Guys,

I am a bit in the dark on this supercharger thing in that I have no idea what goes wrong and what the result of the failure is.

I am curious about your experiences/knowledge in what has gone wrong and what the consequences may have been. If a supercharger fails, if the intercooler falls off, if the boost level drops or something internally jams up, if it overheats, or anything else?

If there's a good site that covers this still, please post a link and I'll read that and be quite content :) I just want to get a good feel of what can happen considering my luck with cars. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

Mike

 

I have never had a blower fail but I have seen the aftermath. On our C4 the most common blower are those that are refered to as a centrifugal supercharger, it ressembles the looks of a turbocharger without the tubine end. Some even refer to them as a belt driven turbo.

Luckily for us these units are generally very dependable and often will last the life of the engine. The most common failure is the a oil seal failure which will cause oil to enter then engine from the blower. This isn't good because oil in the engines intake tract will raise the octane requirements and will cause detonation in the engine. Not to mention blower failure if you loose enough oil out of the blower in the case of a self contained unit, or if the blower uses engine oil it could bleed off enough engine oil so that your engine starves for oil. Also if the system was equipped with a intercooler setup, the intercooler will loose effieciency because its core is coated with oil now.

Another failure would be if the impeller comes apart, while this is not very common at all it could be catrostrophic in that all the broken peices could be forced into your engine. Well one can only imagine what would happen if you throw peices of broken aluminum impeller into the combustion chamber.

Broken belts, lose of boost will not adversly affect the engine physically other than loss of power. If it jams up or seizes up, you would loose your belt and no power, as the air flow must flow through the blower it would act as a restriction in the intake tract. One of our forum members did in fact have his intercooler fall off, he ran over it! :eek: It was later straightened out and reinstalled.

All in all they are pretty good peices of equipment. I have had mine in my car since 96 and I have not had any problems other than loosing a belt a couple times, but that was due to other problems and not the blowers fault.


[Modified by tjwong, 10:08 AM 11/17/2003]

 

Thank you very much for the quick and detailed response!

I have another milder question that I'll throw in here.

When adding an intercooler to the system, how much does that make the engine temp raise? In a vette, there's only so much room for air to pass by something that will take the heat away. Having an intercooler in front of the radiator would make the radiator hotter, especially in traffic, right?

Is there some standard procedure that people use to keep the car cool even if it sits idling for a long time?

Mike