Supercharging Blower
Prototypes
A Southern California Supercharger
Manufacturer Turns to CNC Machining and Mastercam to
Speed R&D and
Prototype Production.
The Blower Shop president-founder, Ron
Hayes, works with Mastercam Version 3X. He uses SolidWorks, Mastercam
and a Haas VF5 to produce short run parts and prototypes for
superchargers he designs
Figure out what you love to do and make a career of it. That way you’ll never have to work for a living. That’s advice frequently given by guidance counselors to people who are unhappy in their work.
For Ron Hayes, however, founder-president of Santa Clarita, CA’s The Blower Shop, disliking what he does for a living will never be a problem.
“I love what I’m doing,” he says. “I love working with my hands. I love to program things. My wife says I’m having an affair, you know, a love affair with my Haas VF5, with my Mastercam and with building superchargers for drag racers, drag boats and for street rods. It’s like getting paid to play and have fun.”
Hayes got started making superchargers when his father bought a company called Bowers Blowers in 1984, but didn’t make a go of it.
“Dad was building funny car bodies and thought it would be a good side business to do superchargers along with the fiberglass car bodies,” Hayes recalls. “So he purchased Bowers. He closed it down soon, though, because it was too hard to run two businesses at the same time. It was sitting doing nothing when I finished four years of college and started looking for a job. Dad said, ‘Take it, see what you can do with it. I’ll give you a year.’”
After finishing school, Hayes says he really didn’t know what he wanted to do.
“I had an interest in automotive and in superchargers,” he says, “and I didn’t have anything else better to do, so I accepted dad’s challenge.”
Mastercam screen showing a 3D view of a
supercharger rotor. Rotors can range from 15” to 19” in length. With a
growing shortage of scrap rotors, Hayes purchased Mastercam and a Haas
VF5 to have the ability to do R&D and prototyping, mainly of the rotors,
which vary from supercharger to supercharger and are short-run
production items.
Hayes was lucky enough to have a good teacher right from the beginning.
“Fortunately, Larry Dixon Sr.. a former drag racer, worked for my dad at the time,” he recalls. “He had worked at Bowers building superchargers when the business was still going, I spent a year learning the industry from Larry, and he didn’t hold back. He taught me everything he knew about building superchargers.”
At that time most superchargers were produced using rotors pirated from diesel engines built by Detroit Diesel.
“Over time Detroit Diesel probably produced about two million super chargers for diesel engines,” Hayes says. “Larry taught me how to buy the cores from the wrecking yards. The cores could have two or three hundred thousand miles on them, so they were greasy and dirty. We had to clean them up, and sometimes rub them up, sand them, balance them, get them in perfect working condition again. We had a 20% scrap rate on the rotors.”
The old Bowers supercharger company had three manual Bridgeports and two manual lathes in its equipment arsenal, all of which Hayes learned to use from scratch.
“Once we had the rotors cleaned up, we manufactured the housings and end plates and all the other parts needed to produce a supercharger,” he says. “I worked hard that year and I learned a lot. I learned to manually bore the cases and to machine the rotors for the Teflon strips that are used in blowers for drag racers.”
During that learning year Hayes mostly produced superchargers for boat and racing dragsters.
“The main differences were in the clearances needed, which, in turn depended on the type of fuel being used,” he says. “The hotter the fuel, the looser the clearances. For instance, blowers on motors that run alcohol can actually ice up. Superchargers on gasoline engines run up to 300 degrees, so you have to allow for the heat expansion of the metals. Otherwise, most of the superchargers are similar, with some variations in sizes and tolerances.”
Why Superchargers?
Normal engines get air to burn fuel by sucking it in through a carburetor or other system. But by adding a supercharger, say on a 350 Chevy motor, the horsepower can be doubled.
“A supercharger can boost air pressure in the manifold,” Hayes explains. “A 300 horsepower engine can be boosted to 550-600 horsepower by adding a supercharger. People who want more power for their street rods and drag racers don’t really have a choice. If they want the power, they have to have a supercharger.”
The Blower Shop
Hayes continued working for his father at the old Bowers shop until 1995, then went to work for Weiand Automotive.
“I ran their blower division until 1998 when Holley Carburetor bought them out and moved the company back to Kentucky,” Hayes says. “That’s when I made the decision to kick off The Blower Shop, Inc. I was tired of working for other people and decided my time had come.”
During his first 15 years in the business, Hayes had served the top fuel and alcohol dragster and drag boat market by building high-performance superchargers. But this time around, he decided to make a switch to building superchargers for street rodders and boat racers.
“It was a matter of market size,” he says. “There are a lot more street rodders out there than drag racers, so it seemed like a good way to expand. I hired an ex-Weiand salesman. Together we went after the street and the marine market, and that was when we really built up the business.”
Today, The Blower Shop has 6 employees working in a 7,500-sq-ft facility.
“We’ve done really well,” Hayes says. “We’ve been instrumental in developing leading-edge technology and increased performance of “roots” type superchargers. And, today, using our proprietary UDA technology, we manufacture a complete line of superchargers and components, including low profile 192 CID, 250 CID, and traditional 6-71, 8-71,
10-71, and 14-71 blowers that are as beautiful and well made as they are powerful. At the moment, we’re working on breaking into the high-performance drag racing market again using our new technology.”
A Chevy Nova street rod with a supercharger kit
installed from The Blower Shop.
To satisfy all the variations of his products Hayes maintains and produces about 2,500 different part numbers. One supercharger kit consists of 20-25 parts.
“Most of those parts are jobbed out to local machine shops,” he says, “which works fine, but our technology is changing rapidly. We’re constantly changing and testing new configurations, and that’s very difficult to have done outside. We needed to be able to make changes fast and to produce short run parts on demand without having to buy them in longer runs. So, we decided to buy a CNC mill and Mastercam to run it.”
A year ago Hayes turned to Tom Shelar at CAD/CAM Consulting, Inc. for help in deciding what to buy.
“We already had SolidWorks from Tom,” he says. “So I told Tom what I wanted to do, and he recommended Mastercam version X3 and several different VMCs. I settled on a Haas VF5 50-taper vertical mill with a 30-hp motor. The only problem was I was a manual machinist. I didn’t know anything about programming or CNC machining.”
To solve that problem, Hayes signed up to take a class in Mastercam.
“I wanted to take a class to learn the Haas, too,” he says, “but the two classes overlapped, so I chose the Mastercam, which was more complex, I thought.”
As it turned out, it wasn’t as difficult to learn as he expected.
“I was able to learn the Mastercam very quickly,” he says. “At first I was frustrated, because I couldn’t get the models to program right, but it turned out our solid models weren’t made right. Once I learned to get them right, Mastercam has worked like a charm. I was making parts the first week the Haas was here. I’m really pleased.”
At present Hayes is producing 20 different parts in house, including his own rotor designs.
“We’re doing the parts that are short runs or that are in some stage of R&D,” he says. “Some day, though, I’m hoping we’ll be doing them all in house. That’s my goal.”
Blower shop owner-president Ron Hayes producing one
of his rotors on his new Haas VF5.
