JerseyMark

iTrader: (2)

Hey guys,
I dont know about you guys, but for the past few years, it seems everyone wont shut-up about turbos. What ever happend to wanting to put a blower on your V8? Turbos, I thought, were always kinda meant for 4 & 6 bangers. If you had a V8, you wanted to put a supercharger on it. I wonder if everyone is kinda falling into the "Fast & Furious" trap? Are people wanting turbos just because they hear ricers raving about them? Im not trying to get anyone upset, but dont you want the boost there as soon as you stomp your foot on the gas?

Just my daily rant,
Mark B

si_camaro

The turbo was originally devised to cut emissions, as it "creates" power from the wasted exhaust gas, thus it is very efficient. For this reason it is still a very popular choice for bolt-on power, and some favour it over a blower because a blower takes engine power to run, whereas a turbo does not.

I'm with you though, I'd much rather have a supercharger for it's more direct power application.

chio987

i hate all types of boost, if u can't do it NA then u're not doing it but that's just me....as far as turbo, it's free hp, what i mean is it's making it hp from something the engine is getting rid of anyway where a blower & SC run off the engine and has to take hp to make hp. and as far as turbo lag, it has seemed to go away. i only starting to learn about turbos, bcuz i have an 04 neon 5sd that is my daily driver and alot of neon owners talk about turbos.

BDBOWTI

Turbo's are one of the most efficient bolt ons you can put on the car....however i personally would prefer the supercharger. I have an 87 Turbo T and it is one hell of a car don't gt me wrong....but there is lag and you have to wait for boost before it does anything....Supercharger boost is pretty much there on demand....still turbo cant't be beat for that trademark sound

StealthElephant

Since when is a turbo "bolt on".

Apeiron

I'm sure there's a bolt or two in there somewhere.

89 Iroc Z

Hey I would take a turbo on my camaro anyday, my goil is power not what people think about the way I make power. Thanks just me though.

Turbo's take engine power just not as much as a supercharger.

BDBOWTI

here is your bolt on turbo(although only lt1 and ls1 right now)

http://www.ststurbo.com/

five7kid

iTrader: (14)

I'm not sure I'd say it quite that way. Turbocharging existed before emissions reductions were mandated (anyone remember the Corvair Spider?).

Turbocharging allows you to get more power out of an engine. Works for diesels, gasoline, Wankels, etc. There is unused energy going out the exhaust pipe - heat - heat is energy. The turbocharger uses that energy to pump more air into the cylinders. It takes energy away initially, true, but as it "bootstraps", it obviously ends up making more power at the crank.

Go watch the GN guys race at the 1320 sometime. They pull up to the starting line on the brake & throttle simultaneously to get the thing bootstrapping up against the converter. Then, by the time they are staged, the engine has reached stall speed, and they launch. Quick 60' times, quick ET's and fast MPH's. Pretty cool, I think.

The Roots blower was used primarily to blow air into a 2-cycle Detroit diesel. Hotrodders adapted it to 4-cycle gasoline engines. There are turbocharged Detroit diesels out there, too.

Turbocharged aircraft engines in WWII. No emissions concerns there.

No, I'm not "tired" of hearing about turbochargers. However, I am on the watch for flaming of the frequenters of another forum on my forum...

ShiftyCapone

iTrader: (7)

How cool were these cars really? They are seriously fun to drive especially the late model ones with 180hp.

five hit it on the head. Turbos make any engine more efficient. Period. New turbo kits are slowly eliminating lag as well. Some old school diesels made use of both turbo and supercharged induction. Rodders started to take the turbo part of the motor off and adapt it to whatever car they were racing. They were smart. Plus, when you put a turbo on a properly built V8 you don't have negative side effects of lag due to the fact that there are 400+ lb ft at 1200 rpm generated by the motor alone.

jimmy_mac

I'm only tired of hearing about them because I can't afford to put one on that will provide boost to a V8. Those 4 cylinder guys can get those cheap T3s and make power.

dankhound

You can put two relativly small turbos on a sbc and produce low boost numbers with almost no lag. That kind of setup works great at high altitudes where the na motors start huffing. Another reason i would rather have a turbo car on the street is the fact that traction is hard to come by on the street. Why take a motor that makes 300ft/lbs off idle and supercharger it to add more to that off idle power only to add more traction problems. With a turbo car the power really starts to come in after youve launched the car.

cormyr

if you dont like turbos then you havent driven a turbocharged car. if designed and tuned properly, it is second to none for producing insane power. just look at what lingenfelter, banks and callaway have done with twin turbo vettes. sure theres a bit of lag but how else can you get over 800hp on-demand from your small block and still have it fully streetable? there are guys around spewing over 1100hp on a sbc. i agree that a solid n/a buildup is the key to good engineering but once you've done that throw 10-15 lbs of boost on top of it and see if you dont like turbos then.

si_camaro

Maybe emissions was a bad choice of words, but one of the principal reasons Alfred Büchi devised the turbo was to increase efficiency. That's all I was saying.

ZZ42Fast

iTrader: (2)

You could say the same about NOS- which is now always talked about especially over here in England.

In terms of potency I don't think you can beat a turbo. Big power from little engines, yet alone big blocks etc.

dankhound- torque kills me on the street, but at least when I overtake I don't need to make sure I'm in the zone. I just point and go

I will always stay Naturally Aspirated. McLaren F1 was NA, that's good enough for me

Felix

five7kid

iTrader: (14)

Reading almost any enthusiast magazine produces the same effect. There aren't many performance modifications that can be done that don't drive some other expense.

And, to be honest, I couldn't afford to spend the money on my entire car that most of those guys have spent on their wheels and tires alone, or on their paint, or on their interior, much less the engine/trans/drivetrain. Same goes when I'm out at the track - a lot of those guys spent more on their paint than I have on my engine. That doesn't mean I don't take them out in the actual bracket race on occasion, though.

I can only assume that most of these guys with these great paint jobs, fancy wheels & tires, heavily boosted or sprayed powerplants, jazzed-out interiors, et al, aren't contributing much to 401k plans or IRA accounts.

CaysE

The heat isn't spinning the turbo, the exhaust velocity is.

...right?

Apeiron

How fast do you think that exhaust would be flowing if it was room temperature?

five7kid

iTrader: (14)

In the most basic sense it's the flow going across the turbine blades, yes.

Ever seen heat blankets on turbo engine exhaust systems? They do that to retain the heat. If the heat is lost, velocity is reduced, and therefore the energy to spin the turbo is reduced.

The total energy available in the exhaust is a combination of the flow mass velocity and heat.

If I understood it better I'd be able to explain it better. Been a long time since I worked through it mathematically. Thermodynamics is a wonderful science.

SSC

You would be very pleased with the performance the T3 provides even on a V8. A month ago I fabed up a twin T3 setup for my 76 C-10. Very easy when you have the room to work with and theres very few parts needed especially if you can hit up a muffler shop for a few peices of pipe and a bend here and there. It works great and cost under $100 to make (for me) since the turbos were free and complete and all the extra goodies were just collecting dust at the shop.

bad_turbo

try supercharging and N/A first, then go to turbos and you'll see nothing beats them. They are a little more money, though, but Bob Reiger told me that when he was racing N/A he would spend $30,000 on a new motor at the start of each season the an additonal $10,000 after each race to freshen up his motor. After he converted to turbochargers he spent $60,000 on a new motor at the start of the race season, but then he didn't have to touch his motor all year. In case you don't know who he is, he used to race in Pro street with a 57 chevy, twin turbos, small block running in the 6's.

Dustin Mustangs

iTrader: (1)

If you consider the mass flow rate of the exhaust gas constant, the hotter the exhaust is the more velocity it has per unit of area of the cross section of whatever it's flowing through because gasses expand as they heat up if they're kept at the same pressure. To the turbine side of a turbo the speed (and pressure for that matter) of the exhaust gas flowing through it directly correlates to how much work it can do for the compressor it's connected to.

As far as turbos being overrated and whatnot, that's a bunch of .

Look at the indy cars of the middle 80's. They were producing 800 hp from as little as 90 cubic inches by way of turbocharging. If you do the math, 90 ci is 25% of the displacement most of us are running. That means if you used the same technology on our level of displacement you'd be looking at well over 3000hp. These engines were making the cars so fast that the league had to outlaw certain key features of the engines to lower the hp just to keep the drivers alive. I personally don't have a governing body regulating what I do to my car (other than my fiance) and therefore will be fabing up turbo or two as soon as I get a place to do so. And no, I'm not a fan of The Fast And The Furious.

biggtime

If he did infact state that that way he flat out lied to you. His N/A engines cost over 75,000.00.
We race turbo engines and here is a couple of things,
head gaskets every 15-20 passes on a little block.
inconnel exhaust valves 25 passes.
the only thing that has less stress is the crank and rods.
oh yeah when he tried to go Pro mod racing he went back to NOS.

bad_turbo

wonder why he would make up a story like that? I guess to make turbos look better, at the time.

JPrevost

Turbo's, the real answer; Imports have been using them to make there small engines as fast if not faster than engines that displace twice as much. Now imagine using 2 turbos on an engine twice as big and the results are . Supercharging is good but turbo's are great, they make more power with the same psi, it's a no brainer.

RSFreak

The fact that Preston Smith runs 9s with a turbo 305 is good enough for me!

Rembrandt

Look at the indy cars of the middle 80's. They were producing 800 hp from as little as 90 cubic inches by way of turbocharging. If you do the math, 90 ci is 25% of the displacement most of us are running.

During the peak of the turbo era in F1, they (Honda, amongst others) were supposedly making 1300-1500 in qualifying trim from twin-turbo charged, 1.5L, 40%-85% toluene fuel V-6s.

One particular, the RA167E, detailed in the book "Design of Racing and High Performance Engines," made 1010 HP at 12,000rpm in race trim. That was after they cut the boost back from 1986 (which was unlimited) to 4.0 Bar in 1987.

So 1500 HP from 1.5L, and it has to last an entire qualifying session, which would include a few full-throttle blasts. 1000 HP per liter

As compared the Top Fuel dragster, which makes about 6000 HP from 8.2 L. 732 HP per liter.
And half the time blows up before a 1/4 mile.

The F1 cars ran gasoline, not nitromethane.
If Top Fuelers were twin turbo, they might match or beat it, but they are still giving up about 3000 revs for their piston speeds.

The fastest unibody 3rd gen I've ever heard of does 8.02 @ 178, and it is twin turbo:
http://www.bmrfabrication.com/FeatureCars/RickH.htm

CrazyHawaiian

I think associating turbo's with 4's and 6's because of some movie is what makes this seem like some sort of problem. Who cares what those guys use, and who cares about those movies. Turbo's are great.

89JYturbo

B4Ctom1

not tired of hearing about them, don't have one, but still interested. boost is boost and any knowledge coming from it is helpful. besides I might do a turbo myself eventually if my understanding becomes strong enough. I dont see nitrous kits, centrifugal blowers or superchargers laying around in wrecking yards for the picking, yet I do see turbos. Most hotrodders have more time or skill than money. turbos offer a way to convert on this.

cormyr

my long term goal is a twin turbo 383. i have a ways to go but i can hardly wait to get started.

83 Crossfire TA

iTrader: (2)

I made it through the first 5-6 posts before so many things were said that I had to comment:

Well, I’ve wanted a turbo V8 (originally a TT big block ’68-72 ‘vette with a 4 speed…) since I learned about how they work as a little kid in the early 80’s. I still actually have a 1984 issue of popular science sitting right next to me that was one of the first that a serious reviews the SVO mustang, Chrysler Laser and Z28 and a number of articles on turbochargers. That lived under my bed or on my bookshelf of “stuff for future reference” though most of my childhood in the 80’s and early 90’s.

I must have missed something… what is going to give you that besides a turbo? Have you ever driven a car with a positive displacement blower? It doesn’t… look at a datalog from one, you’ll find that most make no boost unless it’s at WOT AND at a significant RPM. Turbos can be sized so you get boost right off idle as you roll into the throttle, I don’t know of any supercharger that can do the same and still give you any kind of performance above that range.

No way. Turbos were designed to make more power by increasing the density of the induction air, I believe that the original design was patented in the late 1800’s or early 1900’s, probably 80 years before emissions was an issue.

Heh, you’re a comedian… bolt on…

The turbine restricts the exhaust and increases pumping losses, decreasing VE and partially using the piston upstroke to power the turbine (and therefore drawing power directly from the crank). Nothing is free. If you do some searching you’ll find equations to figure out how much power is being used in a typical setup, and you’ll be surprised that assuming a relatively normal exhaust setup a turbo draws more power from the engine then some of the newer blower designs, like the eaton positive displacement blowers or the assorted screw blowers.

Assuming that everything is properly sized and tuned there is no reason for lag. I fail to see how a supercharger is “there on demand” and a turbo isn’t. With a little creativity you can design a turbo system that is “there” too much, where you end up with it causing the car to have a surging feeling as the turbo is starting to spool during normal cruise, requiring the driver to constantly change his throttle input to keep at a steady speed.

The roots blower was originally designed to pump air in mine shafts. It’s also been used for assorted other mundane duties including powering the big vacuums in the back of some of those steam cleaning/carpet cleaning vans as well as duct cleaning services.

The 6-71, 8-71… blowers that were adapted to race car use were originally used to scavenge 2 stroke diesels, which used a turbo on the intake side to force air in.

89JYturbo

I just couldn't wait for Mark to come in here and straighten this thread out!! I was going to try, but I knew I couldn't do it as well as he would. Good job!

dankhound

83 Crossfire TA I have to disagree with you.

The first one is that turbos are better off the line. While i dont believe that the sbc needs any help off the line i have to say that the supercharger produces higher boost off the line. While sizing of each has a great impact on "lag" superchargers have the ability to change speed relative to rpm with a change of pully size. Every supercharger setup i have seen uses a fairly high overdrive to create boost instantly . Where as a turbo has to wait for exhaust heat to spool up. Many people(including OEM's) choose a turbo that is too large in order to get peak boost numbers up. While there is a huge advantage in the upper rpm range there is no boost in the low end.

83 Crossfire TA

iTrader: (2)

Huh… I guess everyone has the right to be wrong

Then why worry about it?

A supercharger produces no boost off the line. With a transbrake or assorted other tricks you can leave with 2/3 or more of your total boost with a turbo.

Huh, apparently you haven’t driven a well setup supercharged (centrifugal and positive displacement) and turbocharged car at the track. And I’m not going to waste my time making apologies for cars with improperly sized turbos, bad tuning or other issues… Unless you’re talking about insane turbo sizes on cars making thousands of HP, with a turbo you can pretty much leave with as much boost as you can figure out how to control… I haven’t seen any blowers that would do the same (you’d pretty much need a variable ratio drive to do it)

biggtime

I believe in what mark is saying about 90%. But my centrifical Supercharged car makes full boost the minute i floor it. If i could figure out how to post my data logs i would.

Our twin turbo truck is a nightmare to build boost on the starting line, and so is my Typhoon. The problem is you need a loose enough converter to spool the turbos, but tight enough when it does make boost not to drive through the converter.

Did you ever try to build boost on a turbo stick car? THATS a absolute nightmare and to try to do it the same twice is even harder.

So if we aren't talking about max effort engines and smaller turbos I agree.

JAYDUBB

I can vouch for that one! I used to clean carpets in the early 90's and couldnt believe my eyes when I opened my first-issued truck and saw a Roots blower sitting on the waste water tank !!!

onebadwagon

lol, two step?

83 Crossfire TA

iTrader: (2)

I’m not sure that you can ever say 100%, you can always find some twisted example…, but yea.

I'd love to see a data log of a supercharged car showing full boost within a frame or to that you go to full (or almost full) throttle

My first car, and the first one that I ever ran at the dragstrip was a Cougar XR7, 2.3L turbo + 5 speed in a relatively big car… but it was fun…

83 Crossfire TA

iTrader: (2)

Heh, YOU’RE ALIVE!


BTW, I just came home from a road trip from picking up a brand new M112 (Jag style) to replace the M90 and have made a couple of other interesting changes in the last few days…

biggtime

How abot 3 and a lot of tuning, it still takes a while

TurboedTPI

Like someone already said, a v8 (especialy TPI) has enough torque with out any boost to shred tires. So in my opinion, a little lag is better. You can make as much torque as you want, but it doesn't matter if you cant get it to the ground. My car will spin MT e/t streets with the intercooler pipes disconnected. If you do want boost off the line get a trans brake, problem solved.

cormyr

btw the reason im currently building my 383 w/ nitrous is because of my son's talon 2.0 turbo we just finished. he was able to blow the friggin doors off my modified 350 with nearly a third of my displacement. 22lbs of boost on the street on pump gas, 26 mpg, hardly any turbo lag, excellent throttle response and driveability. hmph....

xlwhellraiser

iTrader: (1)

Ok, I have been reading Turbo threads for about 4 hours straight, and all am hearing is people bickering at eachother about which is better. Than I came to a conclusion. Most people own whatever they brag about, so even if it doesnt work quite right ( proven by top dogs here) they will still argue about it. Its baised, and its baised BS.

My real question is. What would you recomend a guy who doesnt know much about turbos, yet wants to install one on a TBI 305.
If I cant do it I will pay a shop to, however if you guys can help me, than I could probably do it.

P.S. I will be buying a prominator and a small laptop next month, along with headers, so I am a step closer to Prom (well, Flash) burning (flash, cuz of the prominator)
Please help, thanks.

stu

I'll reply to this when I'm less drunk. But I do see people talking about turbo lag disappearing. That's not really true, there is no such thing as a turbo without lag, even the VANT turbos have lag. Also, most average turbo chargers are leagues more efficient than the average supercharger.

When do you supercharger guys make full boost? I would think that anything that is belt driven, wouldn't make full boost until redline (I mean, how else would it work?) but, I'm pretty sure that you get full boost about half way through; right?

Plus, you can run way more boost with a turbo than you can with a supercharger, even if you have a centrifugal supercharger, which is the worst of both worlds.