[Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the February 2018 issue of Grassroots Motorsports.]
A lot of people talk about installing a junkyard supercharger. Quite a few even start to do it. But then reality kicks in, causing many of these projects to stall out and remain unfinished.
We’ve put together junkyard turbo setups before–witness our Miata endurance racer–but wanted to jump in with a DIY supercharger build of our own. We wanted to find out what’s involved, where the stumbling blocks are, and what it takes to finish and succeed. We used a Miata for our build, but every step of our project can apply to just about any other car.
Before we started, we spent quite a bit of time combing the internet looking at forums, build threads and commercial supercharger websites. We wanted to glean as much knowledge as we could to home in on a specific plan for our project. Not surprisingly, some of the information was misleading or just plain wrong. But we averaged what we read, seeing enough common themes to put together a recipe for our setup.
Here’s where we landed: We’d use an Eaton M45 supercharger mounted on the driver’s side of the engine, aim for 6-7 psi of boost, and hope for about 140 horsepower to the wheels. That’s a fairly docile setup in this age of huge boost and huge power, but it’s still much more potent than the roughly 100 horsepower that our stock Miata made at the wheels.
Our quest for the blower took about a month of casual junkyard and internet searches, but we finally ended up with an M45 from a Mercedes-Benz for $100. The pictures tell the story about how we went from a supercharger on a table to a much quicker Miata.
We’re presenting a somewhat condensed version of our build here in the magazine. To see even more detail, hop on our website and head to the Builds and Project Cars forum and look for a thread titled “Is the Answer a $100 supercharger?”
Here’s where we started: an Eaton M45 supercharger unit purchased locally on Craigslist for $100. We believe it’s from a 1998-2004 Mercedes-Benz C230 Kompressor. We were lucky to find one that looked perfect–maybe even freshly rebuilt.
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