so i was doing a tune up on a leaf blower at work today and my mind started drifting to cars...as usual...and i got a crazy idea. what if you were to take a high powered leaf blower and use it for a little forced induction on your car every once in awhile for some fun? should be easy to hook up and on something that is small, oughta work just great! here's my thought process and you guys tell me if there are any flaws... in my daily i have an olds 307 with a holley 650 carb on it. according to the flow of the heads, volumetric efficiency, compression ratio etc i'm only using 350-400 cfm at the MAX. then take a blower like this that has 646cfm and hook it up to the intake. i don't know how much that would be in psi (probably not too much) but it should be enough to give it a little extra something right? that's like a 70% jump in air volume going into the engine if i'm not mistaken...is this feasable for a stupid, cheap, fun boost or am i just crazy??
More than once......... I have seen video on the internet....... silly teenagers do this w/ their rice & such......... they get all giddy & excited........ Their fun soon turns to dismay I wonder why
It's going to be awful hard on the midget under the hood that has to crank the leaf blower everytime you want to have some fun. I 'spose you could hook up a 4th pedal that presses on his (or her, I don't discriminate) back when you want them to start yanking on the cord. I think the Little Rascals did something similar using a live goose for a horn. Seriously, you may as well grab an air pump off an old smog car and use that to make boost. They're designed to pump air into the exhaust. But you just gotta' smack it up, flip it, and rub it down. Yes, you're crazy.
Such an animal as an electric supercharger exists - if that will work, I don't see why a leaf blower wouldn't. ~Jason
i was actually thinking of having it in the passenger compartment...use some of the area for the heater ducting to route it through the firewall. i don't think those ricer kids were smart enough to be using a high powered blower though, probably thought that windspeed was better than cfm i do have a 46cc scooter engine sitting in my dining room (i love living alone!) while i try to decide what to do with it. it has an electric start and everything. maybe i could adapt a high cfm blower assembly to it and stick it in the hole where my smog pump and vac canister used to be, wire a switch and plumb it for fuel and see if i can get a boost that way. why can't i just leave things alone!
It DOES work, just not overly well. leaf blowers and such generate tons of flow, but very little pressure. You may only see a pound of boost(about the same as a true ram air intake in clean air at 100 MPH) A smog pump will NOT work because it'd doesn't put out enough flow or pressure..
well doesn't the pressure built depend on the type of blower mechanism? i know that a centrifugal type generally isn't as effective as a vane type etc...but the more i think about it, if i could figure out a way to mate an efficient mechanism to this hopped up scooter engine and stuff it under my hood with the electric start wired up and the throttle timed to my secondaries there might be a chance of some good fun. plus if i figure out a way to make it work, how fucking fun would that be this is all coming from a guy crazy enough to break the sound barrier with a tennis ball cannon, get in repeated plastic knife fights and hop up an olds 307...
Okay. Tennis ball cannon? Somebody should let this guy do it, stop complaining. I think he knows his shit. Tennis ball cannon? Tell me you have a video of that.
that makes one of us...i'm just crazy/stupid enough to try anything. as for the tennis ball cannon, no vid. it was an accident when we figured out how to make that much power. we were using calcium carbide crystals and water (makes acetylene gas) with mixed results when i spied a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. you chemists here can figure that one out so without measuring (unfortunately) i put some H2O2 in there and dropped an undermined amount of CaC2 in, waited who knows how many seconds (once again, unfortunately) and started clicking the ignitor. there was a good sized boom as the fuel ignited and then a loud CRACK when the ball left the barrel and it knocked both of us on our asses. luckily we were using sched 80 ABS pipe or i'm sure we'd have been picking pvc outta our heads. and did i mention that it was 2am...his neighbor on the one side heard it and started yelling and swearing at us over the fence so we called it a night. we never replicated that time, but with 1/2c H2O2 and a tablespoon CaC2 and anywhere from 15-20 seconds charge time, we could consistently fire a tennis ball 300-400 yds. we injected one with water once, but we never found it again and decided it was too dangerous... i'm also working on a marshmallow cannon at this time...think paintball, but edible. just don't try to catch one in your mouth!
Dude, convert your leaf blower into a blower for your lawnmower. LB/LM class at the next HAMB drags?? I think you're on to something here.
When I was (a lot)younger,we used to make tennis ball cannons from 16oz steel beer cans(not aluminum)as PVC pipe wasn't available.Well it might have been but we needed to do something constructive with all those old beer cans. Briefly it involved getting 5 16 oz cans and modifying them thusly: The first two cans had both ends completely cut out and a tennis ball was run through them to make sure it was a nice snug fit. The third can had the top cut out completely but the bottom was only cut out half way around.This can was duct taped to the top two(which were already taped together end to end)with the open side facing the two top cans. The fourth can was cut out on either end half way around but the openings were staggered 180 degrees apart.This can was then taped to the third can with the cut openings at 90 degrees to each other(this is very important). The fifth and final can was cut half way around at the top but the bottom was left uncut.This can was taped to the fourth can again with the openings at 90 degrees to each other.A small hole(1/4")was then punched near the bottom on the side of the fifth can. You now had a cannon approximately 40" in length. To load it,you got a can of denatured alcohol(a pint or quart)and using the can cap as a measuring tool,poured a capful of alcohol into the cap and then poured it down the large opening in the top of the cannon.You covered the opening with your hand and shook the contents down into the cannon. You then pushed a tennis ball in the top and down until it bottomed out on the end of the third can.We used a broomstick. You then set the cannon down on the ground and aimed it in a safe direction and touched a match to the small hole in the bottom can.It would launch the tennis ball about 200 feet or more. The great thing about this set up is if you put too much alcohol in it wouldn't fire and too little would shorten the range.You had to experiment a bit to get the proper mixture for your particular gun. You had to be careful because these guns did get a little hot.
As far as your leaf blower idea, I talked to an old timer several years ago and he was telling me they did the same thing with a heater blower on a 2bbl carb on his car. He said they would wait untill they had some speed and rpms on the car and then would flip the switch to fire up the heater blower. He said you could definitely tell the difference, but you had better have the thing shut off when you decided to stop or it would kill the motor. He showed me some pictures they had of the thing and it was crude, but he said it worked.
Doesn't a leaf blower exhaust through the blower nozzle? That would give you carbon monoxide injection.
I don't think an (optimistic) boost of 10hp is worth the shame of having a damn leaf blower on your car. But maybe that's just me.
My soon-to-be father-in-law said he did the same thing in the 50s/60s on an inline motor. He said it made a big difference, especially merging onto the highway, but I think he had it set up to run all the time. The guys at inliners.org swear it won't work
i would have to agree with this statement, plus do you really want to listen to a leaf blower as you drive? maybe its just me but i would rather hear the v8 rather than a leaf blower. plus, i have heard this idea before from i guy i consider to be a complete weapon and he started to rig it up to his ford festiva although he had an electric one, and whenever i hear someone suggest this idea it makes me cringe.
Did the tennis ball cannon thing as a teenager - final result was an old driveshaft with a sparkplug braized into it and charged with acytolene and oxygen. used to skip a tennis ball all the way across the lake and into peoples yards - by accident of course. It was also good for setting off the alarm once a month or so on my uncles shop about 10 minutes after he left for the night. Scrump
The comment noted earlier about the minimal amount of boost (1 lb.) from this idea is right. The leaf-"blower' won't flow anywhere near the specs. quoted for it when you restrict the exhaust flow which will happen well you duct it into the manifold. The same goes for all of the other fan ideas. Consider that a centrifugal blower (making a few pounds of boost) sucks from 15 - 35 hp from an engine and you can imagine what kind of boost youre likely to get from 2 hp leaf blower or a 20 amp fan. In WWII the Luftwaffe experimented with superchargers driven by separate engines and they were all failures. It just wasnt worth the added weight and complexity. If you want free boost try turbo-supercharging.
It's been done! more info on the subject. http://www.electricsupercharger.com/ this should work great on older cars
most of this is talking about a 1-2 hp engine though...i have a 12hp scooter engine that i'm thinking of using for it. has muffler, electric start and all and would fit in a 1' cube, which i have behind my pass side headlight. what kind of blower assemblies might work for something like this to make anough pressure to go with the volume? i'm wanting to do this more and more just because i am sure i can!
Sorry to resurect an old post, but it is an interesting topic. Any progress? My first question was, "What happens to the motor when you cover the outlet with your hand?" I would assume that it just bogs down a bunch without creating pressure, meaning that as soon as it starts to get into building boost it's done.
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