I worked with Modern Muscle and their Vortech supercharger package over the last several weeks. The results are excellent, but there was a bit of debugging, not with the Vortech, but with the PCM computer mapping.
Yes, under my new carbon fiber hood and nose badge lies a supercharged 3.5L Challenger SE.
Here is the front view of the Vortech installation. The coolant tank had to be fabricated to allow room for the blower and air intake. The anti surge valve is the unit with the small filter on it. The mounting is fabricated by MM in their shop. The fuel injectors were changed to allow for more fuel. I believe the SRT injectors were used. A different MAP sensor was needed too.
This is a view from the side where you can see the inverted cone air intake for the Vortech. Eventually I should get the air intake routed to the cold air box, but that is very low priority now.
Here is how the process went. After the supercharger was installed at MM it had to go on the dyno to get a proper tune of air/fuel/timing. We had Vortech determine the pulley size so the boost would be 6-8 psi.
The air-fuel-timing map takes about 3-4 hours on the dyno and many runs up to various rpm points. Basically this is all computer mapping that eventually gets burned in the Predator.
It was in the high eighties and very humid, not ideal conditions.
Here are some of the dyno readings after the tune was set.
RPM Torque Hp
4000 232 180
4500 237 202
4750 235 210
5000 230 220
6500 210 260
The max boost was 6 psi.
Depending upon how hot the air was and adding extra cooling fans you could raise or lower the number by 10 hp. We had some PCM glitch on the dyno that would sometimes kill the RPM around 5700 in third (1-1). Running in second allowed the high end tuning to be checked and see that the curves were amazingly linear.
Off the dyno and on the street:
Initially I developed some idle issues. The PCM didn't want to (or couldn't) learn and this caused the idle to lope low and die. If the air was on the PCM used a different mapping and the condition didn't occur. Justin at MM immediately reprogrammed the idle map and this was fixed.
The most annoying issue was a MIL code that indicated the crankshaft position sensor couldn't be learned. Fortunately I had the service manual CD and after about two hours I discovered that code was only activated in the de-acceleration mode and upon reflection of driving that was exactly what happened. I visited MM and Justin immediately concluded that with the fuel totally cut to the injectors the engine went out of range of the fixed band. So we disabled that feature and all issues were gone.
One might think city milage would be affected, but it actually went up a little. I guess because I don't need to use the accelerator as much.
I have run the car in all conditions: full acceleration, gentle acceleration, stop and go, highway cruise and it is very smooth and fast. I find that I don't use much accelerator movement as I don't need it, but if I use it the car really moves. What full throttle did previously, I can accomplish with 1/2 throttle and no strain. The 42RLE behaves fine and shifts very smoothly.
It was never an issue, however, I am in the RWHp specs (300 RWHp) for the transmission. Modern Muscle was fantastic and gave me excellent service.
I am very pleased with this system, and if I need a little more boost, I just get a smaller pulley. But the next work will be some minor suspension adjusting.
Linear Mode
