In our everlasting effort to squeeze more power our of our cars, we hot rodders have found a lot of ways to do just that, in my opinion the best way to do this, bar none, is the supercharger, this is a piece of equipment that is fully capable of wrenching major amounts of horsepower and torque out of an engine, with very little work. Wile doing all this, a supercharger also looks really good sitting on top of your V8, it does however have some drawbacks, if you try to squeeze it to hard, by jacking up the compression ratio of your engine higher, this device is fully capable of making you engine meet it's maker, you must keep up on the tune up schedule on the car also, a backfire can cause major damage to your high dollar engine. There are a lot more reasons to have a supercharger then not to though, best reason in my opinion is the power gain that you get from it, it can go from a 75 hp gain all the way up to 300 hp with no problem, and unlike a turbocharger, it has no lag, as soon as you step on the pedal, the power is there right now. A supercharger is driven by a belt, and it creates a boost in volumetric cylinder pressure, this means that it basically compresses in incoming air and fuel so the cylinders can fit more in them, and this process makes the engine run more efficiently which by default creates more power, and this is what we're all searching for. If you compare the amount of power that a supercharger will make to the money that it would cost to put one on your car, it provides pretty good bang for the buck, I'd say it's just about the best upgrade that you can do, the most reliable of course would just be a normally aspirated engine, with a camshaft and head upgrade, but a supercharger, beats most of the other performance upgrades. It beats the turbocharger, because the turbocharger has turbo lag, which means that you have to build the rpms to make the power, it has a lag out of the hole, whereas a supercharger has no lag at all, a turbo uses you exhaust to turn the impeller in the turbocharger, and the fact that it does use the exhaust to make the power, also means that it creates more heat while building the power, and heat is one of the major enemies of your engine. You may also think of nitrous oxide as being a better and cheaper performance gain then a supercharger, but give this some thought, a supercharger is designed to give you constant power, all the through your power range, nitrous is designed so when you get behind in the race, it'll give that extra 200 or 300 hp boost that may be the difference between you winning or losing the race, but nitrous also runs very hot, and when used for any length of time can cause your pistons to melt hole through them, and blow your expensive engine sky high. If you're on a quest to gain more power for your muscle car or hot rod, I hope this has helped you in some small way to decide what might be the best performance upgrades for your car. Auto Industry Alliance
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