unboxing my BOOST DISTRICT LSA Supercharger Kit

every modification that i've done to this step side silverado over the last six months has been preparing for today today is the day we're going to start the supercharging process of this truck and i cannot wait to get started i just got everything unboxed the parts look awesome and it's gonna totally transform how this truck drives how it sounds and how it looks under the hood i've always wanted a supercharger and ever since i worked at redshift back in like i think this is probably seven years ago we had a cadillac cts-v on the dyno we did a bunch of work to it you know different cylinder heads different cam shaft long tube headers um i totally forget how much power it made on the dyno it was really strong i remember that but the one thing that is kind of like burned into my memory is the sound that that supercharger made on the dyno just that kind of whining the screaming sound [Music] you've probably heard one before but today we're going to start the install so i can have that sound of my own on my silverado now this build has been probably no maybe six months in the making i bought the truck back in august of last year and one of the first things that i did was pull the engine out of the truck because it was like super leaky just about every gasket on this engine was puking oil out of it but it was also a good opportunity to reinforce the bottom end because i knew we'd be forcing a bunch of air into it i wasn't quite sure if i was going to do a turbo or a supercharger but obviously we're going a supercharger but to help prepare the engine for that you know i installed some arp head bolts i installed some mls head gaskets it's got a different camshaft different valve train long tube headers a full exhaust which i just finally got dialed in to where i'm happy with it which thanks for your patience on that guys because i know you hate seeing video after video of me welding exhaust but it was a prom a process and i was bound and determined to be able to use a four inch tailpipe and i finally got it dialed in to where i want it so now it's time to move on to the fun stuff but anyway yeah we got the engine completely prepared for boost and it's not necessarily something that you have to do because these you know ls truck motors are fairly strong so i could put the parts that you're about to see on whether or not i had done these upgrades so don't think that it's necessary that you have to do that if you want a supercharger truck but it's definitely good insurance if you're going to go through the effort now also i wanted to kind of bring back my little uh 4.8 versus 8.1 shootout because that was kind of a great comparison to do and we did the naturally aspirated version this truck made 275 horsepower at the rear wheels you know we did a long tube the long tube headers full exhaust camshaft valve train upgrades and so on and that bumped us up by i forget what it was another 60 horse or something like that but anyway the next stage of the build is comparing my turbo 8.1 at low to medium boost to this engine at a similar level so my next benchmark of build is a goal of somewhere right around 480 to 500 horsepower at the wheels i think we have what it takes to make it happen so first of all i wanted to give a big shout out to the guys over at boost district because they're the ones that sold me this kit and they have just about everything that you'll need to supercharge your ls powered or lt powered gm car truck if you've got a silverado if you've got a corvette a camaro you know a pontiac g8 a chevy ss whatever it is if you want to supercharge it check them out because they have all kinds of kits and just about everything that you would ever need and they even have you know the accessories like different size pulleys and they build motors they do all kinds of stuff but we got a complete supercharger kit for them so let's jump right in and kind of go over all the parts now of course the central piece right here is the supercharger itself this is a 100 brand new gm lsa supercharger now this is a zl1 lid that comes from the camaro version which has the water outlets for the intercooler on the front side the cts-v lid does have the outlets on the back side and everything that i've read seems to think that the zl1 lid does flow just a little bit better and offers a little bit better cooling so that's awesome and plus i just kind of like how this looks compared to the cts-v lid anyway but the fuel line i believe that is actually from a cts-v because it has the inlet on the driver's side here where i think the zl01 fuel rail actually comes in on the passenger side over here so that will make life a little bit easier because on the gen 3 and gen 4 trucks the fuel line comes in right there on the driver's side now the one thing you will notice is my year of truck has a return style of fuel system which means i will have to get a regulator in there a lot of guys just do the chevy corvette style filter slash regulator which you can make that work but i don't really like how it looks so i'll probably wind up going with like an aftermarket adjustable fuel pressure regulator with a gauge on it just because honestly it's just kind of for looks and nothing more but um yeah that's i think what that's the route i'm going to take there um in terms of changes that they've made to the supercharger like i said this is all brand new but they do press off the stock pulley and they install this aftermarket one this is a griptech pulley which means it's going to help prevent belt slip and all that kind of stuff it's a 2.55 inch upper i'm not sure what the boost level this is going to put out with the truck balancer but i do know i'm probably going to try to upgrade this to like a 245 or a 238 because i mean we want as much power as we can and i've got the motor built to accept pretty much anything we can throw at it so as long as we don't have belt slip which we shouldn't we are going to be downsizing that at some point we've also got a i believe this is the brake booster line it'll kind of go on there and go over to the the vacuum booster on the firewall the lid also comes with the both map sensors it comes with the inlet air temp sensor it comes with a little bypass valve and everything's already hooked up to go to get installed into the truck in terms of wiring there's a few adapters that they've got here this one is going to go on to the map sensor so you don't have to do any splicing if you don't want to it'll plug into the map sensor there and plug into the stock truck wiring harness for the other side it also has the little pigtail for the inlet air temp sensor once again so that will plug right in we've got a bunch of gaskets we have gaskets for the adapter plate and we have gaskets for the intake or the supercharger side we've got the gasket for the heat exchanger we've got a bunch of hardware right here this is basically to convert the truck accessories that we have and to move everything out of the way so this will reuse the alternator it reuses the power steering pump and maybe the idler and but it just kind of moves things out of the way because the lsa kind of comes down this way and i think the alternator would be in the way so they've got the adapter kit there i also did order from them i upgraded the injectors these are fic 850 so we'll have plenty of fuel flow to go with that they also provided the injector adapters down there we have the this is kind of key to making this conversion work because the lsa supercharger uses a rectangle port head like the ls3 and the lsa and i think there's one more but anyway the truck engines obviously is a cathedral port head in this year so boost district makes an aluminum adapter plate you've got the nice machined o-ring grooves on the one side and you've got the flat surface on the other for the supercharger to sit on and it'll convert from that rectangle port down to the cathedral port like i said you kind of you need these or to switch cylinder heads but i kind of i like this idea it's got the hardware for that and then we have the stuff for the heat exchanger because on the bottom side of the lid if i can pick this up one-handed without dropping anything um you can see in there that's the heat exchanger so the air enters up from the supercharger there and it passes through the heat exchanger to be cooled off and liquid gets pumped through these fittings and it goes through a low temp radiator that's going to be installed in the front of the truck so this is their upgraded heat exchanger it's a little bit on the big side but we're just going to have to get a little creative in terms of how we mount it up there in the grill but that's important to having a good running supercharged engine we want to have as low inlet air temps as possible and then we've got the reservoir and then we've got the fluid pump this is the what was the rating on this one 23 liters per minute so that'll move quite a bit of water and then we've got a wiring harness for that so basically that is all the parts that we have from boost district that's their kit and i cannot wait to get started on the installation now there are going to be a few things that i need to get on my own to finish the installation just a couple of small odds and ends the first one i kind of already mentioned that's the fuel pressure regulator and just some way to connect the fuel lines up to the supercharger and the next big one is going to be the air intake system we're going to have some filter and some sort of an intake tube the lsa blower mounts the throttle body kind of off to the driver's side but on the silverado they have the air filter mounted on the passenger side and i have seen guys just kind of make like a 120 degree bend with a pipe that runs over here and they'll stick a filter somewhere in that corner which would work the option i think i'd like to try would be actually mounting the filter over here on the driver's side but to do that we'd have to relocate the battery using like a duramax battery tray so we can put it over there have to rerun a few battery cables and then the only other thing i don't know right now is just where the accessory drive is going to fit and how much clearance we're going to have around like the upper radiator hose the pcm mount battery cables and all that stuff so i think aesthetically what i'd like is to have the filter over here but depending on how much clearance we have it may wind up over there so i'm not sure yet the only other thing the most annoying thing that i'm going to have to build is a throttle cable bracket because of course the gen 4 ls is what the lsa supercharger came on these were all drive by wire where my older silverado was drive by cable as you just saw so we need some sort of a bracket i'm not sure if i mentioned this already but motion raceworks does have a really trick looking billet bracket that goes between that bolts there and that bolt there but from the pictures they don't show it with the fuel rail installed so i think it i could be wrong but it looks like it would interfere with the fuel rail so i'm not sure if i can buy that bracket or if i will have to build one of my own because if i can't use that hole there is another hole on the top of the supercharger light that guy right there i could use so we'll see how that works out so just keep that in mind if you have a cable throttle body you'll have to make some sort of a bracket you will need to get some hoses i think just regular 5 8 inch heater hose like you can find the parts store to connect your heat exchanger to the intercooler to the pump to the reservoir and all that good stuff but i think for the most part that's all that i'm going to have to get on my own to wrap up this kit and the last thing i wanted to address though is why did i decide to go with a supercharger or a root style supercharger for that matter over the other options that are out there you know turbo charging or even a centrifugal supercharger um a centrifugal supercharger they're great they're simple they don't make a lot of heat but the only reason i didn't choose a centrifugal like a a procharger or a vortec or a torque storm is because they have a linear boost curve that's linear with rpm so down at the lower rpm ranges you're not making a lot of boost and yes this is a high rpm engine relatively but it doesn't make a lot of torque down low so i wanted to choose a power adder that would sort of help make up where this 4.8 is lacking and that's the low to mid rpm range so a centrifugal was out although mechanically they are a great design the next runner-up i think in my mind was a turbocharger and it was kind of almost a tie but the one of the reasons why i didn't want to go with a turbo is because i already have a turbo truck like the ugly truck that's got a big s480 on it and that's kind of like my quote-unquote race truck that's going to be built up to you know 1500 horsepower eventually um and you can make a turbo streetable you know don't get me wrong that wasn't necessarily that my thought process that a turbo truck is not streetable but i wanted to have something with great response i kind of wanted to try a supercharger to get rid of turbo lag and just like i said mainly try something different also this is a sorta heavy vehicle compared to like a car it's going to be all-wheel drive so i wanted as much hit or punch or boost or whatever right off the line so that's kind of the thought process behind choosing a supercharger and the lsa engines that these were bolted to were rated at like 550 or 580 horsepower somewhere in there and we've got room to grow because we have a little bit we've got some room left we can go with a smaller pulley we can do porting on here we can put a bigger throttle body on and then if i get tired of this with the 4.8 like i can always install a different engine underneath the blower like i could put a 5 3 or a 6 0 or a 6 2 even i could put you know i could find a like an ls3 and i could do a 24 x conversion on it and stick it in this truck or i could do like 408 stroker we could do all kinds of different things to make more power while still using this lsa blower because we've got a good solid foundation this is brand new these will last practically forever we've got a good big heat exchanger i think i may have that core welded up just to kind of reinforce it a little bit and prevent any problems if we run a higher boost level um but that's kind of my thought process guys i want to try something different i want low end torque and i want the cool sound that that blower is going to make so come back next time i think we're going to start the installation right away i don't have anything planned ahead of this right now so we'll get the truck torn down we'll start to get things mounted up and there will be a few things we have to build like i said the air intake will get the intercooler mounted up front but i'm so excited and i cannot wait to get this truck done and my plan is right now i want to get this thing down to ls fest in april in las vegas we should have the all-wheel drive conversion done by then we should have the supercharger done by then and i can't wait to get this truck out on the track thanks for watching guys we'll catch you again soon

Channel: Lawrence LT Tolman

Views: 61,393

Keywords: supercharger, lsa install, boost district, lsa supercharger, supercharged 4.8, supercharged LS, cammed ls, blown silverado, gmt800, lsa installation, supercharger vs turbocharger, lsa installation instructions, supercharged 4.8 ls, boost district lsa truck kit, boost district lsa, supercharged 4.8 vortec, lsa supercharger on 6.0, lsa supercharger on 5.3, supercharger whine, supercharged escalade, supercharged f150, whipple, magnuson, eaton, eaton TVS, TVS1900, roots supercharger

Id: H-IoOS3krnU

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 20 2022