Opening Up The RAREST Flathead Supercharger Ever

hey guys Matt irontrap garage and today we're going to do an explorative video as requested on some very rare speed equipment so as you guys know uh we are really into hunting down obscure uh speed equipment and old hot rod parts uh that's part of our business it's my passion and that's why this upstairs has all kinds of neat stuff so uh probably a couple years ago we got a call about some speed equipment local to us in like the Coatesville area and we went to purchase some intakes and when we got there there was a intake I had never seen before it was a marshman Supercharger so it was basically just I got an intake that was empty and very unique looking and it was like an incomplete casting it was never drilled I put some threads up on the ham and uh asking for information no one had was pretty much a dead end I couldn't find anything and uh just recently I got contacted through again the same kind of lead there Tom at Classic Automotive gave me a lead and I went to look at some stuff because there was some superchargers for flathead lo and behold there was two more Marksman superchargers in the Pottstown Pennsylvania area which is not very far from Coatesville and kind of led me down a rabbit hole researching it so then the interesting thing was we got two different designs I only had one style before we have two Styles now and one of them is complete it's basically the key to allow us to complete the other ones we had a lot of interest on Instagram and social media of people asking us to take the blower apart and show how it works because it's a very odd looking blower so that's we're going to do I'm going to take it apart and look at it and see how the heck it works I haven't touched these other than just buying them and putting it on the Shelf with some of my other stuff I had three of them for a few minutes or a day and then I gave the original casting that I had found to my very good friend Pete who is also insane about collecting this stuff to kind of round out his collection so we have two here today but it represents the two Styles so let's get into it so this one here is the first design or the first one I had now the original one that I had like this had no internals and it was missing the front snail much like the other one back here that we're going to show you in a few minutes also was like so it's basically all the ones that the one that I had was the same way as the other one where it was cast it was partially machined but it was never drilled for uh to put on an engine they obviously have this very large kind of cool Caster on the side it says marshman supercharger very big and this design is for a single carburetor which we've seen on a lot of these early blower kits like the mccoa they only really were meant for one one carburetor one Stromberg or Holley carburetor so this these blowers all have a model number f um or Model F with a number like a serial number on the side here that's cast into it but none of them are stamped even this one that's complete that was on an engine running um presumably uh doesn't have a serial number on it so it's kind of odd to me I thought because the other one wasn't cast was uh wasn't complete or drilled that was why so this is a single carburetor design that you can see uh basically this tube is cast as part of the intake and then the internals of the supercharger is in there pretty neat it's a three-piece casting tube which is also probably they just didn't have the ability to cast this all in one piece maybe the pattern maker thought it would be easier or more repeatable not sure but it makes it kind of nice because you have this front nose cone you have the rear breather section I think this is also the bearing holders and then inside you're going to have whatever Mechanicals compress the air so the two carburetor version which I will sit here is this two carburetor version is super interesting it's like they actually made a separate I don't know if they just added an extra mold here because everything else is basically the same but this little box here for two carburetors is is different and doesn't sit up as high but it looks like they are almost exactly the same height overall just that they chopped you know they didn't use this little piece here and they added this little box here and then obviously your two see if we can find two strombergs man there's barely only to pick from yeah see if we have a couple to show here for display so you can see the two carburetors sit there and um I think to me that looks much more pleasing to the eye more carburetors the better so I actually like this casting a little better just because of that we found with the McCullough supercharger on the Roadster pickup I was kind of being stubborn and I wanted to run it basically how they advertised it with one Stromberg and we've really had to go up in jet size to the point where we're like pretty crazy like maxing out the that single 97 carburetor and you would probably need a 48 with huge jets in it so it's kind of interesting even with this one being that it's they offered one with single carburetor but definitely the Dual was really cool it is um it's been like drilled and tapped for like vacuum ports and stuff but it has no nothing's been drilled to actually bolt it down to the intake it's drilled and tapped in the front for a snail same way my other one was but it doesn't look like it's ever had any internals in it either so pretty crazy I don't know exactly why all of them are missing that front snail or the two I found rather all right so now we showed you the two Styles very quickly um we're gonna get into taking apart this one uh our end goal really is like I mentioned is to eventually be able to replicate the missing parts and make three complete glowers with today's technology it's actually quite I don't want to say easy but it's a lot easier than it used to be to do that so I've already been talking with some people on Instagram some guys that kind of dabble in this stuff for a living and I think I may be able to get somebody to help us out with this and do a small run who knows all right so I'll start taking this apart Mike's going to grab a little allen wrench for the pulley it's kind of crazy the pulley is like very loose on this thing the pulley itself is got like a ton of slop they just have a set screw or a set yeah set screw with like an allen head uh two of them on there but it doesn't really fit very well so I'm guessing somebody just threw this pulley on maybe they never figured out a proper pulley but as far as the history goes from what I think this is all just theory on my end but I believe that locally here we had a lot of dirt racing history and a lot of dirt racing tracks and drag racing all kind of things but dirt racing was huge in our area a lot of tracks a lot of famous drivers in our area so that's one of the reasons that hot rodding and and uh speed parts are there's a lot of them in our area um so the George marshman was a well-known name in our area for racing um in the 40s and 50s he in the 40s from my research he was actually a driver himself I might be wrong but I think he did midgets and then eventually became like a promoter and he ended up running the local one of the local tracks here that's no longer around the Sanatoga Speedway it's outside Pottstown Pennsylvania and um pretty well known Speedway in our area he was a promoter and kind of ran the track so to speak and um he also ran some other tracks uh throughout the area might have been Hatfield as well but but anyways he was a big driver he was a promoter he was huge into this stuff obviously he probably had a little bit of money um and he had his son Bobby marshman was also ended up being a racer and into this stuff and working at the tracks and all that stuff and then eventually became a very well-known driver he even raced to Indy and unfortunately he died from injuries running in Indy so um with that with the family and finding all of these intakes basically or blowers right within the greater Pottstown area if you will and surrounding areas it's kind of interesting because I think it's almost too much of a coincidence that he wasn't attached to this so we're wondering if George at some point had taken a run at making some speed equipment our friend Pete who I referenced earlier has a large collection of speed equipment and old racing stuff and he has a marsh men like I think Quick Change gearbox that goes in front of the rear end basically it's kind of like the LeBaron box that we showed in a video a handful of years ago that you essentially put this like Quick Change box in front of the rear end kept your stock rear end and had quick change gears in it so you could keep your rear so we do know that he was making some speed equipment we just don't know exactly if he did this or not but that's kind of what my thought process is behind it we're still looking for some information on that well I think it's the Burr yeah yeah this inside of this has a bunch of birds too yeah it actually looks like this was threaded at some point oh yeah it was I wonder if it was threaded and they like ripped it out surrendered in the pulley set more here and there was threads on the end because that snap is super wall yeah it almost looks like they had threads on it and then it stripped or something and they they just like ground it down or machined it I don't know there's definitely definitely looks like 80 looks like maybe it was maybe they tried tapping it and it was hardened or something and it maybe yeah they just like all right so now we got 8 000 tools out to get the pulley off I was looking on the inside it looks like it's a sliding thing yes that's what I saw too and you can actually see them moving around spin it yeah I was doing my own little lucky waiver temples turning on the bottom there's one on the bottom good cool those are two or not just one let me see if this will come apart I'm gonna flip it back over I want to put it off the front here so if you oh he moved one of the cameras yeah it's just a bearing or something in the back there she is so the bearings where it's pressed on there that's just like a Billet show it to the camera it's like a Billet piece of aluminum that's very sharp something was running inside there that was very sharp established that was probably uh stopped myself a little bit oh I see what happened one of the veins broke it was dragging around in there yep good all right so we got this uh about as apart as we're going to take it for now we just wanted a lot of people seem to want to see the inner workings and all that stuff so this thing has definitely been run um you could see that at some point somebody either tried to tap it or it was tapped the whole shaft and then maybe they stripped the threads out and they put that other pulley on that other pulley didn't fit very well you could see they drilled a recess in there for a grub screw to kind of sit and lock in um so that probably wasn't working very well on its own it's hard to say there probably was some something that thread it on there and the pulley fit differently so if we want to put this on a car that's going to have to be addressed for sure so the front housing here is basically just a bearing support it seems like it has a bearing in the front with a circlip which we did not take off yet until we go to like replicate all this it's probably not necessary but we wanted to show you guys how so it works so this half has a stick fiber gasket on both sides it's more than just your normal paper gasket that's on there and the shaft is aluminum and you can see there's a bearing on the back here which actually fit tight inside of here so they actually machined it there's a bit of machine work that was done on this thing to get it to you know even function whether it's a poor design or not so the way this seems to work is it's offset Mike mentioned it earlier and I knew on mine because I have this rear section the bearing is offset on it so you can see it's not perfectly centered so the bearing is offset in here and as this spins this is a sliding vein setup so there's only one of these that was currently sliding this one so it's like this fiber graphite I don't know the correct terminology for it but it looks definitely like graphite coated but it almost looks like it's like a fiber when you look close at it that there's definitely asbestos might be but it's like a graphite or asbestos we don't really know but you can see it has wear to it they they put an angle bevel on it so when it slides in here and it's spinning as it rotates because it's offset one of these is not going to be touching anymore so this kind of rotates out touches the wall and drags against it as it spins around so I believe originally all these were probably supposed to yeah and they do not obviously from sitting or that one looks like it would come out so the big thing we saw is it looks like it looks like there was something had fallen in here now we're we're not sure it looks like fresh aluminum but who knows because it was it was stuck in there it may have been that way or if it was maybe when the family found it or the first person that touched it in 50 years that this was stored with nothing on top of the the opening so who knows sitting on a shelf in a basement something could have fell in there a piece of metal or bolt I don't know but somebody spun this over at some point it was spun with a piece of metal it broke or maybe this was already broken we don't know but something was in there engaged a little bit and I think this wouldn't be a problem because the the veins are what actually creates the Boost it did scrape a little bit on the inside and create a little gouge again will that cause because the the vein is the full length I'm sure it's not going to help it and how efficient is it really what kind of boost so um we'd have to address that but this we need to look into something of replacement for these I think the machine work and getting it replicated in pieces cast is probably I don't say easier but like we know what needs to happen there we just need a chunk of Billet somebody needs to be able to to slot this this is pretty interesting because it's slotted very deep on an angle on an angle so that is beyond my capabilities for sure to make that I don't I mean I could I could maybe turn something down and put like a straight group but this having that angled Groove like that it's beyond my you know ability so we'll definitely have to ask for some help on this but this is essentially just a giant chunk of aluminum that's been turned down to the dimensions and then you got to put these grooves for this to slide in and out so if we could find a suitable replacement for these we need to look into it I have a hunch that uh Judson superchargers was not far from here it's in Conshohocken Pennsylvania outside Philadelphia which is only maybe 45 minutes from here so I wouldn't doubt that they maybe went to Judson to get parts or supplies again with it being a local name they were all found locally there was a supercharger company that was only maybe 35 40 minutes from where the track was and all that stuff we know that he went to Philadelphia and back to pick people up the train all so there's a good chance that he would have went there and said hey you guys make superchargers how do we make one for a flathead I don't know but that's my guess because there wasn't a lot of companies making superchargers especially the style we need to look into it like the sliding vein style was not the ital and Scott blowers were Roots type blower um you have like the McCullough that was like a centrifugal type blower that is a different design so this design I think Judson used but there wasn't a lot of use of this they're very unique that's for sure yeah so you had said Mike that somebody had told you like some of the motorcycles uh on one of the posts on Instagram or Facebook someone had mentioned that like a Harley they use a sliding vein style supercharger sometimes oh okay so that would be kind of neat to uh obviously much much smaller but yeah yeah so but yeah it's pretty cool you could see the bottom on this um you know you can just stick your hand up finger up in there direct Port direct Port if you get the ant light just right you can see it just goes it just goes down in how they made the mold but this graphite material whatever it is there's it's just everywhere so this is the wear item obviously on it we were wondering when we first got it I'm like it doesn't look like there's a sleeve in there so I would I would have thought originally there would have been like a steel sleeve pressed in there or sacrificial sleeve and then you would have this run against them but no they did it the opposite way the veins are sacrificial so as they spin and wear so I'd be curious to how long do these veins last I don't know but I mean it's a pretty soft material but yeah well I guess there's a a good portion of material still in the slot oh so it would wear that makes sense I mean yeah it's whatever amount you allow stick out before it's I mean you could see where it was sliding to see the line oh yeah to like there so you can see it's only sliding and then you have that that's probably why they did it you have to you have all of this you know you need that much stick out so you still have right yeah there you go so you still have like this much of wear area so that there's probably Judson probably has or whoever made those probably had a number that was like remove the vein and when it gets to this Dimension it needs to be replaced yeah that's that's kind of cool so if we could find it's good this is the part that like when I bought this stuff I I did not get it cheap I in fact I probably paid more money than most sane people would pay for it well you're not saying so it's I'm not saying I told the people that when I was buying it I'm like I'm out of my mind but the Allure to me is being able to take this original one apart see how it was made and try and replicate the pieces to make three of these um so now that we have these veins we can find a suitable replacement for them and we have dimensions and everything else so we can work with some people that are much more talented and smarter than I am to make these oh do you know why they're probably graphite coated it creates a lubricant graphite's like a uh so it doesn't wear as bad yeah you just can't throw metal down inside yeah exactly well the thing you were saying about Metal it's kind of weird though it's so far this is the center of the blower you can see from being shiny so it would have had to get almost all the way up here to break so it almost have to be like something fell in on the side and then made it up to the front yeah that with how shiny it is I I have wonder if something had fell sitting on the shelf oh you know what else it could have been that might fall right around where the intake ports are so if someone flipped it over and something fell inside through the intake yeah it's hard to say I saw the old photos of how it was stored and it was just Dusty as on the Shelf stored like this so but something could have fell in it who knows yeah but that looks sort of fresh but it could just be that it's been covered for all these years and that might be why they stopped using it because something happened but super cool so and you could definitely tell it was used like that's oh yeah this thing's definitely been run which is really neat so I would like to just clean the nest out of the back of this one and slide it together because two carburetors is cooler than one I mean duh can you put two carburetors on that on a shelf or no Too Tall well we'll make it work all right so uh we went through everything and it's pretty cool it's just gonna for now be a back burner project we're gonna set it on the Shelf I thought it'd be kind of cool just for display purposes because I really want the 221 for myself someday to put on a car so just for fun we're gonna see if this all slides into this it looks like this back piece has been machined so we're hoping slide this one to that that's it yeah I'm just gonna find the hole downside is this functionalities that's okay but oh cool with two carburetors sitting on the shelf like I wonder if they ran one of these because this is so far forward of the water pumps yeah that would have been your tensioner for the water pumps straight up and down probably yeah right right because you're replacing the generator that would have been on top of the intake yeah it might be right you put a longer crank pulley off the front what if they have a double pulley maybe that looks pretty far forward even for a double pulley all right so that was our dissection of the uh Marksman supercharger that we found so um again we were trying to go through this to just take a look and see what was inside how uh difficult or not difficult it was going to be to reproduce some of these parts I think the aside from the center rotor section most of the Machining uh isn't too involved obviously we need to have a the part 3D scanned or a mold and a mold made so that we could cast the front portion and we may we're not sure yet I'm sure we're going to get the questions are we going to reproduce these I don't know if we're going to the person that we're working with does small runs of um of cast speed equipment so to speak so if we can work with someone to maybe make a piece that's inspired by this I am not looking to totally reproduce exactly this part I think it's very neat that that there is only like three of them known and probably if there is others out there not many more so to keep it kind of for the thrill of the hunt so to speak I don't want to flood the market by making a hundred of these superchargers so if we do do something we may do something that's inspired by but may not have the lettering or something like that but do not email us and Bug us asking when we're going to make these superchargers all we're going to do is try and put these three back together and as I always say put them on cars and have them driving again and out on the road and racing and running around because I think that's what this obscure speed equipment even though a lot of it is valuable and sitting on shelves I think it should be put on cars and used and uh with today's knowledge and Technology I think some of the stuff that wasn't usable back in the day with a little bit of tweaking might be a lot better this is a good example we may be able to find better materials or a way to sleeve it or something to get it to actually produce more boost or be more reliable so that's the goal and that's an insight into this really rare piece of speed equipment that we now have the key to the treasure box for so thanks for following I appreciate it let me know what you think about the Marksman supercharger and if you know you know of someone that has one definitely would love to see more photos or if you know any history on these definitely send us an email irontrapgarage gmail.com thanks guys foreign [Music]

Channel: IronTrap Garage

Views: 132,770

Keywords: irontrap, iron trap, iron trap garage, irontrap garage, matt murray, hot rod, street rod, rat rod, traditional hot rod, barn find, barn find hunters, kustom, trog, the race of gentleman, vlog, the hamb, jalopy journal, model a, model t, roadster, coupe, picking, american pickers, early ford, ford, how to, how it works, how its made, supercharger, boost, blower, marshman, flathead

Id: ZAWQqcbFQM4

Length: 26min 20sec (1580 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023