Anyone on here turbocharged or supercharged a micro or bubble?

[AndyL]

I imagine the Heinkel and Trojan scene got a major shot in the arm when Ray and Jenny Dilks got their car and got involved with the spares. They ran the IOC spares service like a well oiled Swiss timepiece. Prior to that a lot of owners described running one as on the edge of extinction. Perhaps an overstatement, but certainly it seemed a lot of owners had to mend and make do with Heinkels compared with say a Messerschmitt or Isetta.

Regarding noise, that's an interesting subject to me. Single cylinder engines are difficult beasts to subdue as they need such large volumes on both intake and exhaust to quieten adequately. I notice quite a few owners of micros often abandon the standard air canisters and fit either a small stub stack style air filter, or worse still no filter at all to improve performance. The former is a good way to dramatically increase the noise of a bubble, where induction noise will certainly become louder than the exhaust and the latter sounds a good way to wear the engine out!

[AndyL]

BTW, I have a copy of 'Eric Went too'.

I could scan it and upload it as a pdf. Does this forum feature file hosting capability?

[Rob Dobie]

Did Peter Green write a sequel of his adventures with Eric? I seem to remember the title P.G. Tips.

[steven mandell]

thei have an American friend who bought an MGB. He wanted to improve its performance and acceleration.
The mods he made required other things to be altered, and within a couple of years he had improved it to such an extent that it did not work at all!

I think we can safely say that those modifications were not improvements.

[AndyL]

I don't know if a sequel was written. I only ever saw the first 'book'.

I had a look at the attachments options, and observed it permits pdf files. So I will upload the book once I return to work where I have access to a decent scanner.

[Rob Dobie]

Did Peter Green write a sequel of his adventures with Eric? I seem to remember the title P.G. Tips.

I don't know if a sequel was written. I only ever saw the first 'book'.

Sorry, I was trying to be funny! Lots of people say that I am trying. What do they mean?  Put the kettle on and have a cup of tea on me, cheers. 

[AndyL]

Fair enough. To be honest it sounded like the sort of thing Peter would write.

[richard]

Rob , and Englishman of a certain age , Q Do you know the piano's on my foot ? A you hum it I'll play it 

[steven mandell]

Greg Haas, ("Isetta Dude") here in the Los Angeles area, has restored many Isettas to concourse standards.
He also makes and sells his own rubber parts, and a fuel valve for these vehicles that doesn't leak.
I believe that about 6 years ago he showed up with a tiny supercharger grafted to the side of one of his Isettas.
If I am remembering correctly, he might have borrowed some parts from a smog pump to do so.
It looked to be very well made, if not a bit odd hanging off the side of the motor.
I believe that the improvement in power was modest enough not to engender a need for all the other upgrades previously pointed out in this blog.

On the other end of the spectrum: I had a Brazilian TV crew over last week trying to film me in my Autozam AZ-1.
They were filming from a modern full sized rental car.  I got chastised more than once to slow down as they couldn't come close to keeping up with me.
I'll be first to admit that the intercooled turbo lures you in to letting it out.
It is technically the overall all round fastest series production microcar.

Drove it and a few fridges to my local Car Night group's semi weekly events that I am in charge of securing.
This time it  was easy to secure the venue at a local BMW shop.   All I had to do was stop by in the AZ-1 and let the car do the talking.

[AndyL]

VW did a small Roots style smog pump, I have a hunch he may have used one of those. I've seen a  picture of an Isetta with small roots blower sticking out of the side, so that may have been Greg's. That would have run direct off the crank I assume at a 1:1 ratio. I guess the set-up was suck through with no intercooling, so boost would have been limited to avoid detonation.

This site is very good for baby blowers and turbos- http://www.kemotorsport.com/

I obtained an AMR300 from there, which blows 300cc of air per revolution and is about the size of a couple of coke cans.

Mapped ignition and injection isn't essential, but does make a heck of a lot of difference to drive-ability and performance with blown engines. It also make a blow through set-up simpler, which again gives a lot of benefits, not least the ability to intercool, which is really worthwhile with an air cooled engine matched with a roots blower.