Homemade Roots Blower: Second revision of the rotor profiles

Hopefully This will be the final designs of the Roots lobes before I start making it.

I decided to design a 3 lobe and 2 lobe rotor that would be compatible with supercharger case I designed, I will see which works out best by testing it in use. I will most likely make the 3 lobe first since I feel that the 3 lobe design is better.

I do not have any keyway broaches, for now I will just have drilled holes for the keyways. I plan on using a 1/8 round nose endmill to cut grooves into the shaft so that i can insert a 1/8 inch metal rod to lock together the rotor and the drive shaft. No idea how well that would work out though.

This 3 lobe is significantly smaller than what I had originally planned mostly due to the size restrictions of my small mill. The entire assembly is much smaller too.

Some advantages I see with the 2 lobe rotors is using less raw materials to make one and less machining required. Unlike the 3 lobe above, the centers of radii is different between the male and female lobes. I designed it this way because when they are equal, the center section becomes too thin to properly support the rotor.


I also made a rotor profile that just looked like an oval blob, was surprised that it actually works but the swept volume was very low so it's not very practical.

Next I will probably try to make a lysholm style rotor.

Rebar Paintball gun / marker display stand

Something I made last year to hold one of my paintball markers.

I made this stand from some scrap rebar and mild steel I had around the garage. I basically just heated the rebar with a oxy acetylene torch until bright red and bent it on a vise. The two supporting plates was MIG welded onto the rebar.

My Karnivor on the rebar marker stand

This stand is very sturdy but if I were to make another one, I would have placed the side supports farther back closer to the paintball marker's center of gravity.

I used rubber tape to cover all the areas of rebar that would make contact with my paintball marker.

The length and angle is a bit unequal for the paintball tank support area, my next one will probably be better since for this one I made all my cuts and bends by eye.

The side supports that keep everything upright is made from some scrap that I MIG welded together.

WGP Karnivor Autococker
MQ2 Valve
Tadao Yakuza Board
Palmers Fatty regulator
Invert Too loader

Homemade Roots Blower: Almost done with the design

All i need to do now is print out the drawings and cut a prototype out of plastic or some type of hardwood.

I think my next few posts will be the drawings/blueprints of the individual components. 

If I make this out of wood I would probably just print out the drawing, glue it onto a block of wood and jigsaw out the profile of the part.

If I am to use this as a supercharger as originally planned, this would need to be made out of aluminum at least... as I'm sure gasoline and wood does not mix well especially if I am trying to keep close tolerances on the wood.

New toy, a threaded barrel Ruger 77/22 .22lr bolt action rifle

With the threaded barrel this gun should respond nicely to floating the barrel.

You can tell it is threaded because there are some exposed threads if you look in the right place. This picture shows the actual threading on the 77/22 receiver and barrel.

I plan on floating the barrel and doing some trigger mods to lighten and shorten the trigger pull.
Still deciding on how much bedding I will do to the 77/22


The first thing I did when I got the gun was to disassemble and clean everything... well the manual instructions to disassemble the bolt was really bad, it took me like 5 mins to figure out what the instructions was trying to tell me and took some trial and error to get everything apart.

To save people the trouble I went through, I decided to make a video showing how it is done.

Whipple Supercharger W140AX Sight Glass Cleaning

I usually change my supercharger oil whenever it turns really dark.
The last time I changed the supercharger oil I noticed it was getting hard to see the oil level through the sight glass.

... this time when I went to change the oil, this is what i saw

I could not see anything at all, even in bright sunlight and using a flashlight all I could see was blackness. The supercharger gear case could have been empty for all I know.

Not knowing the proper way to clean that sight glass or even if I could remove it or not, I did not want to risk damaging anything or risk knocking my car out of commission so I decided to contact Whipple Superchargers and ask them what I could do.
Their response was:
"You can unscrew it to clean it. There is an o-ring seal behind it that is reuseable. You will need a 23mm socket and it will need to be ground or machined down to clear the cover."

They are right about the clearance issue, none of my 23mm sockets would fit it, and I did not want to mar it or risk stripping the nut with pliers or a wrench. The sight glass looked like it was made of aluminum and expensive to replace too.

I then went out and bought a cheap 23mm socket to grind down... I did not take any pictures of the unground socket but I'm sure you all know what a normal socket looks like.

But a ground socket looks like this

I think i did a pretty good job, though there is a slight taper to it probably due to my lack of grinding skills...

... it still works though, thats all that really matters.


I decided to measure the outside diameter of the ground socket

The diameter of the ground socket came out to around 1.151 inch.


Now back to the supercharger, not knowing how much oil was in the supercharger I decided to drain it all using a very crappily made suction/vacuum thing.

Removing the oil fill plug was probably the easiest step

I noticed that the o-ring seal was cut by the threads.

I will probably have to replace that o-ring sometime in the future


In goes the suction hose and out comes the oil

After all the oil was sucked out, I replaced the plug due to it snowing a bit outside and I did not want anything getting into the supercharger.


Now it's time to remove the sight glass with my newly ground 23mm socket.

It came out rather easily.


It looked dirtier that I expected

There was black film of something sticking to the inside of the glass...

You can sort of see through it if you brought it up to the light.


But if the background is dark...

A view inside

Dug out an old can of carb cleaner to wash the sight glass off

It takes a lot of carb cleaner to spray all the grime off both sides of the white plastic part

Finally it is clean

Time to screw the sight glass back in

Not too tight due to the aluminum threads and o-ring seal

This looks almost like new

I refill my supercharger with GM Supercharger Oil

Filled to the halfway point according to the manual.

This is what it looks like with the engine running.