Question: Superchargers were used on WWII airplane engines, so they’ve been around for >a long time… That big blockish thing that you see on top of a top fuel >dragster engine is a super charger. They are also commonly referred to as >’blowers’. A ‘roots’ style blower is made of a housing with two interlocking >vanes inside. One of these vanes is belt driven by the crankshaft. An end >view of a vane would be like three lightbulbs joined at the bottoms to form >a three point star with bulbous points – only smaller – about 4-5 inches in >diameter. This triangular vane is about 6 inches long (typically… is that >what the 6 stands for in a 6-71 GMC blower???)

Answer: Actually, the 6-71 stands for the 6 cylinder diesel engine with 71 cu. in. per cylinder that the blower was designed for. They’re not new… A turbocharger is just an exhaust driven supercharger as opposed to an engine driven one. In fact some literature associated with the Ford Probe is kind of hard to read because it said ‘turbocharged/super charged’. I finally found they were just repeating themselves.
Since a Turbo runs off of the exhaust, it’s esentially running off of waste energy. It costs nothing, but takes a while for it to come online when the exhaust pressure builds up.
An engine driven supercharger is driven by the engine, hence it’s always online. There is no supercharger lag like there is turbo lag. But it’s always drawing power from the engine, and so it uses up more gas. I always thought they should use a clutch on it so that when you don’t want it on, it isn’t. Ot just have the clutch engage when the throttle is open a cartain percent…
Would an electronic clutch work for this?

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