History Part III
The Story of the Ultimate Nova continued

Next I ordered a Procharger 1200BR. Dad and I knew that this was going to be a major undertaking. The tech staff stated that it would take four hours to install with common hand tools, but this was hardly the case. The charger took quite a bit longer to install than what they stated. I ordered the kit that would allow me to keep my power steering but the boltholes in the mounting bracket were off. I had to re-drill them in order for the power steering to work, and this added a significant amount of time to the install. That was just one of the many snags I ran into. I would guess the install took close to fifteen hours.

I added a boost sensitive fuel pressure regulator to the fuel system, and changed the ignition to a MSD Boost Sensitive Timing Master. I thought that I had all the bases covered and that this would ease in tuning, but little did I know this would end up being a major pain. Weeks before I installed the charger I had called and talked to several aftermarket carb specialty shops. I asked if a vacuum secondary carb would work for my application, and got the response that it would in fact work. I guess they did not understand that I was running a centrifugal supercharger and confused it with a roots style blower. A vacuum secondary will never work on a centrifugal because you are pressurizing the carburetor, on a roots a vacuum carb works great because it sucks from the bottom just like a N/A engine.

Finally we went down to the track to see what kind of gain the Procharger would produce. We ran into some major fuel starvation problems though, and the car started to pop and bang in second and third gear so we loaded up and went home. The Holley Blue Max was taken out and a Paxton 300 GPH pump took over its place. I also installed larger 5/8-fuel line with a 1/2" return line, and upgraded the fuel pressure regulator to a Mallory 500 gph. With these changes I believed that my fuel problems would disappear so we went to the track again. The car ran a little better but still wanted more fuel, so I turned the pump and the line pressure to the carb up, and had 100 jets front and rear. After making two passes we loaded up and once again went home.

Dad and I started thinking of ways to cure our problem. We decided to try some BG Fuel Bowl Extensions and the bigger .130 Needle and seats. I ran into a problem during the fuel bowl extension install however, it turns out that their blister pack had the wrong bolts in it. I did not realize this until I stripped the threads out of one hole. Dad measured up the bolts and they turned out to be too short. We called BG and they sent me the correct length bolts. Because of the shorter bolts I had stressed all the holes so I went ahead and had the carb heli-coiled.

The fuel bowl extensions and the bigger needle and seats helped the fuel starvation problem. It felt good and pulled hard, but still had some popping. Despite the troubles it produced an 11.55 on the first pass. The next pass we gave it more timing, but it did not like the change so we pulled it back and turned an 11.37 on the third pass. Now I had severe traction problems though, and on every pass spun through all of first and part of second gear. Since then I have moved on to the next phase and ordered a 1400 CFM Spearco intercooler custom built to my dimensions. I ran into more problems after the intercooler was installed though.

 

On to Part IV