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At work, we were busy with a project that would marinize a naturally aspirated Nissan VK45DE engine. The project was going well.
One day my boss called me in. He told me that there is a present waiting in the delivery area at work. He got Cosworth to develop a supercharger package for marine use. This was going to be a straight bolt-on kit that would deliver 450 Horsepower. Cosworth had done all the calculations. They were happy that this engine will be able to handle the boost without any problems. They said that this engine in its standard form will be able to handle 100 horsepower per liter.
First Dyno session
We got the engine setup on the engine dyno and started with mapping. This engine was set up with an MBE 975 ECU. This was a nice and compact setup. We went through the complete mapping of the engine doing all the sites. The engine was just not getting to the advertised 450 horsepower. Cosworth supplied us with 4 different ratio charger pulleys to fine-tune the boost to achieve the goal. This was a wicket engine. IT had a nice and flat torque curve and it made a full 455 Horsepower when we were done. We had to fit bigger injectors as we were running too close to a 95 percent duty cycle. The duty cycle is the percentage of the full flow of the injector. It is good practice to not run too close to a 100% duty cycle.
Talks of a race car.
At this stage, I was doing a lot of work on the engine dyno’s mapping engines. My boss came down to see me. He said that he may be getting a replica car kit for a Porsche 917. He was thinking of putting a supercharged Nissan VK45DE into the car. We had 2 of the supercharger prototypes from Cosworth. There was about 100 plus of the Nissan VK45DE engines in stock. My boss asked me to pull one of the VK45DE engines from stock. His words to me were “See how much you can get out of this engine with this supercharger kit”.
The 450 horsepower engine was boosting 0.3 bar and Cosworth said the engine was good for that. I wanted to run at least double that boost. I also wanted to still run on pump fuel as this would be a development motor. We may get to the point that we could have a high-performance unit for the future for the boats.
We stripped the engine down just leaving the crank in the block. I had to lower the compression on this engine. I designed the pockets for the pistons and new shapes for the combustion chambers. I aimed to get a compression ratio close to 8.5 to 1. This was a common ratio for boosted engines.
Dry what?
My boss came to me and said that he has ordered a dry sump pump and tank for the engine build. At this stage, I wasn’t too familiar with dry sump systems. A dry-sump system just means you don’t keep a volume of oil in your sump. The oil is kept in a separate oil lank that can keep a larger volume of oil. You have a special oil pump that is mounted externally on the motor. The oil is pumped from the main tank to the oil galleries. Multiple scavenge pumps would pump the oil from a flat sump back to the oil tank. This pump setup is usually only used on race cars or cars that the engine is mounted very low. This helps, where there is no space for an oil sump.
The pump my boss ordered was a Morosso oil pump. The Morosso pump is one of the big brands of oil pumps on race cars.
The Morosso pump had 3 stages. One stage was the pressure pump and the other two stages were the scavenge stages. The scavenge stages could pump air as well. The next thing I had to do was to design a dry-sump pan. As we had CNC milling machine at work I could design the part and we could machine it out of billet.
We machined the sump out of 6082-T6 aluminum, and I had it anodizes.
Driving the supercharger
The supercharger package made use of Lysholm supercharger internals. This was a very efficient supercharger. The max continuous RPM the supercharger could run was 12500 RPM. If the supercharger can run at 12500 RPM then that is what it would run on this engine. Because the belt loading would be a lot higher than on the 450 horsepower engine I decided to run a toothed belt. There was one thing in my way though. I could not get around the water pump easily. I decided to through out the mechanical water pump and go electric.
The engine was now ready for the dyno.
On the dyno with this beast.
At first startup, most of the people at work ran to the test cell. This engine sounded beastly. You could hear the whine of the supercharger from far. It took me about 2 days to fully map this engine. I ended up running a boost of just over 0.6 bar. The engine produced a healthy 560 horsepower and 635 Nm torque. My boss was very happy with this power output. Now it was just to get the car…
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17 thoughts on “Building a 560Hp Supercharged VK45DE”
Wanting to know wht all you did as for internal work. Did you guys mess with the pistons rods cams ect. If so where can I get some of these parts own a 2008 m45 and want more power looking into supercharging it
Hi Boosted_m45x
Unfortunately, there isn’t a bit aftermarket for the VK45DE engines. When we started this project way back there were no aftermarket parts for this engine. The standard VK45DE is good for 0.3 to 0.4bar boost on standard compression. This will give you around 450HP on the crank on pump fuel. Boosting more than that you will bend the rods if you don’t lower the compression. You can have a read at https://crasyideas.com/how-to-dropping-engine-compression-ratio/ about what we did to lower the compression. With this, we were able to run 560HP on the crank with pump fuel and later 700Hp with AVGAS and bigger supercharger. Hope this helps!
Thanks much appreciated. Would getting a better fuel pump and better fuel line help as well
Hi Boosted_m45x,
We never ran the VK45DE engine in a road car, we had a whole stack of these engines that we marinized. And then we used the engine in the Porsche 917 replica. I will not be able to tell you if the standard pump in your car will be able to deliver the proper fueling. What I can do is give you the part number of the fuel pump we used. The pump was a Bosch 044 0580254044 Pump. The Fuel line size we used was Goodridge -6 hoses and fittings. What I also did was to convert the fuel rails to a pump through system. The fuel will come in at the one rail, go to the next rail and then exit the second rail via a fuel pressure regulator. The standard one line fuel system didn’t work that great. Hope this answers your question.
Just remember supercharging the engine even if it is just 0.3 bar you will have to run bigger volume injectors as the standard injectors are too small. Smallest injectors I would run if you supercharge the engine is 550cc for the 450Hp to 560Hp range and 1000cc injectors if you looking ar running 700Hp+
Also if I did want to replace the pistons I would most likely have to take it to a good mechanic to find what works. But clearly I really won’t need to do this to reach that power just lower compression??
You can try and find a supplier for pistons for the VK45DE. If you do find a supplier it may be very expensive. The best way is just to lower the compression of the engine. The best way to do that is to machine the pistons. We did the pistons and the heads to get down to round about 8.5 to 1. I had a customer that only wanted to machine the pistons and they wanted 9.3 to 1 compression ratio. This was for a turbo drift car. They boosted 0.7 bar boost and made some crazy numbers. There is another option as well, you can get thicker head gaskets. We tried this option as well. There is too much work involved in this option. You need to modify the front cam chain cover, the VVT housings, the chain tensioners. This just put too many risks in the build. Hope this helps.
Hi Malik123,
You say you have an Infinity Q45, if so that has the VK45DE engine as we used. You just need to get a Lysholm of a Whipple 2.3liter per min supercharger, a charge cooler make a custom manifold and get a proper aftermarket ECU like Motec or Haltec. The supercharger to crank ratio needs to be in the range of 1.785 to 1. This means if the engine is running at 7000 RPM the supercharger will spin 12500RPM. This will give you a boost of 0.6 bar to 0.7 bar. Like I said in the post you will have to drop the compression ratio of the engine as well otherwize you will bend conrods. We have tried running standard compression when we built this motor but we bent and broke conrods. The highest reliable power you will make on standard compression is 450Hp and that is at 0.3 to 0.4 bar boost. Hope this helps.
Hahahaha, the picture you have of the standard engine is actually my engine! Ive bought it brand new (Cape Town, South Africa). Busy developing it to install it into my race car. Enjoyed your write up! Keep up the good work. I would love to come have a look at that engine with the charger on. Pop me a mail if you are avail. mareemario@yahoo.co.uk
Hi Mario, the engine you bought new in Cape Town, South Africa is from the company I worked for. We had a lot of those crate engines. The car that is running the supercharged VK45DE was sold last year to a guy in Johannesburg South Africa and is competing at Swartkops Raceway. If you read on you will find out what power we got to and how we got to it. I would love to see some pics of your development. Please send some pics to CHCrasyideas@gmail.com.
Hi Mario, you can also register for the forum if you want to discuss ideas for the VK45DE build. Would be nice to get some outside content on the forum side of the website.
Just checked my email, I got it. Thank you again! This is a big help.
Yesterday I saw a vk45 cosworth supercharger manifold for sale like the the one you guys used here, but it’s just the manifold. I was wondering if you could give me some names for the other stuff the kit came with. I noticed you mentioned it used the internals for a Lysholm supercharger, so I’m assuming I couldn’t just get one of those and have it bolt right up? Also what size pulleys did you end up using to get the 450hp figure? What about the other just out of curiosity? Also what did you use for intercooling if anything? What about the throttle body? Also anything that came in the kit that I might have missed. I’m part of a small community of people who drive Infiniti M45’s which have the VK45de in them and this was a huge thing to come across for us and it would be great to finally have a somewhat feasible way to boost our motors.
Hi David, the people call that a Cosworth supercharger manifold but it is not. We original had Cosworth develop a supercharger package as per the above post. We only ever had two of those chargers. I had to redesign the casings so it works with a bolt on Lysholm or a Whipple supercharger. We had the casings cast and we machined them inhouse. There wasn’t ever in a kit form. We just had a part list and we pulled the components we needed out of stock. There should be 3 castings in total that makes up the unit. The manifold, charge cooler housing and the intake housing. The charge cooler housing houses 4 Laminova cores for charge cooling. The intake housing was designed to run 2 off VK45DE throttles as the one throttle was to small. You will see more of the supercharger setup in the later posts. I can’t really remember the ratios we ran, it was a long time ago we run the VK45DE at 450Hp. I would not exceed 0.4bar boost on standard compression as you may bend rods. We ran 8.5:1 ratio to be able to boost higher. Hope this helps. I may be able to send you some screen shots of the castings if you need to see how they look.
If it’s not too much trouble, it would be nice to see those screenshot, yes. Thank you for the info! Do you know if there’d be any kind of chance we could see more cosworth kits in the future?
Hi David, I sent you a email. Please let me know if you received it.
How would I get one of these engine 560Hp sounds good to me I got a 02 q45 gettin 390whp
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