, which way are you doing right?

I mean, that's obvious, momentum wins both, yeah, I mean you'll have that hot pig under the hood and that's a problem, but if you can get it in the right place, I'm very good at making tubes and pipes and arranging them masterfully, so in a car that i installed that would be cool so we convert you with this episode that's what i'm saying i'm a changed man wow yeah dinosaur reborn that doesn't happen every episode what do you want say with dinosaur? Oh, I'm progressive and with the times when it comes. to engine things