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Spud: what, again!?!

Hope for my Spud SE board becoming available ended when another forum member started selling his version of the same amp. I had figured that it would barely sell enough to recover costs, so there certainly is no sense in having two versions of the same design.

I had tossed the original board into a box of stuff that I routinely rob for parts. It is still in there with all it's parts, but hasn't been fired up in maybe 8 years. I traded all 200 of my 6LR8's for something I would use several years ago.

The schematic for the board is in post #23 so you could build one yourself using point to point wiring, use these Eagle files to make your own board, or buy one of the other guy's boards. I believe he calls it Novar Spud or something similar, and it can be found in the Tubes forum.

These are the files I used to make the schematic and PCB layout in Eagle 5.11. I do not use the newer versions due to Autocad's pricing structure. They are Zipped to fit the forums file requirements.

If anyone makes a batch of these boards, please send me one. I will build it and squeeze it for all it's got!
 

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PRR

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Joined 2003
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...I remember the Turbonique from a write up in Hot Rod magazine .....

A YouTube which re-discovers the Turbonique.
intro - Why the 1300 HP Turbo Axle Failed - YouTube
skip to - Why the 1300 HP Turbo Axle Failed - YouTube
That's the blow-through-carb version. Hard on the engine.
Axle version: Why the 1300 HP Turbo Axle Failed - YouTube
He seems to think it was a "thrust system", a rocket. Maybe a little, but IIRC most of the GO was a pinion onto the back of the axle sprocket to turn the wheels.
 
Back in the mid 80's I bought a 1982 Dodge Charger 2.2 (a two door Omni) for cheap that had been abused buy a teenage kid. I drove it as is for about a year until the transaxle scattered itself all over a road on my way home from work.

I shopped junkyards for a transaxle and found a wrecked 1984 Dodge Daytona with a nearly new turbo drive train. This prompted a complete gutting of the Charger and a year long construction project to build something that would smoke 5.0 Mustangs on the drag strip and pass a 1985 Corvette at 154 MPH on a deserted road. I did have some help from a guy named Shelby, and the engine builder for the Mosler Consulier GTP which was essentially a street legal race car with a Chrysler 2.2L engine.

Consulier GTP - Wikipedia

I still needed a way to get to work and back while my Charger sat in pieces, so I bought a dead 1981 Omni for $100 knowing that I had the running engine from the Charger sitting in my backyard. The omni only needed a cylinder head, so I fixed it and drove it while the Charger build was under way.

What do you do with a $100 car when you no longer need it, or want it.....roughly the same thing you do with some ugly old sweep tubes, except the Omni just refused to die. I tried to kill it several different ways, one was my $39 supercharger experiment.

This was a small electric leaf blower, a 1200 watt inverter a piece of 4 inch flexible drain pipe, and a set of jumper cables. We took the hood off the car, connected the drain pipe to the carburetor, and the jumper cables to the battery. Both came inside the car through the passenger window. The cables fed the inverter, which ran the leaf blower without the extension snout. My friend operated this stuff in the back seat while I drove the car.

I pointed the car down a long stretch of empty road and mashed the gas pedal. Once the engine got spinning good my buddy turned on the blower, then pointed it into the drain pipe. This was a carbureted engine without a rev limiter. I don't know how fast it spun but when a tire broke loose the tach passed its 7000 RPM limit. We learned not to apply "boost" at low speeds, or any time the throttle wasn't wide open. Either gasoline would be forced out of the carb and all over everything under the hood, or a backfire would blast the hose off the carb, sometimes blasting flames through the hose and into the car. We had about an hour of fun, and left about half of the right front tire all over the road, but decided to abandon the concept after a minor fire in the engine bay.

The little leaf blower definitely added some power to an anemic 84 HP 4 cylinder engine. It was nothing like the 142 HP turbocharged version of the same engine which I eventually took into the 220+ range. I doubt it would have done much on anything more powerful.

There were some electric superchargers on the market in the 1990's, but much like the Turbonique, they failed in the marketplace.

The Omni survived all of my attempts to blow it up, so I gave it to my brother in law. I think he drove it for a year or so before it "disapeared" one night. Nobody would steal that POS.