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Those great big whine-boxes you see on top of drag engines and poking through the bonnets of various old muscle cars and hot rods have a few names: supercharger or blower being the most common. Basically they are an air pump that sucks in normal air, uses two rotors to compress it, and then it is jammed into the motor to make beautiful clouds of tyre smoke.    Using compressed air to make things better, as a basic concept, has been around for a couple of centuries, and the concept of a twin-rotor air pump has been around since Francis Marion Roots...

If you saw THE LATEST EPISODE of MCM where MOOG fits a new Harrop supercharger to his Lotus Exige, you might wonder what the deal with these things are and why there are so many different-looking superchargers. There are centrifugal side-mount ones, 6/71 and 8/71s, Eaton-TVS, twin-screw... so what is great and what is junk? Let's focus on the modern style of top-mount supercharger used by car makers like General Motors (Chevrolet, Holden, Cadillac, etc) and Lotus. Side-mount superchargers, old Roots-style blowers (like what you see from our mates at Roadkill, below), and the big PSI or screw-type blowers are also...

You may have seen the episode where Marty's WRX spun a bearing, but what exactly happens when you "spin a bearing" in a motor, and why is it so bad?  We all know traditional four-stroke piston engines rely on a crankshaft spinning in block, which also has connecting rods attaching that crankshaft to the pistons shooting up and down the cylinder bores.  The crank and rods can spin at high-speed without melting together because they sit in specially-measured bearings that have a micron-thin amount of oil lubricating the spinning metal. You might have seen shows where people built engines and they talk about bearing...

Project cars are a wondrous journey of maaad mods and sweet upgrades, but they don't always come along at the most opportune time. Life can be full of adult pressures like bills, free space to put extra cars, the spare time to work on a new project... basically, stuff that isn't as fun as a new project car! But sometimes a vehicle speaks to us and we just know we will own one of them, some day. For Marty this very situation happened a few months ago when he saw an example of a rare Japanese import for sale, one he'd...