>Has anyone any experience installing a
>supercharger on a MGB engine? If so, care to share any information about
>the installation as well as your personal pros and cons by having one on
>your B?
I have some experience with positive pressure systems. I have run a Judson on
a B engine (in an A - might as well have something that looks good ;-) , and
currently have a street driver that has a V6 in it that I tuned from 140 bhp
to 300 bhp with a turbo set up.
First - it ain't cheap!!! If you just want something that looks interesting,
by all means find an old Judson - puts out 3-5 psi on a good day and has a
rather modest influence on power, though the mid range torque boost is
welcome.
The MG head, poor non-crossflow thing with worm eaten ports, and not enough
of them, is actually admirably arranged for turbo conversion. All the ports
are sitting in line, and all you need to do is join the 3 exhausts, run them
into the turbo, and then route the output into the nearby pair of intakes
through a throttle body. The only bother is that on LHD cars the steering
columns are inconveniently located just where you would want to put something
else, but the rest of the ancillaries are neatly over on the other side of
the engine.
Assuming that you don't mind spending $3000-4000 on the conversion (and if
you do mind, save yourself a lot of agony - just put a loud exhaust on and
pretend), you can get some pretty good results with turbos.
One of the main problems with the turbo route is that I am not aware of
anyone that is doing a properly engineered kit right now. If I were doing
it, I would borrow an intake log with throttle plate and Bosch injectors from
some Japanese 4 cylinder engine, and buy an after market ECM (computer
module) that was programmable, and end up with a nice modern system, with
knock sensor, etc., that would probably only cost twice what a transplant of
a turbo Toyota engine would. Plus the hassle of fitting 4 injectors (or 2
bigger ones) to just 2 ports, but hey, what are TIG welders for?
You would have to know a fair bit about turbo technology, and have a chip
burner that knew what was going on, or use the aforementioned ECM. Not an
easy project, probably only for the over the top technophile.
I know of no reason that the engine can't be made to stand up to such use,
again, if you are willing to spend the bucks on custom forged pistons, etc.
(the etc. can include a billet crank if you want to go all the way). At
least half the money I spent on my V6 went to making it strong and reliable -
I now have 175,000 km on it and it uses up to 13.5 psi routinely.
If anyone does this, let me know - It's always nice to know that there are
people out there that are farther gone than you are, that you can point to
and tell your wife - "See, at least I don't do that sort of thing!" (while
busily doing something else just as crazy, no doubt).
Bill Spohn
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