i am new to the group and just want to say you guys have a great thing going here.. my question is i am looking to run a paxton supercharger on a 401 nailhead. has anyone done this swap, how did it work and i would assume that the nailhead would do wonders with forced induction. big torque numbers would be nice. it is a somewhat stock 401 rebuilt, .030 over. mild cam, custom full length headers. q jet carb and intake. Any idea's? pressurized mondo box? do they work, or is a carb hat with a blow through carb the way to go. i know i will have to make custom brackets, and a custom crank pulley. would be nice if anyone had any pictures of it done before. well thanks guys, paul 66larkgs new bedford mass
Never heard anyone putting a paxton on but there is alot of good info here: http://www.v8buick.com/search.php?searchid=251459
Someone on this site has done that! Hi Guys, Don't know who it is for sure, but someone has a Paxton or McCullogh? style blower on a nailhead in their avatar. It looks to have a flow thru carb cap on that set up. Hope someone reads this that knows about the car! Tim
Buick tried a turbo on the 401 Nailhead, the engine developed so much torque and power that it twisted drive shafts apart. It was decided the dynaflow would never be able to handle that kind of power and the project was scrapped. A great article about this project is in the current issue of Buick Stories.
The publication is private, but, the editor has very big ties to the BCA. His name is Alan Oldfield. You can contact him thru BCA. Great little publication/magazine
Use a hat.. Whether you make a setup to use a Vortech, ATI Procharger, or Paxton, I would use a hat and a CSU setup carb. The hat works great and there are specific hats to use that outperform other, but it eliminates the big box and all the linkage. Plus it is much cheeper. You can setup you own carb if you know what to do with the air-bleeds and power-valve. Unless XSPERFORMANCE has built a Nailhead supercharger bracket, you will have to build you own. All you have to do it mount it and run the pullies. The hardest thing is working around accessories. The less you have the easier it is.
i'm working on such a beast, but i've been saying that for a while now! a few people have tried to get this car on the road, for various reasons it hasn't happened with the blower yet. i got the car setup with the blower, but with a blown motor, literally! i put in a saved from the dead 401, it had a pile of busted pushrods and timing gear, put it together with parts from the two motors, it's been going two years now...without boost. i'm basically doing the whole setup over from scratch. it's an ATI procharger, i recently picked up a huge procharger intercooler, and an extreme velocity carb hat, shorty headers will be ordered this week. i'll be blowing through a holley 750 double pumper adapted to a quadrajet intake, stock heads with minimal cleanup of the ports when i had em off, stone stock 40 year old bottom end. i'm gonna have to call this thing the grenade, cause i'm gonna lay some boost to it, pull the pin and see how long till it blows! :grin: down the road the engine will get freshened with good parts, i'm kinda testing to see what a high compression nailhead will do with intercooled boost before the new engine is built. i just pulled it into the garage this week to start butchering it for the intercooler. hopefully some real progress in the next few weeks. i'm going for the sleeper look. externally the car will be a mild custom riviera, basically lowered with tru-spoke wires, but a lot going on underneath to make it haul some azz.
You are setting yourself up for some real disappointment. With high compression and no mention of boost retard, cast pistons and lots of boost, I would guess it will last until the boost gage indicates 7lbs. You most likely will not be able to stand the detenation noise and will have to back out. When it does explode I doubt there will be many useable pieces for the rebuild. Mike S
blower Yup, when you runn a huffer, you have to back down on the compression and have forged pistons. The cast wont handel any kind of super charger.
have no great expectations of what will happen, so i won't be disappointed! :grin: i know this motor will be running on the ragged edge considering the factory cast pistons. they are my single biggest concern. and yes, i will be running boost retard via a msd 6btm box. i'll be upgrading the dizzy shortly too, currently a stock dizzy recurved with a pertronix, i'll switch to a MSD dizzy for ease of tuning and reliability. i'm not trying to get more than a few pounds of boost as it is, it was built to make 5 pounds of boost by the previous builders without the intercooler, i'll lose a bit with the 'cooler, but gain a much cooler charge temp. the intercooler is the key component, it never had one before, with it, you CAN run higher static compression with the blower, it's a matter of keeping the overall temp down below a certain threshold to reduce the possibility of detonation. 20+ pounds of boost ain't gonna happen, but single digit boost levels should be doable. i'm also at a very high altitude, so that helps to effectively lessen some of the static compression...so does the moderate blowby this ol engine has :laugh: i'm even considering setting it up to run E85 to run cooler, the mustang guys have been having good luck laying down big numbers using the stuff, and not getting even a hint of detonation. if it blows on the first shakedown run, i'll take my crow fried... :laugh:
Don't think that E85 would be a good choice. True that at altitude you can run more boost and lead, but I feel that I would start with at least Sport Fuel, 104 Octane in Ca.) and then work down from there. Why not just put new forged pistons in it that are 8 to 1, run a huge carb, minimum 850 cfm, then you can leave some advance when under boost. With the higher compression and stock everything, detonation is going to be a major problem slightly lessend with the intercooler. Also you might want to set up the blower so it only produces enough boost to offset the vacuum. This in itself makes a big improvement in performance. Then work up from there. I guess what I am saying is that you will end up with far less advance with the blower than you would be running stock when the boost starts and you start removing timing. 25 total degrees might be a good place to start and most likely pulling 3-4 degrees per pound of boost. If you can find an chasis dyno to set up the carb correctly, this would be an important step.
this motor is pretty much a test mule for now while i get the perephials setup, eventually the motor will be purpose built for big numbers. i'm using it to feel out the basics of the blower setup. i figure if i can make it live for a even a short while with a stock long block, i'll feel a lot better about doing it with thousands stuck into the engine. when that happens, it won't have as much compression as stock, but still a bit higher than 8:1. and yep, plans are to get on the dyno, a friend of mine runs a custom body shop next to his son's ricer shop, and they recently got a chassis dyno :laugh: :3gears: i also picked up Innovate's LM-1 o2 meter a few months ago and have been using that to do my carb tuning, it's been a fun tool to use! hard to keep your eyes on the road when you're always checking out the AFR though. i plan on getting Innovate's AuxBox as well, i'm quickly getting hooked on datalogging, the few hundred dollars on these devices seems pretty cheap to even my tight budget when you consider the kind of money that is invested in the engine that is at stake if you let it go lean. i suppose i gave the impression that i was doing it half assed, i threw away a few thousand in parts that a previous owner had invested in only to have various things go wrong, i cried and it wasn't even my money laid out! custom Ross pistons...junk, heavily ported heads....doorstops because someone who should have known better tried to put hardened seats in and busted into a water jacket, not discovered untill it was too late. i managed to save the camshaft, timing chain and rockers from that motor, that's about it. i hope to not learn that lesson quite as hard next time around. it's really not a slammed together effort like my earlier post may have implied, there's a method to the madness! i think. o No:
