GM's supercharged 3800 V6 was put in lots of different types of cars, which sold in large numbers, and they've been out there long enough to ensure that many ill-advised innovative junkyard swaps have taken place. While you could start such a project from scratch yourself, there's really no reason to do all that work when someone else has done the hard parts of A) obtaining the blown engine and B) disposing of the unwanted original engine for you! How about tearing the 240-horse L67 from a Pontiac Grand Prix GTP and stuffing it into a lightweight '91 Chevy Beretta, as this motivated seller (go here if the ad disappears) has done? Don't worry about statements such as "car has been a project from day one. I was constantly modifying and changing," because this car must be sold now! You see, the seller's boyfriend is in jail, and the seller, Tim, "will do 'anything' to get the money." The asking price is $800, but you'll have negotiating leverage!

Are you tired of driving cars with the same old Otto Cycle going on under the hood (yes, Wankel owners, we know you're special in a very non-reciprocating way)? You need to get yourself a Miller Cycle machine, and that means supercharging is a necessity! Of course, those ignore-the-rules whackjobs at Mazda were the first ones responsible for putting out Miller Cycle production vehicles, and now you can profit from massive depreciation- and a touch of backyard engineering- by scoring this 2000 Mazda Millenia (go here if the ad disappears) with a somewhat bait-n-switchy asking price of 500 bucks. Oh, wait- it's actually a 1998 car with a 2000 engine. Well, no problem, because other than the dead transmission it runs great! How much will it cost to take this 210 horsepower machine home? Not much, we're guessing, thanks to sign-of-the-times statements such as "need to sell please make offer...i am willing to negociate!!"

Any Peugeot 403 stands on its own as a Hell Project, but what do you get when you restore one? You get 65 horsepower, that's what! Clearly, some added motivation is needed here, and what better choice than the good ol' small-block Chevy? Can you fit one in a 403? Yes, indeed- just ask the guy who's already done most of the work on this 1961 Peugeot 403, which is already set up for Chevy power. Hell, The General himself will sell you a brand-new crate motor today! Then all you'll need to do... hey, hold on- did we say the seller has already done most of the work? Perhaps we were a bit hasty there, but lots of stuff has been done. You get front and rear suspension, a narrowed Ford 9-inch rear, and "tons of parts in the car, more than I can list." In a break from PCH tradition, we've got a seller who appears to know what he's doing in the garage, which means you'll be in for dozens instead of hundreds of sanity-puncturing surprises as you attempt to finish the job.

Small-block Peugeots are fine and all, but all the weight is on the front of the car instead of over the drive wheels. Not good! That's why the real Project Hell Hoon goes for an air-cooled VW, for a virtually weightless car that provides tons of exciting oversteering fun. Like, say, what you'd get with this 1974 Volkswagen Beetle with supercharged 2110cc engine, on sale now with an asking price of $3,500. I've owned a few stupidly overpowered performance-upgraded Beetles, and by some miracle I'm still here to tell you that the handling and braking characteristics of such a vehicle are, uh, interesting. Yes, that's the word I was looking for! So, you've got a car that weighed 1,831 pounds new, hack 400 pounds of unnecessary crap out of it, and then you replace the 46-horsepower 1600 with a howling supercharged unit belting out four or five times as much power (when it's not burning valves or blowing cylinder heads completely off the vehicle, that is). Was the engine built right? What kind of fuel-delivery system (if any) do you get? Is your life insurance paid up?

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

The 90s Honda Civic is edging ever closer to Ford Model A and '55-57 Chevy territory when it comes to the sheer number that have been sap-enhanced by wild-eyed hoons looking for crazy acceleration out of a once-sedate transportation car. Sure, most of the Civics you see on the street with 6" diameter tailpipes and Space Shuttle wings would be hard-pressed to buzz out a pathetic 15-second dragstrip pass, but don't be fooled by the foolish antics of the all-show-no-go crowd! Were I to go about upgrading my Civic, it would be done stealth-fashion: don't touch the body, use a quiet muffler, and keep the wheels/tires as stock-looking as I could get away with. I could stick with the D15B7 that's already there and add mild turbocharging... but why do that when I could add a quick 80 horses with a B18C plus ECU, transmission, and accessories, straight from Soichiro's homeland? The B18C isn't a particularly challenging swap into a 5th-gen Civic, so where's the hell? Well, here in California we have über-strict smog laws... and I'd need to make it even harder for my new VTEC setup to pass the test once I bolted on a supercharger. Then, of course, the stock suspension and brakes would need some help, and the list goes on and on. But who cares? Imagine the glorious torque-steering mayhem that would result from tripling the factory horsepower in an already funky-handling front-wheel-drive economy car!

A sleeper Civic would indeed be a great deal of fun, but our forefathers didn't invade Grenada so we could drive front-wheel-drive cars! Hell no! Rear-drive V8s colossi rule this land, buddy! My Crown Vic has a nice stiff cop-grade suspension and big brakes, but the 4.6 SOHC V8 leaves something to be desired in the power department. I could do what Quickvic did to his Crown Victoria and nitrous my way to glory... but that wouldn't be difficult enough. What I need to do is pick up this supercharged F-150 Lightning engine and transmission and stuff it into the engine compartment. The fun will be just beginning at that point, since California's smog referees are known to gaze disapprovingly upon truck engines in cars, even if the donor engine retains all its smog gear and is from a newer vehicle than the transplantee. Of course, I'll probably find at that point that the factory one-legger rear end (the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Department apparently didn't feel like spending the extra for limited-slip diffs in their detectives' cars) doesn't quite do the job of applying power to pavement, and (knowing Ford's love of pointless year-to-year hardware changes) getting all the engine accessories to work might be a beat-head-on-wall exercise in frustration. It will all be worth it, however, when I'm rumbling around town with a great big blower sticking through the hood of my Ford... oh, wait- wasn't this supposed to be a sleeper project?

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

This is truly a cool piece of hi-po tech geekery, and it's so simple, we don't know why anyone hasn't tried it before (or at least why we've never heard of it). The pocket-protector advocates over at Atonov have come up with a centrifugal blower (which operates like a crank-driven turbocharger) that uses a transmission to change the rotor's speed depending on engine RPMs, resulting in improved boost matching throughout the rev range. Totally donk-stompin' awesome.

New supercharger really shifts [Fastcar]

Related:
Remote Turbo System for Mustangs [Internal]