April 29, 2008 - Alan Dowds

A snatched pic of our Suzuki B-King, with a supercharger actually bolted onto the engine... ... Scroll down for the full story

Regular visitors will have noticed it's all been a little bit quiet on the Suzuki B-King front - and here's why! The bike's been in top drag-race engineering shop Psycleworkz in Peterborough, having the bracketry fabricated for the Procharger supercharger.

Making up a bracket to hold a tail tidy, or exhaust, or whatever, is one thing. But making a bracket to take the forces between a crankshaft and a spinning supercharger at 10,000rpm-plus is another thing. We also need to sort out a method of properly tensioning the belt as well.

Sean at Big CC Racing, who's masterminding the project has also been working out the pulley ratios required to suit - the supercharger blower spins at up to 80,000rpm, and the internal gearbox multiplies up the input shaft rotation by a factor of 4.7:1. So when the engine is at 10,000rpm, if we used a pair of identical pulleys between engine and charger (1:1 ratio), then the blower would be spinning at 47,000rpm. That'll make plenty of power, but nowhere near what you'd get from the full 80k rpm. So we'll probably use a slightly higher pulley ratio, so that when the engine is spinning at the 11,000rpm peak power zone, the blower is turning at nearer 60-70,000rpm.

Next up is how to fuel the thing. Sean has already produced a plenum chamber for a turbo B-King, so we have a way of mounting the injectors, and channeling the pressurised air into the engine. Getting the fuelling right is proving trickier than Sean expected - Suzuki's latest fuel injection is much less tuner-friendly than the old Hayabusa's setup. We think we're going to use a secondary ECU to run the second set of high-rpm injectors. Sean's looking at a Kronenburg fuel system from Holland.

More on the supercharged B-King setup in the next issue of SuperBike magazine.