Well, I'm still debating if I recommend it to "anyone". At this point, I wouldn't recommend it to people who don't know quite a bit about engines. You do introduce a lot of extra stress and heat to your engine and increase the likelihood of damage. The power gained is amazing, there's no doubt about it. If you're accustomed to driving fast, high-power vehicles (before this truck, and the blazer before it, I had NEVER owned a vehicle with less than 300 horsepower...Mustang cobras, Trans Ams, Camaros, etc) the xcharger will make you feel a bit more "at home". I am accustomed to having tons of power at my beck and call.
If you feel comfortable diagnosing minor problems that may come along with your engine, then I'd say go for it with the supercharger. If you're going to drive the crap out of the truck, don't get the supercharger, go buy a car/truck that's designed to be fast, such as a Lightning or Mustang GT.
I would like to see EE go with a fuel pump that is compatible with the sport trac. Doug told me that the fuel pump provided with the xcharger kit is from a focus, it's a pulse-modulated fuel pump. The fuel system on the sport trac is designed to work with a constant voltage fuel pump, NOT pulse modulation. I suspect that this could cause some problems down the road, even if it doesn't initially. Feeding constant voltage into something that isn't MADE for constant voltage is bound to cause problems sooner or later.
I would also like to see Dave get someone to actually tune EACH and EVERY sport trac that has the xcharger kit on it. No two tracs are alike, so one "canned" tune isn't going to fly since there are so many mods that a person can do to their vehicle. I don't know how Dave could do that, I suspect that he would have to have multiple tuners throughout the country, who would be willing to tune the tracs after an xcharger kit is installed. It was very thoughtful and generous of Doug to come up, spend his day and try to tune my trac. However, I don't think that he should have given up until the problem was FIXED, or he had a definite diagnosis on what the problem was. As it stands now, my problem could be injectors, fuel pump, fuel lines, fuel rails or any of a dozen other things. In all fairness, I went with a 0.2" smaller pulley, which would allow a little more air to be forced into the cylinders, but it shouldn't make all that much difference in the grand scheme of things, and the supercharger was still running well within its rated limits. Now I have switched back to the "stock" pulley, and I am still having all kinds of troubles. The very day I put the supercharger on I started hearing that thumping noise, however, it never had any adverse effect on performance and it happened so rarely that I didn't think much about it.
Explorer Express has only sold 80-something of these kits, so I guess they're still in the learning process. However, it doesn't seem to me like they're doing much to continue learning. I mean Doug had NEVER tuned an xcharged sport trac, mine was the first, yet he is THE person EE uses to get the tunes from. It seems to me that EE would want everyone's experience to be as positive as possible, so getting any problems ironed out would be the first order of business. I haven't heard from Dave since the whole tuning fiasco last week. I will probably write him sometime this week, to let him know what's going on. Doug said he talked to Dave, and explained my problem(s) to him.
I just think I'd do things a bit differently if I was the person selling these kits. That's just my 2 cents worth.
So no, I wouldn't recommend them to MOST people who feel that they want a faster trac, at least not at this time. Once the tuning/tuner issue is fixed, as well as a proper fuel pump, and an INDIVIDUAL tune for EACH and EVERY new xcharger sold, then I would. When I say an individual tune, I don't mean telling Dave your engine code, I mean having Doug, Wayne o
