Re: Finally! A universal \"blower\" anyone can install. Must have for Hi-po cars!
Nathan- The air cleaner is likely one of those round ones just out of camera range...
I built a couple of electric superchargers, one for my Dodge Dakota, and one for my Corvette. My first effort did not route the incomming air through the mass air flow sensor. The picture shows it correctly going through the mass air flow sensor, which allows the computer to adjust the injectors flow to compensate for the increased airflow. Great fun....
It was an interesting excercise, very fruitful, and I proved that for a very little money, you can make almost ANY car go faster than it does. (Which is the goal, right?)
As far as leaf blowers go, most of them have forward curved blades, which is not good for a supercharger, because they lose pressure when the air flow is stalled, or near stall. This situation occurs when the engine is at lower RPMs, while it is sucking in relatively less CFMs of air. So during acceleration from a dead stop, the engine at first is receiving no boost from the blower, because the CFM of the blower is initially greater than the CFM intake of the engine, which with leaf blower forward curved blades, results in a pressure drop off such that, there is no advantage to having the thing on your car.. As you accelerate, and the engine RPMs come up, with the forward curved blades of a leaf blower, or any blower with forward curved blades, there comes a point at which the blower comes into its range, begins to apply some pressure to the intake, and you have lessened the relative vacuum of the intake, and the engine turns harder. As you continue to accelerate, if the blower does not have enough CFMs to keep up with the CFM demand of the engine, then the blower becomes an obstacle. Twin blowers would overcome this, in the case of typical 350 CFM leaf blowers on a 350 Cubic inch V-8. A 488 cubic inch V-10 will just take proportionally more CFM, which is acheiveable by selecting proper blower characteristics. But you still have the low stall pressure problem of forward curved blades.
You would have laughed to see a leaf blower strapped onto the front of my Vette for testing! That took a lot of balls to drive in front of God and everybody. But thats research, and it taught me something about blowers that you never find out reading brochures about somebody else's pre-engineered product.
Enter the reverse curved blade blower-
Such as the Makita industrial blowers. This is the way the blades are curved on the Paxton and Vortech blowers, arching backwards from the hub outward towards the case, as seen in the direction of rotation. They deliver considerable pressure, even when the airflow is obstrusted, unlike a forward curved blade. I tried one of these on my Vette, which needed something like 650 CFM(?) at redline, and it was a very noticable increase in torque off the line. I dont have any numbers, but I definitely could feel it in the seat of my pants, pushing my body back into the seat, and I knew I was on to something. It gave a huge punch until about 3500 RPM, after which point it couldn't keep up with the CFM demand of the engine. The next step would have been twin Makita blowers, which based on my research with one, would have been very promising. Anyway, it was alot of fun tinkering around. I learned a lot about air flow, blowers, and pressure at varying air velocity as relates to forward and reverse curved blower blades. Plus, I just like to build things. Not just cars. All types of electrical and mechanical things. Its my passion.
I built a very clean set up, modifying the stock aircleaner, keeping the filter, of course, and hiding the whole unit in the front bumper. An inverter took DC from the battery, converted it to AC, which was fed through a relay to the AC motor of the blower. A floor mounted micro switch under the gas pedal, or in the engine compartment attached to the throttle linkage was going to be next, but temporarily I just used a toggle switch. You could not find the blower unless you put your head way down low in the front where the hood hinged, and then you could see the pressure tube coming up over the radiator. But you still could not see the blower, which was hiden in a recess made by removing some of the honeycomb material inside the front bumper.
It was a lot of fun, and if I can prefect the idea, maybe I will install it on my Viper, uhmm, that is, when I get it.
