I said I wanted to tinker with the idea of what you could do with this concept, but on a budget price and no fancy super high pressure system. So, I've been thinking about it and have come up with a rough design. I honestly think what I have come up with is completely doable and is pretty inexpensive. However, there are some draw backs (of course) that I will go over as I explain things. The setup uses the same concept of the CAS system, but drastically simplifies it, and uses primarily off the shelf components with one or two custom parts that could be 3d printed. This really would allow anyone to build the system fairly easily as 3d printing for hire is quite common these days and fairly inexpensive.

Lets talk about this low pressure system vs the CAS high pressure system. Obviously, most of us do not have a 3000 psi capable air compressor kicking around to refill our air tank. This basically relegates us to what a standard air compressor can kick out. Mine happens to go to 150 psi, so that is what I will be using for my calculations. That is a pretty huge draw back right off the bat. That means our air tank has to be 20x larger to hold the same capacity! The upside is our engine is tiny compared to most, so we don't need as massive of a tank compared to most engines.

As previously mentioned, at wide open throttle (WOT) AND peak rpm, our engine is inhaling about 140 CFM of air. If I was going to setup a system like this, I'd like to get about a 30% boost in power so I could say my monster Mirage has three digit power output! (This means I'd like 100hp). So, to get a 30% boost in power, we need 30% more air. 140 * 1.3 = ~180 CFM. This is where we start. We need 180 CFM of airflow for as long as possible from our air tank. Looking at standard air tanks, 10 gallon tanks seem pretty common and cheap. Amazon has them for about $50 shipped to your door. You can probably find them cheaper locally. This tank would easily fit in the trunk of your Mirage, heck two would even fit pretty easily back there I think. Of course, that begs the question, how long does a 10 gallon tank last at 180 CFM? The answer is a whopping 4.5 seconds. I made a simple excel calculator to mess around with this.

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If we add that second tank in, we get 9.1 seconds. Woohoo! Now you can live your life 9.1 seconds at a time.

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Now, this number is actually conservative. It will be longer as 180 CFM will be the absolute max flow you'll see at peak rpm. But, we aren't at peak rpm the entire time we're accelerating (unless you have a CVT). It will likely last another second, maybe two with a manual. So, two 10 gallon tank setup will get you one 'pull' on boost. That doesn't sound too great does it? Well, lets continue on and see this to the end. After all, we just took two cheap air tanks and slapped them in the back of the Mirage, we're not in this real deep yet, right?

Next, we'll look at how to regulate the compressed air and get it into the engine in a controlled manner.