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| The Ultimate SUV? | Short Cuts | ||||
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By: Martin Ahlers - 9/2000
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| Supercharger mounted. |
After the Grunt Work!
Most of the grunt work is now done! The supercharger is set in place and torqued down. Remember the bolt next to the rearmost driver-side intake port? It is now buried behind a ton of stuff and I don’t even want to think about what a pain it was to try and properly torque it down – especially since I pretty much gave up after an hour and figured it was “good enough” to last. Like I mentioned earlier, it will probably work its way loose one of these days and I’ll have a big project to tackle.
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Here you see the relatively stock locations of the air conditioner compressor and the alternator. These should have been a snap to install, but I think there were some manufacturing tolerances that made life rather complicated. One of the most frustrating things in the world is when something “almost” fits. In this case both the a/c compressor and the alternator brackets were about a tenth of an inch off, and I tried everything to jiggle them into place. The manual said it would be a tight fit, so I figured there was some sort of voodoo magic involved with getting them to properly drop into place. After trying for about a half hour, I said “screw it” and pulled out the trusty Dremel tool. It took about ten minutes of careful grinding with a cutting disk, and they plopped right into place as advertised.
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This part of the install is something every WJ owner might want to consider. Kenne Bell has come up with a really nice ram-air system for this application. In the kit included with the supercharger, the ram-air system converts the stock speed density airflow system to a true mass-airflow system. The big advantage to this set-up is that the computer can now handle virtually any temperature and altitude combination (and a wide range of other modifications) and still deliver maximum performance. With the stock speed-density system, you’re pretty much limited to what the designers included in the various fuel and timing mappings programmed into the controller. The speed-density system takes intake temperature, throttle position, and manifold pressure and tries to figure out what the density and velocity the incoming air charge is. From that info, it looks at a fuel flow mapping and tells the injection system to do its thing. The mass-airflow system, on the other hand, reads the true mass of air coming into the engine and then knows exactly how much fuel to pump in to get that magic 14.7 air-to-fuel ratio (this is a mass ratio, by the way, which is why the mass-airflow system is such a better system to utilize).
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| Stock computer harness. |
If you can manage to purchase the Ram Air system from Kenne Bell, you won’t get the Mass Airflow conversion, but it will definitely be worth it anyway. The setup looks like a better unit than the K&N FIPK system, although it is probably much more expensive.
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| Stock computer harness, |
All that talk earlier about the Kenne Bell system converting the stock speed-density system to the much more desirable mass-airflow system is probably getting you to ask “how does that happen?” Well, their “Optimizer Computer” is the main component of how this, and many other, computer enhancements come about. Without going into great detail, the installer of the Kenne Bell “Optimizer” has got to tear into the stock computer wiring harness, and splice in the Optimizer in series with the stock computer. Once installed, the Optimizer sits on top of the stock relay box next to the battery via some Velcro tape.
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| Optimizer. |
The Kenne Bell Optimizer really seems to do it’s job. Although I had some serious problems with it’s original factory program, the unit seems to do what it is supposed to. Basically, the Optimizer intercepts signals from the stock computer, adds its specialized logic, and tells the fuel and timing system what to do when the supercharger is doing its thing. One of the really nice things about the Optimizer is that it senses engine knock (through a small accelerometer mounted on the alternator bracket) and retards the timing appropriately. This is a really nice feature since supercharged engines (especially those running compressions greater than 8.0:1) have a tendency to become turd-grenades when detonation takes place under boost. In fact, that “light spark knock” that the vehicle manufacturer tells you is normal for efficient operation can cause some serious damage on a supercharged application. Since my car is still well within its 3/36 warranty and the supercharger will definitely cause my vehicle warranty tech to raise his eyebrows when I bring the car in for any engine/drive train problems, I wanted to choose a system that had some sort of detonation protection. Kenne Bell was the only game in town with this protection.
I mentioned a minute ago that the system I originally got from Kenne Bell had some serious programming glitches in it. Basically, what happened was that I was doing some “high confidence” driveability tests that included a slow rolling full-throttle acceleration test. The car did a 1-2 shift at redline, the tires all chirped, and then the car went completely bonkers. I lost almost all power, and the car started bucking and lurching like crazy, and did a bunch of other undesirable things that I didn’t take careful notice of at the time. It felt like I dropped the tranny in the middle of the road, and I was feeling a queezy mixture of guilt and stupidity having spent $4,000 on a supercharger that probably caused me many thousands of dollars of un-waranteeable damage. I cautiously let off the gas, pulled to the side of the road (lurching and bucking all the way, even off-throttle) and shut down. After getting out and seeing that nothing broke off, I got back in and did a check to see if any trouble codes were saved. If you don’t know this already, you can cycle your ignition key on and off three times to get the stock computer to display all the trouble codes on the odometer. I did this, and strangely no trouble codes came up. So, I started back up and, presto, everything ran fine. I carefully drove the 20 miles back home, and called Kenne Bell the next morning. The tech over there told me that I probably had one of the earlier programs and there was a glitch in the timing routine. I sent the Optimizer back to them FedEx, they FedEx’d it back to me a few days later and ($80 in shipping charges later that I had to pay) the system works fine.
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Here’s the final installation. In addition to the supercharger, I installed Autometer Pro-Comp Ultralight gauges on the A-pillars to monitor vacuum/boost and fuel pressure. Kenne Bell also provides a “Knock Out” detector that has an LED readout which shows you how much your engine is detonating. The “Knock Out” system comes packaged with all the detector electronics and the readout in one big off-white box that you’re supposed to install somewhere in the cockpit. I took one look at this thing and realized there was no way I was going to install a trick polished supercharger in my new WJ and then have some big ugly off-white box ruin the look of the nice Agate interior of my car. So, I decided to mount all the electronics somewhere nobody could see, and remotely mount the LED Knock-Out display someplace really useful. I went down to my local electronics store, bought some 14-conductor ribbon wire along with some 14-conductor IC sockets, and made a remote mount for the display. I cut a precise hole in the front of the dash, and mounted the display on the lower dash panel right below the oil pressure and temperature gauges. Take a look at the picture, it is really trick – most people think it is just a sticker placed on the dash until they see it starting to light up when I turn the ignition on or do a full-throttle blast down the road. At that point, everyone comments that it is a way trick integration. I doubt Kenne Bell would be too happy hearing that I chopped around with their electronics, but I just couldn’t take the look and feel of the system they sent over – so I figured it was worth the risk of annoying them and their warranty claims staff to get a finished product that I am really happy with.
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| Trick, RS9000 in-cab adjuster. |
This is completely off-topic, but goes along the same theme as my remote mounting of the Kock-Out display. I recently installed a set of Rancho RS9000 shocks with their in-cab adjuster. The adjuster consists of three buttons and two gauges to control the shock settings. The standard way to install these is to use the Rancho display mount, but it looked awful in my opinion, and there was no place in the WJ cab that it would easily and conveniently mount to. So, I did a bunch of careful cutting and grinding with my Dremel and mounted the whole package in my ashtray. When the ashtray is closed, you can’t even tell it is there. When the ashtray is open, you’ve got a very trick way to adjust the shocks on the fly.
Introduction The
Grunt Work After the Grunt Work
Conclusion & Impressions
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