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The MAG supercharger |
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Not many pages can be found about MAG
compressors while surfing on the net. Most times they will include a
B&W picture from the beaten track of H.Elfrink’s « making the VW go
» book and a short mention on the system. Elfrink’s book doesn’t
either provide much information, except for important carb settings. As my speciality is vane superchargers for
aircooled VW engines and the MAG is a lobe type supercharger, I present
this subject here because of the importance it has for the oldspeed engine
preparation. An excellent website to enlarge information about MAG
superchargers is the Swiss based www.oldspeed.ch The MAGs are very precise machines, produced
with the best Swiss accuracy and tight tolerances. The maker, Motosacoche
S.A. of Geneva, Switzerland, developed in the fifties-sixties quite a few
models of supercharger kits adapted to certain popular vehicles of the
time. Nowadays it is out of business. The MAGs were marketed only as complete kits, the blower on its own was not obtainable. I present MAG kits for French cars in another page of this website
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By design, the MAG blower doesn’t provide such
high boost as the Judson but enough to liven up a split bug or an oval
trying to negotiate a steep Swiss road mountain. The Solex 32 PBIC mounted
with the kit in replacement of the 28 PCI does count for that improvement. The VW MAG kit is to be mounted on 36 SAE hp (30
hp DIN) VW aircooled engines. The kit consists of A) a Roots type blower
with two half pulleys (a belt tensioning method using shims, similar to
that of the VW engine dynamo pulley), sitting on a platform welded onto a
36 hp manifold; B) four different pipe elements that conform the
combination of elbows needed to conduct fresh air from the filter to the
carb, from there into the blower intake and from the blower outlet into
the manifold ; C) a clever linkage set up that uses the standard gas cable
without any modification ; D) a hand operated oiler that functions as a
jerringue to inject, by pulsions, SAE 60 motor oil into the tiny gear sump
located in the back of the blower. These oil injections should be made at
regular intervals – tipically every 200 miles or so – to compensate
for the oil losses this sump has into the rotors chamber. E) a specific
crankshaft pulley and belt and F) the necessary (metric) hardware to
install the whole kit.
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| This kit was designed, the same as the rest of
MAGs from the catalog, to use the original air cleaner, an oil bath type
in the case of the VW. An interesting possibility of this kit was to
install it in the engine bay of a Karmann-Ghia or a type 2 VW, a barndoor
or a bus, for example. The clever disposition of the elements of the kit
were of great help for this purpose, and the relatively small space
required by the harmonious set up resulted in a coherent implantation of
the same in the engine bay of bugs. I will be expanding this section on the MAG supercharger in the future, including a couple pages in French language about the MAG. For the moment being, I insert a copy of the mounting instructions for one of my most rare superchargers, a MAG for a Panhard car. |
