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Installed Eaton Generation 5 M90 Supercharger
On 11/5/2005 and 11/6/2005, I took my car up to my parent's garage to install an upgraded supercharger. I was keeping an eye out for a great deal on one but I was really looking for one. Well, one popped up on Ebay but was listed in the wrong section. I did my research into the seller and decided that I would try to bid on it. My bid was going to be low and I didn't expect to win, but in the end I got it for $200-300 less than others have paid. The one I bid on came with the L32 Lower Intake Manifold, $110 ZZP L67 Throttle Body adapter, and two bottles of GM Supercharger oil. A few days before I won that auction, a Gen5 Blower (just the blower, nothing else) went for $150-200. My old blower will be sold to a local GTP friend that is selling his car shortly since he wants a lower mileage blower on his 97 GTP.
The Generation 5 Eaton M90 Supercharger is a more efficient design of my existing supercharger. It has cooler outlet temperatures, 75mm intake inlet, smoother intake design, and better rotors. All these things equal up to a 15-20hp increase with the same size pulley. It decreases KR and provides a better upgrade path in the future. Now only a year ago, I upgraded to a lower mileage Generation 3 M90 since I had bearings going bad in the rotor assembly. I tried to get a Gen5 back then, but they went for twice the price that I bought this one for. Anyway, here are some pictures of the blower when I got it. Click on the thumbnails for a larger (1024x748) version. I'll post some comparison pictures of the Gen3 versus Gen5 outlet later.
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So those are the pictures of the blower when I received it on Thursday, October 27th. Over the next few days, I cleaned it up with simple green and rubbing alcohol. On Saturday, October 29th, I took it over to Hulkspeed to have it powder coated. I originally wanted to have it done in candy-red, but after seeing that color in person and looking at a few other colors I decided to go with the super-mirror-red. Here is a picture:
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Now that the blower was blinging and ready to go, I worked on getting everything else ready. I needed to get some longer 8mm bolts to fasten the Gen5 to the L32 LIM. It came with a 140mm, 120mm, but I still needed an 80mm bolt which I found at our local hardware store. Next, I worked on cleaning up the L32 Lower Intake Manifold. I plugged our sink and let it soak in Simple Green degreaser for 5-10 minutes......then hit all the tight spots with a tooth brush to make it as clean as possible. After thoroughly rinsing it, I got out the Dremel tool with sanding bits to port the intake runners to match the gasket. The night before the install, I then realized that the PCV brass fitting that was on the throttle body adapter plate didn't match up with my throttle body. To avoid running a valve cover breather, I figured out a way to channel the PCV gases to the correct port. After doing some research, I figured that I needed to modify my Throttle Body to allow the air to get to the PCV port and I depicted what I did with the below picture. Click on it to see.
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Anyway, I started working on my car at around 11am on Saturday, November 5th. I planned on working on it for 4 hours on Saturday, and 6-8 hours on Sunday. So my plan was to tear it all down on one day, and put it back together on the next. Here are pictures from Saturday.
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The tear-down took me 2.5 hours to do, and I was taking my time. The last hour or so of that day was spent trying to remove my modular pulley hub from the Gen3 Supercharger snout. I had a heck of a time trying to get it off because my hub removal plate was too thick to fit behind the hub itself. I tried putting other things behind it that fit, but it wasn't working. So I had to get out the hacksaw and trim the end of the snout lip to allow me to fit the plate between the snout end and the hub. Once I did that, I was able to remove the hub and call it quits for that day.
On Sunday, November 6th, I started working on it at 2pm. The first thing I did was pull off the rear valve cover to see if I could fix my coolant leak. My theory was that there was no, or not enough thread sealant on the ARP head studs. Since the studs go into the block's water jacket, you need to either use bolts that are use-once and "stretch" to seal the threads or you use re-usable head studs and Teflon paste on the threads. When I had my heads and cam installed in November of 2004, I chose to use the head studs. Well, I removed the nut and washer, then used a hex bit to back the stud out of the block. It appeared that it didn't have any sealant on it, so I cleaned it up really well and put a bunch of sealant on it and re-installed it. I cleaned up the heads with a solvent (brake cleaner) and then used a razor blade to get any leftover RTV from the gasket joining joints. Then I removed the EGR and installed the block-off plates. I did this mostly to keep my intake cleaner since the carbon starts sticking to everything in the blower and the intake. After that was done, I started putting everything back together. Here are pictures from that day.
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Everything went smoothly, but I had to remove part of my Wizaired Intake since the longer supercharger plus the throttle body adapter caused a clearance issue. So I shorted the intake tubing and got it all set back up. I also needed to modify the throttle body itself like I mentioned earlier on this page. My throttle cable bracket was rubbing one of the brake lines, so I trimmed part of it off to get clearance. Anyway, after everything was installed, I re-filled the radiator and the coolant overflow tank. I then changed the oil and finally started it up. It fired up the first try with no problems. I let it warm up until the thermostat opened and then shut it off. I opened the radiator cap and re-filled the radiator again. Started it up again, warmed it up and bled the air out. Then it was time to drive it. I drove it to the grocery store listening for any strange sounds, and it sounded fine. Then on the way back, I got on it and noticed that I pulled harder, smoother, and the whine from the supercharger was much more pronounced.
So that's it......now I'm currently tuning for a Cecil Track day to see if I can finally get into the 12's. December 10th is the day I'm planning on going and this time I will have a way to tune the car in at the track. Next on the list for mods is an upgraded throttle body. I'm planning on getting the 75mm Northstar Throttle Body with a LQ4 MAF.....I'm just waiting for the throttle body adapter to be made. Once that is made, I plan on re-doing my intake with 4" tubing and a 7" filter that sucks air from the fenderwell.
I'll update this page soon with a more detailed write-up for those of you that want to install a Gen5 on your L67. :-)