At 04:23 PM 12/2/98 -0500, you wrote:
>So you guys are workin' the Vortechs on the OBDII trucks with no problem ?
>
>I am trying to decide between a kit from Nitrous Express or a SC and am
>weighing the costs . Sure , the NOS is cheaper up front , but after the
>bottle refills and such , it doesn't fall too short of a sucker .
>
I went through the same thing myself... One thing you can do is find out
what a refill costs, figure 6 runs per bottle, and see how many runs
you'd have to do before you "could have bought the supercharger". I did
that once but I forget now how many runs it came out to; it was a lot.
Another issue is that a supercharger also has some additional costs. You
might be able to get the supercharger itself for about $2500, but then you
need your boost guage, fuel pressure guage, safety interlocks, and so on.
(The same can be said for nitrous, but the costs are just more for a
supercharger.) Also, there's the added hassle of getting the supercharger
to run "right". Read some of the posts from Frank about trying to get the
Vortech to work right on his ('95?). I think he said he has spent about
$7,000 so far and it still doesn't work like its supposed to. There's a Dak
that comes to the drag strip every now and again with a supercharger; he can't
figure out how to keep it from blowing head gaskets. Overall, nitrous is
simpler.
Also, if you care about gas mileage at all, consider the difference
between a spurt of nitrous every now and again and running a blower all
the time. Then there's the issue off all the HP that a blower saps
from your engine just to run itself.
As far as performance goes, from what I've seen, nitrous equipped vehicles
always seem to be able to go just a little bit quicker than their blown
counterparts. A combination of the blower heating up the incoming air and
the power drains at high RPM, I would guess.
Obviously, I favour nitrous, but there are pros and cons to both; it
also depends on how you want to use your truck... The biggest concern I
have with nitrous is the "initial shock". You don't want to run it below
3,000RPM, so it comes on all at once with a big bang, whereas a blower
would spool up gradually. (Hey, speaking of spooling up, I think a
turbo would be cool. Good gas mileage, no high power demands in the
upper RPM range...)
I've been studying about how to lessen that initial shock; one way is to
keep the solenoids away from the engine; the closer to the engine they
are, the greater the shock. I think I might put 10-20 feet of hose
between the solenoid and the jet... Another thing you can do is to buy
a progressive nitrous controller. The drawback there is that they're expensive
and you need special solenoids (also expensive). They work by opening and
shutting the solenoids very quickly to regulate the flow, which is obviously
torture on the solenoids, so if you use one of those, I would guess it might
not be a bad idea to save some money on the side to buy new solenoids every
now and again...
Ahhh, why decide? Throw a blower AND nitrous on there! ;-)
You might be able to find some more info in the archives. I think are at
least
a couple of "nitrous vs superchargers" threads in there.
-Jon-
.--- stei0302@cs.fredonia.edu ------------------------------------.
| Affiliations: DoD, EAA, MP Race Team, NMA, SPA, USUA. RP-SEL |
| '96 Dodge Dakota v8 SLT CC (14.58@93.55), '96 Kolb FireFly 447 |
`----------------------- http://www.cs.fredonia.edu/~stei0302/ ---'
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