I actually bought a kit from Empire back in the end of January for this truck with the understanding that it would be 3-4 weeks from payment date until ship date pending no huge surprises, and that a functional kit was near completion. That time frame worked on our end, so we did it. As time progressed, and the ship date "evolved", they offered a full immediate refund when we decided the time table was unreasonable for this truck. They refunded me, and I got to work on building this setup. ...and no, I have nothing against empire for this. They made a serious effort to facilitate a product need not yet on the market. I appreciate the effort they made.
The concept of a super feeding into a turbo has always made sense to me under certain conditions. Everybody knows the main drawback of a super is the amount of horsepower it draws to drive it. Therefore, running a larger one here requires a big belt. To minimize horsepower draw, throw a turbo down stream of the super, and let it eat the pressurized air from the super. If sized right, the super supplies all the air on the bottom end of the rpm range, and as the turbo enters the map efficiency range, it takes over for the most part. You might be able to run both hard, and have crazy boost that works well, but I don't see the point in going there with this truck. Drivability is more important than peak power here.
The approach we are trying first on this truck is to leave the blower only feeding minimal positive air pressure into the turbo once the turbo is fully lit. There will be parasitic loss through all moving components of the super system, but at say 5 psi, the blower isn't drawing nearly the HP to spin it at any given rpm as it would at 30 psi. We will be playing with as many configurations as necessary to make this right, but our target is 800 hp without water or n2o. At that level, we should have awesome drivability, and "reasonable" reliability. Ask anyone making much more power with a heavy truck how reliable even billet 4r100 or 5r110 transmission shafts are for a daily driver, and you'll see why we chose that target power level. The owner is still considering a nitrous system, and the piping has bungs for the jets just in case, but that would be just for the occasional street race or whatever in a situation where reliability is not as important as making it home with his cargo.
