Best Blower For Your Mustang - Choose Your Weapon - Tech

For guys looking to get boost on a budget, centrifugal supercharger kits are available for less than $2,000, though these typically lack all of the components required for a complete installation. Know that adding a supercharger to an otherwise-stock 5.0 or 4.6 motor may require fuel-system upgrades (injector and/or fuel pump), programming changes, or at the very least, a rising-rate fuel-pressure regulator. Make sure when ordering that all of the components required for the installation are included with the kit. Stay away from those electric supercharger kits promising extra horsepower for just $69.95. There's no way an electric fan will provide enough airflow or pressure to support the needs of a decent 5.0 or 4.6. A crank-driven supercharger can easily require 50 hp to produce the desired power gains. Do you have any idea how big a 50hp electric motor is or just what the power requirement would be to spin it? As a rule of thumb, if the gadget seems too good to be true, it usually is. You can realistically expect to drop a couple grand on a decent blower setup-more if you start adding options to the list.

Though we have concentrated on the fuelie Fords, there are plenty of supercharger kits available for carbureted motors as well. Both Roots-style and centrifugal supercharger kits exist that provide plenty of power. Just make sure to get the proper carburetor for the boost application. ATI, Paxton, Vortech, and Weiand all offer kits for the carbureted crowd and can help you select the proper carburetor for your application.

Keeping Cool
No discussion of modern street supercharging would be complete without covering the topic of intercooling. The unfortunate side effect of supercharging any motor is that the elevated inlet air pressure we see as boost generates unwanted heat. It's a simple fact of nature that compression causes heat. More boost equals higher inlet charge temperatures. Elevated inlet charge temps are bad because they increase the likelihood of harmful detonation. To combat the increase in charge temperature, blower companies resort to intercooling, which is nothing more than a heat exchanger used to remove some of the unwanted heat from the inlet air.

Intercoolers work by exposing the heated charge air to a cooling medium. In air-to-air intercoolers, the cooling medium is ambient air. The increased surface area of the air-to-air intercooler (relative to the discharge tube) helps radiate the heat from the charge air out to the ambient air. This is caused by the temperature differential between the heated charge air and the cooler ambient air, combined with the heat dissipation properties of aluminum. Often, this type of intercooler is placed in the airflow, so overall flow increases with vehicle speed. On air-to-water intercoolers, the surface area of the intercooler can be reduced dramatically thanks to the use of a denser and therefore much more efficient transfer medium-water.

Whenever talk turns to intercooling, there's inevitably a fight between the air-to-air proponents and those on the side of air-to-water. Let's clear things up right away and say that just like with supercharging, there's no absolute best form of intercooling. For maximum heat rejection, running ice water or some other super-cool transfer medium in an air-to-water is the ultimate setup. This system is often employed in drag racing and even at the Bonneville Salt Flats, where the run time is short as not to use up all the ice. The downside is that you'd have to constantly refill the ice in the system to keep it at optimum cooling capacity. Air-to-water systems can obviously be run using just water (though never with the same water used to cool the motor), but such a system usually requires a second heat exchanger to rid the system of the heat put in by the elevated charge temps. Such a system is employed by Ford on factory Lightning, Cobra, and GT500 motors. These systems work well for the limited full-throttle runs seen on the street or even at the strip, though many enthusiasts opt for ice water at the strip.