This is the Vortech supercharger installed on the little 4.8L truck engine in my Orange Peel Chevelle. The flexible hose for the air inlet is temporary until I can talk my fabricator buddy into making an aluminum tubing inlet package. I’ve found some nice parts offered by Spectre that should work.

Saturday and Sunday are always good, but a few weeks ago, they were great. My buddies from San Diego called me a month ago and offered to brave the L.A. traffic and come up to help me work on any project I needed to get done. The big one I was facing: installing a Vortech supercharger on my ’66 Chevelle with its little 4.8L LS truck engine.

My fellow tech writer, Richard Holdener, had borrowed my 4.8L motor for a dyno test that included some CNC-ported heads from West Coast Racing Cylinder Heads, a mild COMP cam, and a Vortech supercharger, and we had made more thaqn 600 hp with this tiny little 4.8L motor on race gas and 10 psi of boost. The idea now is to see how much power we can make at the rear wheels on pump gas.

But before we can do the testing, we had to get the blower on the engine. I’ve been so busy writing lately that the project was always being pushed back, so my friends coming up would help me get it done. I’ve been involved with so many builds through the years that I’ve come to be a bit skeptical about completing a major install project in one weekend. There always seems to be some little part you need or a custom-fabricated piece that will prevent completing that project. I’ve just come to expect this.

So, my pals Doug Eisberg and Eric Rosendahl arrived around 10 Saturday morning and we started right in on removing the nitrous system and the original truck accessory drive. The Vortech supercharger requires a Corvette-style accessory drive, which meant we needed to start with a different balancer. Vortech recommends using Summit’s SFI balancer and then pinning the balancer to the crank. We had already accomplished the pinning operation with the previous dyno test, so installing the balancer was easy. Another friend, Kris Shields showed up and we had quite a shop crowd, which also included neighbor Thomas Wyard, who recently bought his first car, a ’64 Chevelle.

After actually reading the instructions and installing the mount and the supercharger, we discovered the blower case hit the Chevelle’s inner fender well, so with a hole saw and a pneumatic saw blade, we had our clearance in short order. By 6 p.m. Saturday, we had the blower in place and things were looking pretty good. I started early on Sunday morning to cleanup up the inevitable pile of tools that happens when a thrash is on. By noon, we had the blower belt and tensioner in place. The next biggest challenge was re-routing fuel lines and figuring out how we would plumb the inlet air.

Because of how most centrifugal superchargers are mounted, this places the blower inlet very near the headers. Our passenger side mount demanded we not place the inlet air filter right on top of the header. I scrounged around in my parts collection and found a length of heat-resistance flexible tubing that allowed us to route the air filter to be placed at the back of the engine, right below the fresh air inlet for the cowl induction hood. Eventually, I will enroll my fabricator buddy Scott Gillman to build a four-inch aluminum tubing duct to accomplish the same thing, but for the time being, we’re ready to rock.

We started the engine at around 3 p.m. on Sunday, and I was mildly stunned. It’s true that bolting on a centrifugal supercharger isn’t that difficult, but I kept waiting for something to derail our project. I had to forage for parts, and we had to rearrange the original truck water pump radiator plumbing to work with the blower and the new Corvette water pump, but those were minor impediments. Overall, the install took roughly about 10 hours of work with three guys and we were never in a hurry, so it could have easily been done in one day had we pushed hard on Saturday.

There’s an inordinate amount of attention paid to turbochargers lately, but I’ve never seen a story in a magazine about how to actually install one of these turbocharger “kits” in a car. I seriously doubt we could have installed one in one weekend unless we had the benefit of the expertise of one of my welder fabricator friends to build all of the custom plumbing these systems require. As it was, we still had some minor cutting to do, but no real fabricating, and we managed to install our centrifugal without firing up the welder. My knock on those cheap, Chinese turbo kits is they require some serious fabricating skills to actually make them work in a car. That, in my opinion, is the significant hidden cost no one talks about.

All I have to do now is dial in a blow-through carburetor. This will require some tuning skills, since I’d like to have the engine operate at a decent 13.5:1 air-fuel ratio at part throttle and still deliver enough fuel at WOT for a safe air-fuel ratio. It shouldn’t be too difficult, but I’ve never tried this before. The other key will be creating a boosted timing curve that will keep this little cast piston motor away from detonation under boost. Once all that is accomplished, we should be able to make 500-plus rwhp on 91 octane, if the tuning stars and planets all line up for us.

But, the best part of this exercise was the fun my friends and I had spending two days in the shop just turning wrenches and solving little roadblocks that occur with any car project. I don’t like drilling big holes in my cars if I don’t have to, but I’ve decided life’s too short to stress over that anymore, so the holes we cut can be attended to at a later date, as I’m sure my Orange Peel Chevelle mule will see many other engine combinations before the end of its career.

Of course, this now motivates me to now take on the next project rather than just sit behind my computer all day banging on this keyboard. There are challenges on both sides of the door between the shop and the office. Luckily, when the frustration level gets too high on one side, I just retreat to the other side and work on something different. It’s a nice balance that just might keep me sane for at least a couple more decades.