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Rick Shrameck (who founded Epic Aircraft and had a lot of experience in auto racing before he got into aviation), built one of the first Legacys and developed a supercharging mod for the IO-550. His company was called Aero Supercharger Solutions and was based in North Las Vegas. His Legacy, which was flown by a race pilot, had a supercharger on it and was entered in the Reno Air Races for a few years.
Rick's most notorious supercharged installation was in a Legacy built by Shannon Knoepflein . For those not familiar with him, Shannon was an electrical engineer and had about every gadget known to man in his plane. He'd reported persistent problems with high oil temps and a couple of particularly hot cylinders for several months after his engine mod, but kept flying anyway. He took his plane to Oshkosh in 2004 and mentioned his overheating issues to several people there. He was advised by some of them not to fly again until he figured out the problem, but he decided to fly the plane home anyway. Witnesses said his engine was missing badly on the takeoff roll, but he continued on anyway. A few minutes after takeoff his engine suffered a catastrophic failure when an apparent case of pre-ignition caused the number three piston to suffer a burn through. Shannon passed by one airport in an attempt to deadstick his plane into Madison County. He didn't make it to the runway and was sadly killed in the subsequent crash. Metal was found throughout the engine and there was a large hole at the top of the crankcase. There was also evidence of overheating damage to several other engine components. I recall that almost anyone who had an opinion at the time felt the supercharger was the root cause of the problems that Shannon had. I'm not aware of anyone who installed another supercharger after that and Aero Supercharger Solutions closed up shop soon thereafter for lack of business.
For anyone interested, this link is to the accident report:
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief2.aspx?ev_id=20040804X01144&ntsbno=CHI04FA203&akey=1
Skip Slater
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