I befriended a gentleman yesterday who recently bought an S65 Brabus. He inspired me to find more power in my S55. I can't imagine having his horsepower but after spending countless hours on this forum I new I could find some more for my car.
So my supercharger would experience shut down on rare occasions when I would hammer on it for extended periods i.e. cranking up a mountain at high speeds. The shut downs were infrequent but after reading all the posts about the issue and especially someone's comments (I think Vadim and maybe others) that the ECU would retard timing I decided tonight to locate my pump for eventual replacement. Well one thing led to another and soon I had the pump out of the car and decided to bench test it to see how well it performed to later compare it to a new one. Unfortunately and to my surprise, I could not get it to work at all. That is when I decided to tear it apart to see how it worked. What I discovered was an incredible amount of black dust behind the pump and all inside the electric motor. I used a large amount of brake clean to remove the dust and tried once again to bench test the motor without the pump on it. It slowly spun over but soon slowed down and after about 30 seconds stopped spinning. In order to get it to spin again I had to start it spinning with my finger. I disassembled the electric motor and cleaned the armature with sandpaper. Once reassembled it was good as new. I reinstalled it and took the car for a spin. WOW! Not sure if it was the pump, my anticipation or the 50 degree cold air but it definitely has more power. ESP off standing start eased the throttle to wide open and the tires started spinning hard, eased off the gas and they kept spinning a bit till the car caught up. My car hasn't done that in quite some time. I also came through a familiar corner accelerating through 60 mph and the back end started coming around. That has never happened in that corner and I drive through it twice a day minimum.
I write this post for information to all but more importantly to thank all of you who post here and offer advice.
All the best,
Warren.

 

Nice job Warren! Unfortunately these pumps fail quite often,your's will fail again and maybe even soon.You would be better off just replacing it now with a Johnson Cm30 and save the wondering of "when",will the stocker fail again.Very easy job,even easier than rebuilding your stock one....so dont worry there.

 

Thanks JRocket. I plan on buying a Johnson and even sent an email to the girl on Ebay that sells them but never heard back and just forgot about it. I need to locate one from another source. Once I found out the stock pump wasn't working it was difficult to reinstall the known bad part without trying. I actually started to put it back in when my eyes started twitching and I got short on breath. lol

Another thing I checked while working on the Intercooler system is the heat exchanger. It was full of debris, bugs, gravel / sand and other. I took a hose to the back side of it and blew out a ton of junk, it just kept pouring junk out. I just visually inspected it and it still is not clean. I may end up pulling it off the car and putting the whammy on it to make it like new.

Do any of the members here clean their heat exchangers? I know they replace them with larger units but I'm sure many are not operating at 100% efficiency.

If you see a good source for the Johnson pump let me know.

Thanks,
Warren.

 

I havent had any debris clog up the HE,but it is very possible.then again i dont drive my car on bad weather days so that might be one reason.


I have a brand new Cm30 if your looking for one.