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© 2001 Brian F. Schreurs
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Vortech's kit comes with everything necessary to install the huffer.

There it is: the Vortech V-2 Supercharger.

Take the supercharger out of the box and admire its beauty. Stare in awe at the raw power in your hands. Drop it when the cat bites your ankle and try to come up with an excuse that'll get you a new one under warran-- er, marvel at the engineered wonder as you carefully set it on the workbench out of harm's way.

The instructions want you to put the inlet on the supercharger before installing the unit on the car, but we found it quite impossible to get everything aligned properly that way. So hold off on it for a minute.

Instead, start by installing the oil drain hose onto the supercharger's drain fitting (near the bottom) and put a hose clamp (provided, for a change) on it. Make sure the clamp won't interfere with the bracketry when the supercharger goes on the car.

Put the supercharger on the car. The oil drain line goes straight down; no big deal really. The supercharger is held in by four 9/16" bolts; it's a little fiddly to get it just right, and the matter is confused a bit because you don't actually use all the holes on the bracket. But hang in there; when you get the alignment right it'll work well.

Get under the car and attach the oil line to the drain in the oil pan. You might find that the hose is too long; if so, trim it to fit. Just don't cut it too short! It's held in place with another clamp.

The supercharger is (eventually) nestled into its new home!

Bolt the supercharger idler assembly to the supercharger. The instructions call for 12mm bolts, but if you look carefully you'll notice that the three bolts are in fact 3/4". Not only that, the tools list calls for a 3/4" tappet wrench for adjusting this idler! Since the tappet wrench fits the bolts, we can only assume that Vortech changed their specs without telling their documentation department. The bottom line here is, attach the idler pulley to the supercharger, but be ready with a 3/4" wrench to do the attaching.

Note that they claim one bolt has a shallower head than the others. They lie. They're all the same, and none of them smack the pulley, so don't worry aobut it.

Now for the fun part! Jam the intake elbow onto the supercharger. This isn't a lot of fun, we'll tell you that now. The inlet tube is about one nanometer bigger than the supercharger's flange, so it really doesn't wanna go on there. Gentle application of a hammer on the elbow and Jim Beam on the installer will make the process go better, or at least, the installer won't get as worked up over it.

Next up is to install the black elbow going from the fender to the inlet. If you're using a Pro-M mass airflow meter like we are, then before you install the elbow you'll need to cut a hole for the air temperature sensor.

Generally speaking, the sensor should fit along the outside of the bend. Be sure to check for clearances, as things are tight in the engine bay so there's plenty of opportunity for interference problems. Once you've selected a placement, drill a hole in the elbow, starting with a small drill bit and working up. When the hole is close but just a hair too small, stop drilling and gradually widen the hole with a file. You don't want air slipping out of the air inlet via the sensor, so it's important to make the sensor a tight fit.

Here is the elbow going from the supercharger to the MAF sensor inside the fender, including the hole we drilled for the air temperature sensor.

With the sensor hole done, clean out the inside of the tube to prevent debris from wiping out your nice new supercharger. Then attach the elbow to the flex tube coming off the MAF. Between the elbow and the supercharger's inlet tube is a piece of wide blue rubber hose. Slip all of the various hose clamps onto the end of the inlet so that they can slide onto the hose when everything else is assembled.

This part is almost as much fun as installing the supercharger's inlet. The inlet-to-hose-to-elbow arrangement is not going to want to happen, and only hard labor accentuated with reels of profanity will make it work. We highly recommend renting a New York cabbie to help with the profanity; if one is not available, try playing an Eddie Murphy movie in the background.

Once you've got that elbow all hooked up and clamped down, go check to see whether there's any Jim Beam left from the intake install, and take a breather. The supercharger is in at last!

Frustrating? Yes. But now that the object of your desire is installed, the remainder of the project consists of putting the car back together and beefing up some of its subsystems. And the first stage of that is covered in Vortech's step 14.