Leaf-Blower Supercharging a 1978 Chevrolet Monza Spyder! - Roadkill Episode 16
On this episode of Roadkill
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00:00 This time on Roadkill we flew all the way to Pittsburgh to visit our buddy Jeff Lutz,
00:04 buy this Monza and cram five leaf blowers under the hatch.
00:08 What a dumb ass idea that was. Let's go!
00:10 [Music]
00:41 We're going land speed racing and we need a car to do that but we're not
00:45 going to shop Craigslist this time. We're heading to Steel Town Motors in
00:48 Youngstown Ohio where they've got a bunch of muscle cars for us to check out.
00:52 Figures we finally get to the East Coast and it's raining the day we get here.
00:55 They have good stuff for cheap though. Well they have cheap stuff. I don't know how good it is.
01:01 Good enough for us. This must be Matt. Matt, nice to meet you bud. Good to meet you.
01:05 I'm Fryburger. Nice to meet you Fryburger. I got the '78 Monza for sale. It's got the
01:09 original small block in it, original four-speed, sort of V8. It was actually
01:13 built here in Lordstown, five miles away. Does it do good burnouts? Yeah real good.
01:18 That's critical. Has it got a posi? Yes. Really? That's good donuts then.
01:22 Four-speed and posi. It's cool. Yeah check it out, four-speeds you need.
01:26 This won't work at all. It's got two seatbelts. Oh yeah. We've never had a two seatbelt.
01:31 [Engine starting]
01:34 Dude, this is way too good for us. Yeah this already works.
01:37 [Laughing]
01:39 What do you want for this? I'd take three grand for it. Three grand? I like this.
01:43 What's the story with the Mustang? This is a '73 Mustang 351. It's a four-speed car also.
01:49 How much is this one? You probably saw it for around 15. All right, next car.
01:54 [Laughing]
01:56 Oh my goodness. That is cool. Look at the fast boat feel. I love it. Side pipes are genius.
02:04 Oh and it's a roadster. Wow. What year is this? '69. I went to my high school prom in one of these.
02:10 Didn't get laid, but it was still fun. Should I even ask how much this is? 15, 16 grand.
02:19 Okay, what's next? Let's get this. Now what are you thinking? This one's even more rare. It's a '69
02:25 original Trans Am. It's a real Trans Am? It's a real Trans Am. One of 600. 698.
02:30 [Laughing]
02:36 So you want this one. That's what you're saying. I'm not asking. We can't afford this at all.
02:40 No. I think the Monza is the winner then. Yeah. I like the Monza though. Yeah. The Monza's as good
02:46 as this if you squint. So let's test drive the Monza. Okay. Kiss your tires goodbye.
02:53 Did I say that out loud? Yes you did.
02:58 I don't think there's a return spring on the throttle. Wow. Try putting it in gear. No,
03:02 I'm in gear. The clutch comes all the way out before it engages. Look at that. All right.
03:07 That means it's shot. Still hasn't engaged. Wow. There we go. We may need a clutch.
03:13 [Engine revving]
03:20 Oh man, she spins good. In the rain.
03:23 [Engine revving]
03:30 This is way too good for us. It's very sticky though. Like. Well, yeah, there's literal mold
03:35 on stuff. Look at the interior is falling apart a little bit. This thing's bitchin.
03:41 I like this. This is easily the coolest sounding car we've had on roadkill before.
03:46 [Engine revving]
03:49 Six grand.
03:49 [Engine revving]
03:52 Dude, this thing is funny. I want to drive.
03:56 Yeah, you want to barely pull over. You drive it.
03:58 Seatbelts don't retract.
03:59 [Engine revving]
04:07 Why, why, why are you swerving? Why are you swerving?
04:09 [Engine revving]
04:13 All right, let's go buy this thing.
04:14 [Engine revving]
04:19 We have to buy it now because we almost destroyed your tires and
04:22 almost guardrailed that side of it.
04:24 It's like that on dry pavement too. Car's fun.
04:26 Cool. Awesome. All right. Well, let's.
04:29 All right. Come on. Money up.
04:30 Come on. Money.
04:30 [Engine revving]
04:33 Thanks man.
04:34 Thank you very much.
04:35 That means we can do donuts now.
04:36 [Engine revving]
04:39 What are you doing?
04:40 Dead battery or neutral safety switch or something.
04:43 You notice this happened right after we gave him the cash.
04:45 Did that price come with a battery or no?
04:47 You gotta be kidding me.
04:49 You know what? It hasn't been either five minutes or 50 feet.
04:51 [Laughing]
04:54 Oh, there you go. Check that out.
04:56 Is this a sign of what's to come?
04:58 No.
04:58 I've been wanting to do a Manza Land speed car for a while
05:02 because these are actually pretty aerodynamic.
05:05 I know some guys at El Mirage in Bonneville who run these things that are really fast
05:08 and this one won't be, but it's good.
05:10 [Engine revving]
05:15 [Laughing]
05:17 That's a graceful exit.
05:18 We still had a couple days until we had to race at the Ohio Mile,
05:21 so we decided to run over to Pennsylvania and visit our buddy Jeff Lutz
05:25 who has a race shop and a chassis dyno
05:27 so that we could find out how much power we were going to make.
05:30 [Engine revving]
05:40 I think you can go right in the door.
05:42 [Laughing]
05:43 Oh, nice.
05:44 Sorry.
05:45 We're here to class the joint up for you.
05:47 How you doing?
05:48 What's happening?
05:49 Nice car, buddy.
05:50 This is it, huh?
05:53 It's actually not that bad.
05:54 Man, that is a clean looking car.
05:56 Yeah.
05:56 Little Bondo on the hood.
05:58 Meanwhile, this is far more important over here.
06:00 We just built that.
06:01 Gear vendor, Rossler.
06:03 Spread for heads.
06:05 Does this make like $2,500?
06:06 About $3,500.
06:08 Oh yeah, easily.
06:09 Jeff Lutz is a Hot Rod Drag Week veteran
06:12 and his shop, Lutz Race Cars, routinely builds Hot Rods that have more than 2,500 horsepower.
06:17 Lutz's son, Jeffrey, is building an '89 Honda Civic.
06:21 It's rear wheel drive and has a twin turbo small block under the hood.
06:25 Jeff's other ride is a legit pro mod car.
06:27 A yellow Camaro that packs almost 4,000 horsepower under the hood
06:31 and runs deep into 5-second territory.
06:33 Want to trade?
06:35 We make a good deal.
06:38 No.
06:39 Should we put it on the dyno?
06:41 Absolutely.
06:42 Let's get a baseline.
06:42 You should take it for a spin.
06:45 It's fun.
06:45 Well, I got to turn it around anyways.
06:47 Yeah, go for it.
06:48 How do I get the feeling he's done this a hundred times?
06:50 Second gear, go.
06:57 [ENGINE REVVING]
07:13 Made 144 to the wheels.
07:15 At 215 pound feet, but you saw 15 to 1.
07:19 It was over 14 and it climbed all the way to 15.
07:21 That explains the misfire.
07:22 It's got a burn spark plug wire.
07:25 It runs way too lean and it has a ton of blow by.
07:28 We can't do anything about the blow by, but we're going to see if we can tune it up a little bit
07:31 and make it run right and get a real number.
07:33 We took the Quadrajet off the Monza.
07:35 We borrowed a Carb Shop 650 double pumper here.
07:38 Up.
07:40 Up.
07:41 Stop.
07:42 This thing has a hydraulic flat tab, a cam in it,
07:45 and you're supposed to have about a quarter turn of preload on the push rod,
07:48 and it had none.
07:48 They were just sort of dangling in the breeze.
07:51 This thing only has a 305 in it, but 144 horsepower to the wheel sucked.
07:56 We also gutted the interior, found some drug paraphernalia,
07:59 and spray painted the hood with some help from Lutz's son, Jeffrey.
08:02 And then it was time to hit the dyno once again.
08:05 [ENGINE REVVING]
08:15 Yeah!
08:15 193!
08:17 He's a beast.
08:18 193 to the wheels with a 305 that smokes like a banshee.
08:22 That's perfect.
08:23 Woo!
08:23 Yeah!
08:24 Dude, we picked up like 49 rear wheel horsepower.
08:28 This is like a whole new car.
08:29 With no timing light and no jets, it made 193 to the wheels and 231 for torque.
08:36 We need 200.
08:37 I know how we can get 200.
08:40 [MUSIC PLAYING]
08:56 Morning!
08:56 We brought the horsepower.
08:58 700 CFM each.
09:01 Wow.
09:03 And there's--
09:03 So we got four.
09:04 Oh, we got one more.
09:04 Oh, no, we got five.
09:05 Five.
09:06 We brought every one they had.
09:07 Wow.
09:07 $1,600 worth of horsepower right there.
09:09 [LAUGHTER]
09:12 Two years ago, I saw some guys on YouTube supercharging a Chevy S10 with a leaf blower.
09:17 And I thought, well, if one leaf blower is good, then two is better.
09:20 So I bought two.
09:21 And we supercharged a small block and a Corvette and actually made horsepower.
09:25 So I figure five is going to be even better, right?
09:28 We should be able to make four or five pounds of boost and maybe 270 to the wheels of our
09:32 little Manza here.
09:34 We know this is going to work from past experience.
09:36 But we're dying to do something.
09:38 So we're going to rig two of them here on the table, wire them together right like that
09:42 with some duct tape, which is going to be brilliant, and test the theory.
09:45 There we go.
09:48 Yeah.
09:49 [ENGINE REVVING]
09:52 Let's go.
09:54 [ENGINE REVVING]
09:56 [ENGINE REVVING]
09:58 [ENGINE REVVING]
10:00 [ENGINE REVVING]
10:02 [ENGINE REVVING]
10:04 Two and one.
10:05 Two and one!
10:06 Yeah!
10:06 [LAUGHTER]
10:07 Awesome.
10:08 [APPLAUSE]
10:10 See the gain down low?
10:11 It's much bigger.
10:12 It felt good.
10:13 When we hit it, it didn't do the "blah" when it took off.
10:15 So do you want to mock up PVC for more or just go right to let's install all five in the trunk?
10:21 Might as well get them in the trunk.
10:22 I'm all in on this deal.
10:23 Let's just put them all in.
10:24 Let's just do it.
10:24 It's not like it's not going to work.
10:26 Our goal yesterday was to make 200 horsepower to the tire, and we just did it.
10:32 We took out the rear seat so that we'll have room for five blowers here staggered.
10:36 We're going to go three and then two, make brackets to hold them down, and we are going
10:40 to have to make a firewall between the blowers and the passenger compartment because there's
10:44 gasoline in them, so it's like a fuel cell.
10:46 And then we're going to have to make a discharge tube that connects all of those blowers together
10:51 and runs up the middle of the car and somehow gets through the firewall to connect to the
10:56 carburetor hat.
10:57 [ENGINE REVVING]
10:59 [ENGINE REVVING]
11:01 [ENGINE REVVING]
11:03 [MUSIC PLAYING]
11:05 [ENGINE REVVING]
11:07 Fire.
11:08 Big fire.
11:09 Oh, yeah.
11:10 That's good.
11:11 [INAUDIBLE]
11:13 Farks caught his flame proofing on fire because his flame proofing was cardboard.
11:17 Beats a box.
11:18 And then the cardboard caught the carpet on fire.
11:21 You want to stand by with the fire extinguisher?
11:23 It is truly the first time on Roadkill we've used a fire extinguisher.
11:27 We have needed one.
11:29 This is the first actual use.
11:31 Looking good.
11:32 You got your extinguisher?
11:34 Yeah.
11:35 [MUSIC PLAYING]
11:37 Oh, sorry.
11:39 Ah.
11:41 Sorry about that.
11:42 You OK?
11:44 That doesn't taste good.
11:45 Is it in your eye?
11:46 It's in my mouth.
11:48 Oh, it tastes nasty just floating around.
11:50 What is it?
11:51 Hey, you got me back for the snowball, all right?
11:54 I did not do it on purpose.
11:55 [MUSIC PLAYING]
11:57 While Finnegan and I were trying to burn the shop down, Lutz fabricated the whole discharge
12:01 tubes for the blowers.
12:03 Finally, we're getting closer to finding out what these blowers were going to do.
12:07 [MUSIC PLAYING]
12:09 We're running three leaf blowers right now.
12:14 So this is the moment to find out if this is all going to make it.
12:17 We're worried that all of this tubing might actually reduce the flow to the point that
12:21 it's only going to run as well as it did with the two when we tested them up here.
12:25 You all got your choke off?
12:27 No.
12:28 I can feel something happening in here.
12:31 And it's good.
12:32 [BLOWING]
12:33 Yeah.
12:34 Here we go.
12:35 [BLOWING]
12:37 Moving it.
12:39 [BLOWING]
12:41 Nope.
12:50 It made 197, but all the fluids are cold, the oil, the transmission, the rear end.
12:54 So we're hoping that's where our five horsepower went.
12:57 [BLOWING]
13:00 [BLOWING]
13:02 I was down one leaf blower.
13:12 So that one's junk?
13:13 Well, we're going to dissect it.
13:15 Oh, yes.
13:16 Hashed.
13:17 For some reason, all these superchargers are just not making the power.
13:22 But finally, Lutz figured out the problem.
13:25 We tried to fire up all three of these leaf blowers at the same time.
13:28 And we would get two of them running.
13:30 And they would make so much pressure in the pipe
13:33 that they would actually be motoring the third one backwards.
13:36 And so not only does that mean that that motor is not making boost,
13:40 it also means it's a boost leak because the pressure is coming out through it.
13:44 Here's what we did.
13:45 This valve right here is a ball valve, which right now is completely open.
13:49 So we can fire up all of the motors, and it'll just blow all of the boost out that hole.
13:55 We're going to then rev the engine up to about 3,500 RPM
13:58 when the engine's consuming some air and slam that shut,
14:01 at which point all the boost will go to the engine.
14:04 But it'll be able to take it at that point because the engine's consuming air.
14:08 On our last pass of the day, even with the blow-off valve,
14:11 we managed to bring the torque up quite a bit, but the horsepower remained the same.
14:15 At this point, there was only one answer--more boost.
14:21 It's Friday, and we planned to drive away to go to Ohio to the races today.
14:25 But we showed up this morning, and Lutz has this buddy who had a perfectly good 350 Chevy,
14:30 and he was sick of the 305 smoking and puking oil all over the floor.
14:34 So they got the motor half out before we even got here.
14:38 So I guess we're doing an engine swap because we weren't far enough behind.
14:41 We're finishing up the installation of blower number four, blower number five.
14:50 Right now I'm welding together an exhaust system using the stock mufflers
14:54 so we can vent it through the bottom of the car so we don't suffocate,
14:58 which is new for us.
15:00 Blowers one and two through one pipe, and blowers three, four, and five through another pipe.
15:06 And if you notice, we have cross-flow happening here.
15:09 They're exiting at an angle, so that's going to scavenge one side from the other.
15:14 We're boosting our power here.
15:17 Ah, the look of horsepower.
15:20 All our five leaf blowers work. Now if we had an engine, we'd be somebody.
15:30 That's a serious boost.
15:33 I don't know if it's serious boost, it's serious wind.
15:36 Wind, anyway, yes.
15:38 It blows about like an F3 Pro charger at idle.
15:40 It blows.
15:42 It blows.
15:44 It blows.
15:46 Timing.
15:51 It's going to be first fire on our new 350 small block.
15:55 It clearly needs a little bit more ignition advance.
15:58 We've got it running well enough to make a back-to-back comparison between the 350 and the 305.
16:06 And the bigger motor, naturally aspirated, made the best power that we've seen yet.
16:10 207 horsepower to the wheels.
16:13 That's where we were at with the leaf blowers on the 305.
16:16 I've got 3,500 miles an hour with the wind coming through this pipe right now.
16:41 [Engine revving]
16:43 283!
16:49 [Cheering]
16:51 The internet says this doesn't work. Go check. You can find out.
16:57 Oh my God, dude.
16:59 284 pound-feet of torque.
17:01 We've owned this Monza for three days.
17:04 We spent one day doing ridiculous burnouts in the rain,
17:07 and two days wrenching, dyno testing, and thrashing on this thing.
17:11 And finally, we're on our way to race it at the Ohio Mile in Wilmington.
17:16 [Engine revving]
17:34 It is 8.15.
17:37 What time are we supposed to be there?
17:39 Now.
17:41 And, uh...
17:42 We're right on time.
17:43 Four hours to go.
17:45 The gauge says 55, but I think we're going 67 or 70.
17:51 We're going 72.
17:53 Wow, the gauge is way off.
17:55 The fact that we have a gauge of any sort is amazing.
17:59 [Engine revving]
18:03 I think it's got a driveline vibration.
18:06 The engine's shaking because it's running too fast, and the tires are out of balance.
18:10 So it's fine.
18:11 So when you combo that all together, we're kind of doing the cabbage patch as we go down the road right now.
18:16 The whole point of this episode was to come here, to the Ohio Mile,
18:26 which is in Wilmington, Ohio, at the Air Park.
18:29 And it's an event run by the East Coast Timing Association.
18:32 Cars start from a standstill, and they accelerate all the way through the mile.
18:36 And at the end, there is a 132-foot timing trap, with a beam here and a beam here 132 feet apart.
18:42 And the mile-an-hour number that you get is your average across that distance.
18:46 One of the cool things with these events is you see all kinds of cars.
18:49 There's tons of street rods, there's streamliners, there's roadsters, there's late-model cars,
18:54 and there's a Monza with five leaf blowers on it.
18:57 They're dying to make passes, but we had to go through the registration process, which involved tech inspection.
19:02 Now, does the duct tape actually hold it?
19:04 They passed us through tech, although there's some things that we need to do,
19:07 just little stuff, zip-tying here and there, that they want us to pull the radio out of the dash.
19:11 They don't want the radio flying at us.
19:13 The class we're going to run is C, which is the engine designation.
19:18 And then we're going to run Lone, because clearly we're supercharged, and Gas.
19:23 And we're going to run in Altered, as our body class.
19:26 All you have to do is tape this all off, and it actually makes the car more aerodynamic.
19:33 They had a record number of cars here, and the line was huge.
19:37 But the good news about it is that the Monza was clearly the biggest freak show in the whole place.
19:43 People could not stop checking out our genius supercharger installation.
19:55 There's five leaf blowers in the trunk, and I've never done this before.
19:59 What could go wrong?
20:01 All right.
20:09 All right, that's 50 miles an hour.
20:20 60.
20:21 70.
20:23 80.
20:25 90 miles an hour.
20:27 All right, we're in high gear.
20:30 120.
20:34 23, 25, 26, 28, 130.
20:39 We're going to get a license, baby.
20:41 135.
20:43 136.
20:45 Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo!
20:47 138.46.
20:50 Not bad for an utter pile of garbage.
20:53 Yeah!
20:55 Best day of work ever, right here.
21:00 Holy crap.
21:01 That's awesome.
21:03 And they're yelling at him they're going to throw him out because he broke out of his license.
21:07 Didn't I say like 125 plus or minus 5?
21:11 Isn't that kind of what I said?
21:12 Never heard the plus sign.
21:13 That one, I just--
21:14 Yeah, the plus or minus is a little confusing.
21:16 Can I ask for leniency on this?
21:17 Plus or minus.
21:18 It's a complicated task.
21:19 Finnegan had to get yelled at by my buddy Keith Turk, who runs the East Coast Timing Association,
21:24 because Finnegan was only supposed to run 125 miles an hour on his rookie path.
21:29 130.
21:31 We're going to get a license, baby.
21:32 135.
21:34 The next time Finnegan ran, he actually went 125 miles an hour to get his license,
21:41 and then we moved on back to Testa.
21:43 We came back the next day, and it was raining.
21:47 We knew we weren't going to get a whole lot of runs in, so this was not going to be science.
21:51 But we did stab Finnegan in the car without the leaf blowers running, and he went 137.15 miles an hour.
21:59 And then we put Jeff Lutz in the car, and he bang shifted the Monza and ran 139.84.
22:06 So we picked up two and a half miles an hour with the leaf blowers.
22:10 Was that worth $1,600?
22:12 No.
22:13 I'll say it.
22:14 We proved that leaf blowers work on the chassis dyno anyway.
22:18 We saw these things pick up 20 horsepower at the wheels and a little bit more than that in torque.
22:24 It's all about the airflow. It works.
22:26 But in the standing mile, we only saw maybe one mile an hour, two mile an hour gain,
22:31 and that's because we spent so much time at high RPM where the leaf blowers are less efficient
22:36 because they can't move as much air as the engine is consuming.
22:39 But in the end, we've got one thing to show for this,
22:42 and that is the only Monza on earth that you can use for drying the track.
22:46 On this episode of Roadkill, we flew to Pittsburgh because we were tired of sun,
22:58 and we bought this Monza, and we stuffed five leaf blowers in it at our...
23:02 Why don't you do one?
23:04 Boosted.
23:06 On this episode of Roadkill, we prove the internet is right.
23:10 Leaf blowers don't make boost.
23:12 I don't think you want to give that away.
23:14 Oh, no?
23:15 Do you? Why would you watch the rest of the show?
23:17 On this episode of Roadkill, we stick five leaf blowers in a Monza for no good reason.
23:22 (beep)