Electrical Supercharger

[Jim Davies]

On Mon, 12 May 1997, Kurt Bilinski wrote:

> In high school, a friend took a lawnmower rebuilding class.  They all
> rebuilt (obviously) the lawnmower engines, but he did something different.
> 
> He ran shop air into the intake.
> 
> >From what I'm told, reving it, it sounded like a Formula One engine, until
> BANG, it stopped Suddenly.
> 
> Must have been something while it lasted,
> 
Not that anyone would ever do this, but...

Once there was a little Briggs and Stratton which was saved from a scrap 
pile and taken back to a shop. It was complete, and a bit of fiddling got 
it to run. It ran pretty well in fact. Except for all the oil smoke in 
the exhaust, sssoooooo, after exterminating all the local mosquitoes 
modifications were made. Always wondered how the governors on these 
worked...just a simple little air vane activated by the air coming off 
the flywheel. Snip. A little more twiddling got about another 1000 revs 
or so, but nothing impressive. (cutting out lots of torture techniques) 
The "final solution" entailed putting the rosebud on the acetylene torch, 
lighting up, getting a nice, neutral flame, extinguishing the flame using 
appropriate procedures (not turning off the gas) then sticking the torch 
where the air cleaner was. Amazing. The old B&S started to sound like a 
Stihl 090. Picked up about 2-3000 revs. Course, the long torch hoses were 
needed to chase it around the shop. Guess they aren't too careful when 
they balance those things. The really interesting part was the pinging. 
Maybe that was what caused it to pop. I looked up the octane rating of 
acetylene after we cleaned up the walls etc. IIRC, it is pretty low.

Jim Davies