Electric Supercharger?!?!, Anyone tired this? Options

[king_wsk]

I've been thinking about the concept for some time. Boost like NOS w/o the wear on the engine. I did some research and I found two products that could work. First is E-RAM. $300 for 1psi, 831watt motor for WOT only powered from the standard electrical system, only 4-6% boost.

The other product is http://www.boosthead.com 's ESC electric supercharger which generates 5-6psi... $1700, not including lots of needed parts. Its a centrifugal blower powered by an 8hp electric motor that runs off a seperate electrical system (2 deep draw style batteries). They say you shouldn't run the boost more than 15 sec unless you have special cooling for the electric motor. They estimate you'll get about 10 min of max boost on a full charge (spread out into a few days of 15sec bursts here and there).

I really like the concept and for the extra 50-80hp with no lag, I'm really considering it. Its just more money than I want to spend. And being that we are FWD, that no lag = spinning tires, especially since I still have my stock 15" 205's. So I'm thinking about designing a similar system that wouldn't require an ECU or extra injectors and wouldn't cost more than $500-750 total and maybe product 2-4psi. I've been looking at some centrifugal blowers, most of the high CFM + pressure run on 230VAC and in the 5amp+ range. This would require a heavy duty inverter, so this is probably out of the question.

What I'm really looking for is a mechanically driven centrifugal blower that I could attach my own 12v electric motor to power it. Any ideas?

Or should I just forget about FI entirely and focus on other things first? I'm thinking that a programmable ECU/boost controller might be a good investment as I might be able to get hp just running NA and then still reuse it after I decided to go FI.

I really do like the concept of having a "turbo" button... but not the dangerous side-effects of NOS.

[phattyduck]

I probably shouldn't even touch this... but...

You can turbocharge your car for pretty cheap - and do it safely if you are careful and do it *right* the first time. A few members here have many safe miles on their turbocharged 5s-fe motors (and others have blown their motors quickly...).

A small (35 shot, maybe?) amount of nitrous (btw, NOS is a name brand...) is very safe. I'm not quite sure why you are so afraid of it.

Risk of blowing your motor is pretty much proportional to how much power your motor is making and how good your tuning is. It doesn't matter much where you get the power - more power is extra strain on your motor and associated components.

-Charlie