Miles Turner

I almost let them pull my supercharger...

I am not a mechanic. I am not selling anything. I just need every 2013-2014 Shelby GT500 owner who has heard a belt squeal on a cold start and felt his stomach drop to read this before he hands a shop the keys. If you have ever started a cold GT500 in your driveway, heard a new squeal off the supercharger, and immediately thought snout, and felt that cold drop in your gut, keep reading. If you have chased a noise around your Trinity engine bay for weeks, ear against the air filter housing, swearing it shifted every time you got close, this is for you. If you have a dealer quote sitting on your kitchen counter right now for a number that does not match the size of the problem, this is for you too. My name is Russell. I am fifty-six. I have spent thirty-one years on the Detroit Police Department, the last fourteen in the Major Crimes Division, the kind of work where you do not get to call in sick and you do not get to be wrong about what you saw. I am still on the job. I am not afraid of a wrench and I am not afraid of a service manual. I have rebuilt my own carbureted 302 in a Fox body in my garage on Beaconsfield with a beer and the radio on, and I learned what real men taught me about cars from men who built this city. I have wanted a 2013 GT500 since the day Ford announced 662 horsepower out of the supercharged 5.8 Trinity. I was forty-three then, two kids in high school, working third shift in the precinct on Mack Avenue, and I would stand in the showroom on Telegraph and look at one I had no business looking at. The salesman knew my name and knew I was not buying. I told myself someday. Someday took ten years. Two years ago I finally bought it. A 2013 Shelby GT500 coupe, Performance White over black, thirty-eight thousand miles, two owners, a folder of records that started at a Ford dealer in Sterling Heights. The 5.8 liter Trinity, six-speed manual, the SVT Performance Package. Six hundred and sixty-two horsepower out of the most powerful production V8 ever put in an American car at the time it was built. A Detroit cop with a Detroit-built Mustang. The SVTPerformance forum crowd and the Modular Ford guys live and die on this car. I drove it home from Sterling Heights the long way down Woodward at dusk and I do not mind telling you I had to pull off at the M1 Concourse and just sit with the engine ticking down. Nobody warned me about the squeal. It showed up last month on the first cold morning that fall had really arrived. A high, fast squeal off the front of the supercharger, worst the first five seconds, fading as the engine warmed. By the time I got out of the alley behind my house it was gone. Most days you would not even notice it. I noticed it. Because here is the thing every Trinity GT500 owner carries around in the back of his mind. The TVS R2300 supercharger snout. The snout bolt story on SVTPerformance that comes back to the top of the forum every other month. Owners pulling the supercharger off for inspection, thirty-five hundred to fifty-five hundred dollars for a snout rebuild or full replacement, plus labor to get there, and the cars are not easy to source parts for anymore. You do not sleep at night when your supercharger starts making a noise it has never made before. I did what we all do. I went down the rabbit hole. I read the SVTPerformance Trinity squeal thread until two in the morning. I put a long screwdriver to my ear like a stethoscope and crawled all over that warm intake convinced it was the snout bearings. I had a Ford performance shop in Royal Oak put it on a lift and listen, and they told me what I had started to suspect from the forum but did not want to believe, and then they told me the price. It was not the snout. It was not the bearings. It was an intake plenum mounting bolt at the front of the supercharger that had backed itself loose. With that bolt loose, the plenum was sitting about a degree off square, which put the belt routing one degree off true, which made the belt squeal on cold start exactly the way the early stages of snout death sound on the forum. A four-dollar bolt. Already in the car. Just needed to be reseated and torqued. Then the service writer told me what it costs to do that. Twenty-two hundred dollars. Not for the bolt. For the access. He slid a printout across the counter and I read the line that explained everything: labor, supercharger drive system and snout condition investigation. He told me, almost apologetically, that on a 2013 Trinity the plenum bolt sits between the supercharger housing and the front of the engine, under the air filter housing, in about an inch and a half of clearance, that the book procedure calls for partial supercharger removal to even verify the bolt is the problem, and that one of the bolts back there, his word, basically does not exist for any tool in their box. Four dollars of bolt. Twenty-two hundred dollars of I cannot reach the bolt. I have heard that song before. I have heard the same song the diesel guys hear about turbo access and the BMW guys hear about exhaust manifold studs. The part is nothing. The bolt nobody can reach is everything. So I tried it myself. I am a Detroit cop with thirty-one years on the job. I have a good box, built up since I was nineteen at the Police Academy and saving my first checks for a Snap-on rolling cabinet. I put the GT500 on the lift at a buddy's shop on Eight Mile, pulled the air filter housing, and went after that bolt from above. My ratchet handle hit the strut tower brace before the socket would seat. My flex head folded the second I loaded any torque on it. My universal joint deflected sideways and walked the socket clean off the bolt hex, and I felt the corner start to round before I heard it. I drove out to Snap-on in Madison Heights and bought a stubby and a low-profile swivel, came home, and turned that bolt the only way it could be turned through an inch and a half of clearance, by feel, my hand cramping against the supercharger housing, my knuckles bleeding on the front cover. Three hours. Two flats. Turning a fastener by feel through an inch and a half of gap behind a packed engine bay is like trying to wind a wristwatch with the watch in a coat pocket. The bolt was never the problem. The bolt is just steel. The problem was the geometry of every tool I owned. I put everything back on and drove home and did not say much at dinner. My wife asked if the Shelby was alright. I told her I was working on it. I did not tell her I had waited ten years for a car I was now afraid to drive past the precinct on Sunday afternoon. It sat in the garage on Beaconsfield for the rest of the month. I would go out and look at it under the cover. The third weekend of August is the Woodward Dream Cruise. I have lived four miles off Woodward my entire adult life. I had skipped exactly one Dream Cruise in twenty years, the year my mother passed. I almost skipped this one. I went. The SVT and Roush parking lot near the M1 Concourse in Royal Oak on the Saturday morning of the Cruise is full of men my age standing around open hoods, talking quietly the way only guys who have owned these cars a long time talk. There was a 2014 GT500 with the hood up and an older man bent over the supercharger. Gray hair, a faded Roush polo, the calm hands of a man who had probably built more supercharger snouts than I had written reports. His car had ninety-six thousand miles on it and looked better than mine. We got to talking and I told him about the squeal and the twenty-two hundred dollars and the three hours through that inch and a half of clearance. He did not laugh. He just nodded the way the real ones do. His name was Bo. Twenty-nine years at Roush Performance in Plymouth working on supercharged Mustangs and on the F-150 SVT Lightning program before that, retired now but still doing favor work for the Detroit-area Mustang Club. He told me three things. First, the dealer quotes twenty-two hundred because the labor is the access, not the work. The work is forty minutes if you can reach it. Second, most techs at the Ford performance counter dread this bolt and some of them will genuinely pull the supercharger for the same reason I did. Third, and this is where he reached into a tool roll on the floorboard of his GT500, the problem is not the bolt, it is that nothing you own will turn it square in that gap. He handed me a steel bar. About fifteen inches long. A bend in the middle, a square drive on each end. I said it is just a bent bar. Bo told me to press the drive end. Something moved inside it. A chain. An actual roller chain running down the inside of a sealed steel body. Everything else in your box bends at the moment you load it. This does not. The chain takes the bend and carries the torque dead square to the socket. It does not deflect, it does not walk, and it turns in zero swing. He had reseated more Trinity plenum bolts and Roush supercharger fasteners with that bar than he could count. He had not rounded a supercharger bolt since the day he got it. That was not a forum opinion and it was not a salesman. That was twenty-nine years standing in front of these exact engines at Roush. He told me where he got it. I ordered the heavy 1/2-inch version that night from a booth at Vinsetta Garage on Woodward, ninety-nine dollars, the Pro, because the supercharger hardware on this car has been heat-cycled for twelve years and I wanted the torque in reserve. It comes from a small American outfit, WildBear, that sells direct from their own site. Bo was firm about one thing. The look-alikes on the big marketplaces use a universal joint or a flex shaft inside instead of the chain, and without the chain they flex under load, which is the exact problem you started with. Now here is the part I want to be honest about. I had been telling myself for a year that I needed to add a tool like this to the garage. Detroit cops know that nothing in this city stays running without preventive prep. I had been meaning to order this for the day my GT500 threw something I could not reach. I just had not done it. The Trinity made the decision for me. The bar came on a Wednesday. Saturday I soaked the plenum bolt in penetrant the night before like Bo told me. Then I slid that bar in past the strut tower brace, dropped the socket on the bolt I had fought for three hours in that buddy's shop, and pulled. It broke loose clean on the second pull. Square the whole way. No walk, no deflection, no rounded corner. I had the plenum bolt out, the threads chased, the bolt back in, and torqued to spec by lunchtime. Without pulling the supercharger. Without a new snout. Without bleeding. I started it cold the next morning and stood in the driveway off Beaconsfield in the early light waiting for the squeal. Silence. That was three weeks ago. I have driven it down Woodward a half dozen times since and the squeal has not come back. I have used the bar since on the alternator bracket bolts and on two bolts on a fellow officer's Coyote-swap Fox body that he had been quietly avoiding. Ninety-nine dollars. The shop wanted twenty-two hundred, and a month of a car I was afraid to take past Eight Mile. I am not affiliated with the people who make this. Nobody paid me. Nobody sent me a free one. I am a fifty-six-year-old Detroit cop who waited ten years for a car and almost let a four-dollar bolt and a reach I could not make take it away from me. I am just telling you what worked. If you own the apex Shelby production car, the one Ford built in this city, you already know it does not forgive a half-finished job and you already know the difference between a tool that belongs in your box and one that does not. This is the one Bo has been reaching for for a decade, and the one that finally let me do my own work on a car I was told to hand over to the performance counter. WildBear builds it in a heavier 1/2-inch, 200 ft-lb version for exactly the seized, buried, heat-cycled hardware these supercharged engines are made of, and they sell it direct from their own site only, never through the marketplaces where the chainless imitations live. It is backed by a 60-day, no-questions money-back guarantee. Over 30,000 mechanics, DIYers, and enthusiasts have one in the toolbox already. Put it on your worst bolt, the one under the air filter housing you have been dreading, and if it does not turn it square and clean, send it back and owe nothing. Reach the bolt the shop cannot, and keep the Shelby this city built, yours. P.S. Bo called me last week. He is still doing favor work for the Detroit-area Mustang Club out of his garage in Plymouth, still keeping a count in a yellow legal pad. Mine, he reminded me, was the one where the Detroit cop almost let the dealer pull his supercharger. He said to tell you the math is never the bolt. The math is the one fastener nobody can reach. It always has been. Drop "twenty-two hundred for a four-dollar bolt" below if a shop has ever quoted you for the access instead of the work. https://wildbeartools.com/products/extension-wrench