How reliable?

[fearnsj93]

Actually turbo's are better for engine and gas mileage vs a supercharger. The reason they are better is you can control the amount of boost that your engine recieves via a boost manager. You can increase the boost for track times, and decrease it when on the way home from the track and keep the boost low, untill you need it therefore decreasing the amount of wear on the engine. It's actually very simple and can be dialed in from inside your car, as long as you have invested the money in such an item. Friend of mine running a turbo Laser with a 3g (I think that's right) turbo is running low 12's with a very few modifications. With a supercharger, you have no way of controlling how much boost your engine is recieving and the superchargers are much more labor intensive to increase the amount of boost you want to make. With a supercharger you end up having to remove the belt, then replace the pulley with a smaller diameter pulley to increase the boost.

Joe

[fearnsj93]

Yes, all the ford 3.8's before 95 or 96 (i believe) were blowing head gaskets around 60-80,000 miles. I can't even count how many I had to replace. For the inital first year or so of the bulletin (ford publication to all dealerships) we were to replace the head gasket with the same head gasket that came with the car, after awhile I guess ford caught on that replacing the blown head gasket with the exact same one wasn't fixing squat, because they would come back in another 60-80,000 miles. Ford finally released a new gasket and I think they actually recalled some of the cars/vans with the 3.8's. If you want a good engine with almost as much torque and HP, go with the 3.0, IMO that's the best V-6 that ford made prior to 2000.


Joe

[94Bonnyssei]

My previous car was a 93 t-bird lx and I had the head gasket redone at 155,000kms. It cost too much but other than that It was a pretty reliable ride. Rear wheel drive is just fun!

[thunderbird muscle]

only problem i ever had with my old 3.8 was the headgasket which even ford admitted to being a bad part of the motors

[sc-matteo]

Originally Posted by fearnsj93

With a supercharger, you have no way of controlling how much boost your engine is recieving

joe, i disagree. i only push boost when i want to in my super coupe. depending on the gear and throttle position its very easy to control the super charger.

and swapping pulleys is not hard at all.

matt