I understand it is recommended to supercharge any vehicle when it has low miles, but what is considered low miles? Only because then maybe there is less wear and tear on the engine? Tell me if I am wrong there or been lied too. Anywho, Got a 95' 460 with abut 124k on it and was tempted by the vortec s/c for it. I'm just looking for a little bit more power to help roll my 38's. Is 124k too may miles to put an s/c on or should I wait until I rebuild the engine before I add an s/c? It runs strong now, so don't know when I'll have to rebuild it anytime soon. Thanks for any responses. Greatly appreciated.

 

If the motor is in good shape, you'll be fine.

 

Alright. Thanks for the input. It's quite an investment, but I think I could use the extra gas mileage and power. It's either do that or sell the truck and buy an Diesel and then Turbo Charge that. I know I could get more power from that, since Diesel's are potential for power.

 

your fuel milage will more than likely drop with the s/c.

 

It's an investment, but you don't have to buy a brand new supercharger kit at full retail either.

If you comb places like ebay, you'll find used superchargers that people are selling because they couldn't get it to work correctly, or, they sold the vehicle it was on. Obviously, buyer beware and one has to scrutinize what comes with the supercharger, knowing that some parts that are missing will have to be purchased seperately or made which reduces the savings. Also, even if the unit is sized correctly for your engine the included bracketry might be for a different engine and you'll have to fix that as well. Mild steel and a welder (mig, flux core, arc, tig, torch, etc) is all that is necessary. And lots of paper templates

This is the way I usually go - used or junkyard parts as much as possible.

As long as your engine doesn't have much blow-by, it should be fine. I had a supercharger on my 351W-powered crewcab for a couple of months with 300K on the clock for the purposes of tuning the EFI (I'm over 400k at this point). See, a good friend of mine bought this thing used, fabb'd all the bracketry necessary to install it, but couldn't get it to run correctly on his F-250 and blamed the old "because it's speed density" paradigm and had to take it off since his truck is his daily driver - small, one truck contracting company. His wife's mercury tracer wasn't cutting it for contractor duty.

Anyway, I tuned with it for a couple of months on my crewcab then he came back and took the supercharger and bracketry back and we put my engine back to stock, and he took the "bin" home on a floppy and reinstalled. Viola - torque.

 

thats sort of been my ponderings...got about 140000kms on mine and considering a paxton SC...guess i should be safe too then eh?

 

sherm - it all depends on the health of the engine. If the ring, bearings, and other key sealing parts are borderline the supercharger is going to kill off what little life it has left fairly quickly.

As you know some engines last 50K then die, others last 500K then die. Most of this is maintanence but part of it is luck of the draw based on "tolerances" in "bin manufacturing".

Then again, if you have good compression, nothing wrong with installing a supercharger and start saving for new rings/bearings/etc

 

yeah that is true i guess. i'd be more worried about rods, pistons and such, but i guess a S/C isn't a huge single burst of xtra, but more a steady gradual increase. i've been doing some homework on the PI head idea too...any thoughts??

 

You can damage the rods much easier by adding 1000 RPM to redline, as compared to adding a supercharger.

Which PI heads?

You'll find that supercharging (and turbocharging) is fairly forgiving of lame intake tracts, because of the pressure. Obviously larger ports, less bends on both sides of the engine help things a bit but on a stock engine, it's not as critical as with a purposely built, high peformance engine.

 

i might be confused. do you mean just by over reving on a stock engine?? or will the PI heads lead to probs??