I have a 2005 150 4.6 so that just about cancels any supercharger out there I looked up this company a friend and i were talking about and the setup is amazing but i wanted to put this topic out there to ask if anyone has any experience with this company?
The owner of STS lives a block behind me. I have seen his Tacoma pull a large enclosed trailer at really impressive speeds. He is a great guy and from everyone around here that I have talked to he and his shop do great work. The only reason I don't have one already is the price. I think the prefab'd kit for an F150 is like $6K. You can however buy a universal kit for around $3K and just install it yourself. The kit comes with pretty much all the hardware, excluding the tubing to feed from the turbo to the intake. That is the route I am going to go. They replace your muffler and sound really cool. I am also picking up a 91 ranger this week. I hope to installe the universal on it as well and have a sleeper that gets close to 30MPG.
The STS turbo setup is interesting and somewhat innovative, however there is a reason that no one has really marketed this before: it's not very smart due to lack of efficiency. A turbocharger is a load based device and thrives on the wasted energy of the exaust system. The farther away the turbo is located from the engine, the more heat is lost through the exaust tubing walls and equally less energy is available to spin the turbine. Interesting idea, bad science.
Mary-Kate is correct, however the concept behind the STS rear-mounted turbo is that it performs better than no turbo at all, and is easier to install than fabricating complicated exhaust manifolds for mounting all this under the hood.
It's a product that will in fact perform better than stock, even though from an engineering/purist standpoint it's certainly not an ideal design.
Obviously a "true" turbo mounted under the hood is the best way to go if time and money are not an issue. As Federic stated, it is better than no turbo at all. Plus, have you ever driven a Toyota Tacoma? I have witnessed the Owner of STS pull an 8x14 enclosed trailer faster than my 02 SuperCrew 5.4 will. So whether or not it's the best setup is an argueable point, it allowed a Toyota to hurt my pride. That's a sad day for a blue blooded Ford guy.
Actually, fabricating a turbo system for any vehicle "under the hood" doesn't necessarily have to be expensive. A used/junkyard turbo (or two), a rebuild kit (or two), and some minor fabrication to take the output of the factory log manifolds and turn that output "up" and mount the turbos is all you need to get started. Of course you'll upgrade injector size, tune the EEC and do various other things, but turbocharging a vehicle doesn't require stainless everything and $1500 turbochargers. You'll have some limitations of course but it will perform better than naturally aspirated and of course not be terribly expensive - just labor intensive.
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