I know what you're thinking. "A supercharger system! We'll be here all week!" Well, the bad news is that this here install guide from your friends at Stage 3 is a bit longer than our average exhaust kit, cold air intake, or throttle body install guide. The good news is that the total time of install for this here 2011 to 2014 F150 5.0L ProCharger Stage II Supercharger Kit was a measly five hours for the guys down at Extreme Performance and it went off with barely a hitch. So, while long, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how simple everything fits together. We're giving the folks over at ProCharger a ton of credit for putting this system together so well, especially when it's a brand new design for a truck that's been through limited testing and a quick development. Aside from a couple of minor hiccups with some of the kit's hardware, our ProCharger installation went extraordinarily well for being the third or fourth F150 5.0L system that ProCharger has shipped. Anyway, here's our ProCharger Stage II Intercooled System install guide on our 2012 F150 5.0L FX4 Project Truck. Enjoy!
There's nobody we would trust more with this ProCharger install than the guys down at Extreme Performance. We pulled our 5.0L Project Truck into the garage and Jay got to work tearing into it to get our ProCharger system all bolted up and ready to go. Working on our truck completely on his own, Jay had the kit completely done in just under five hours. Everything was a quick, easy bolt-on (except for the charge pipe. More on that later) and ProCharger has everything labeled nice and cleanly. ProCharger's instructions are also very good with point-by-point directions and full-color photos. They only real criticism of the instructions that we have is that they tend to jump around a lot from subsystem to subsystem, but that's a minor quibble in an otherwise good set of install instructions.
The first actual step of our ProCharger install was to pull the aFe Stage 2 Cold Air Intake that we had installed off of the truck. Jay simply loosened the band clamp holding the intake to the throttle body, pulled the PCV and vacuum lines, and flipped the clamps on the lower half of the air box to remove the kit.
Next, Jay drained the coolant reservoir tank. He had a vacuum contained to make the job easier.
After the tank was cleared out, Jay vacuumed as much coolant as he could out of the feed and return lines, as well as radiator hoses.
Once Jay had as much coolant out as possible, he disconnected all of the lines on the coolant reservoir and set them all aside.
Next Jay unbolted the coolant reservoir and lower air box assembly from the truck and removed them both from the engine bay.
After the coolant reservoir and lower air box was out of the truck, Jay removed the air deflector flap from the truck by pulling out its pins.
Jay then removed the mounting bolts for the headlights and removed them both from the truck.
Some modifications needed to be made to the coolant system in order to get all of the engine's coolant lines to clear the supercharger bracket and supercharger itself. To start off, Jay needed to remove the lower radiator hose from the engine and add an extension piece that ProCharger includes in their kit.
The extension piece is pretty basic and is really just a piece of tubing with some band clamps. Jay easily installed it onto the lower radiator port and pipe.
Before moving on, Jay removed the coolant reservoir supply hose from its port on the engine.
Jay moved on to the fuel system, and the good news is that he just had to swap the injectors out. The first step was to remove the fuel rail insulators by simply sliding them off. Now, Jay was pretty content with letting gasoline spill everywhere. Both we here at Stage 3 and ProCharger strongly recommend following ProCharger's instructions and removing the fuel pump fuse (#27) and cranking the engine until fuel clears from the lines. Still, if your engine's cool and feel like cowboying it up, you can go with Jay's methodology. The second step is to unplug all the injector electrical connectors from each fuel injector.
With the connectors all detached, Jay unhooked the fuel supply hose from the fuel rail. Fuel got just about everywhere.
Next, Jay unbolted the four bolts holding the fuel rail to the manifold and removed the rails and injectors from the truck as a single assembly.
With the fuel rail out, Jay removed the injectors by slipping off their retainer clips while making sure to remove any of the original O-rings.
After Jay removed the stock fuel injectors, he installed ProCharger's included fuel injectors and made sure they were rotated properly for their connectors. He then reinstalled their retaining clips.
Now, ProCharger's included 52lb/hr fuel injectors are shorter than stock, which meant Jay had to remove the factory fuel rail spacers with a pair of pliers and then installed ProCharger's shorter spacers in their place.
With everything more or less ready to go, Jay reinstalled the fuel rail, made sure the injectors were seated properly, and then rebolted the fuel rail to the manifold.
Once the fuel rail was back in the truck and tightened down, Jay reconnected the fuel supply hose to the rail's port.
With our truck's fuel system pretty much taken care of, it was back to the cooling for some more hose routing. Starting off, he installed ProCharger's new coolant reservoir line onto the port on the engine and threw on one of the OE clamps.
Next, Jay unhooked the hose connector for the lower radiator hose by slipping out its spring clip.
ProCharger's new lower radiator tubing reuses the stock fitting, but to remove it from the stock hose, Jay needed to cut off the plastic band holding it on.
With the fitting squared away, Jay reinstalled it back onto the lower port on the engine. He then installed ProCharger's new lower radiator hose.
Now it was time for the crankshaft pulley. While it sounds intimidating, ProCharger's crank pulley actually installs in your OE crankshaft balancer, making it a bit easier. Jay unbolted the the crankshaft pulley bolt and removed the crank pulley's cam bolts.
Once all the cam bolts were out, Jay installed them onto ProCharger's crankshaft pulley.
After he got the cam bolts in place, Jay installed ProCharger's crankshaft pulley into the factory balancer while making sure they were aligned properly for installation. When it was in proper position, Jay bolted the pulley down using the supplied bolts and crankshaft nut.
With the crankshaft pulley in place, Jay removed the three bolts on the face of the motor so he could install ProCharger's supercharger bracket.
Once the bolts were off, Jay grabbed ProCharger's bracket. The bracket is held on with three grade 8 bolts with tube spacers that install in the place of the stock bolts.
After Jay tightened down the bracket's bolts, he grabbed the P-1SC-1 head unit and two of its mounting bolts and installed it onto the "hooked" provision in the bracket.
Jay installed the bolts in the highest and lowest holes on the bracket and supercharger to hold it in place while he grabbed the rest of the hardware.
Jay threaded in the rest of the supercharger mounting bolts and then tightened them down.
With the supercharger securely mounted to the bracket, Jay turned his attention to the head unit's belt system. The bracket has both idlers and tensioner pre-installed. However, the tensioner needs to be adjusted to tighten the belt and pick up slack. ProCharger includes marks on the tensioner to help out. All Jay needed to do was adjust tension until the mark on the left side was nearly aligned with the last upper mark on the right side.
In order to get the tensioner set up properly, Jay had to tighten down the collar on the rear of the tensioner with a 1/2" socket and extension until the aligning marks were in the correct positions.
Once the tensioner was in the correct position, Jay tightened down the front nut on the tensioner and the rear nut on the tensioner collar.
With the supercharger mounted and belt system set up, Jay moved on to the intercooler. The Stage II's intercooler is huge, but mounting was extremely easy. Step one was to remove the bolts holding the hood latch to the upper radiator support.
Once those bolts were out, Jay slid the upper intercooler bracket under the latch assembly and reinstalled the OEM bolts.
Then Jay removed the two bolts for the bumper cover from the stock tabs.
Jay then grabbed the two lower intercooler mounting bracket and installed them on the stubs built into ProCharger's intercooler.
After the lower mounts were tightened down, Jay dropped the intercooler into the truck and aligned the lower mounting brackets to the bumper tabs.
Jay then aligned the upper mounting bracket and installed the bolts into the intercooler.
Once the upper bolts were tightened down, Jay installed the two bumper bolts through the lower brackets and back into their tabs.
And that completed the installation of our intercooler. Next was all the piping for it.
Getting our supercharger's tubing was pretty simple, though there was a whole lot of it. To start off, Jay installed a bended coupler onto the supercharger's outlet port.
He then hooked up a piece of steel tubing that was then coupled together with another piece of steel that carried the system underneath the headlight bracketry.
Then came a 90° bend and the tubing that has a provision for ProCharger's ProFlow® ByPass Valve.
The tubing with the BPV provision leads right into the intercooler and connects with 3" coupler and a couple of band clamps.
With all of the supercharger to intercooler tubing in place, Jay went back through all the tubing and tightened down their band clamps.
Jay then moved on to the other side of the intercooler to assemble the charge piping into the intercooler. First he fit on a coupler and band clamps before inserting a piece of straight tubing.
Then came a 90° bend and 3" coupler. The 90° bend was followed by a longer pipe with 45° bends on each end.
None of the tubing was holding itself in place very well, so Jay went back through and tightened all the band clamps.
Jay then went up to the throttle body and installed the required coupler. You may have noticed that our OEM throttle body made it back on the truck in place of our BBK Throttle Body. The coupler has enough give to it to fit over the BBK throttle body, however, we didn't want to skew our dyno results by keeping it on there.
Now this is where we ran into our major "bad luck thing" with this kit. We either received the wrong couplers or wrong charge pipe tubing and Jay wasn't able to connect the piping coming off the intercooler with the coupler on the throttle body. Whatever the reason, Jay had to fab up a suitable pipe. The good news is that there were a couple of lengths laying around that worked out just perfectly. He did some quick cutting and fast welding and we were good to go. If you have this problem in a DIY situation, you may be okay with some 3" diameter steel tubing and some different couplers sourced locally.
The other problem (though much less serious than the charge piping issue) we started to run into was a dire lack of 3" band clamps. We ended up scavenging a few off our aFe intake and some extra ones laying around Extreme.
Now that Jay saw where the charge piping was routed, he connected the upper radiator hose to the connector he had modified earlier.
After the charge piping was taken care of, Jay installed a 1.5" coupler onto the BPV provision just before the intercooler and then installed the ProCharger ProFlow® BPV.
Once the BPV was in place, Jay installed the air filter on its top and used a band clamp to tighten it down.
Jay moved on to the vacuum system. The first step was to unhook the vacuum line from its port on the vacuum sensor and then remove the stock vacuum tree from the vehicle.
Next, Jay assembled ProCharger's new vacuum manifold and threw on some thread tape for good measure.
Jay removed the stock manifold vacuum line and replaced it with a supplied 1/2" hose which needed to be trimmed for proper fitment. Jay routed the new hose over to the ProCharger vacuum manifold.
Jay capped off one end of the OEM vacuum tree and reinstalled it with an extension onto the ProCharger vacuum manifold. He then ran a new line over to the port on the vacuum sensor.
The final part of the vacuum system was a small piece of vacuum tubing that ran from the small port on the manifold over to the ProFlow® BPV.
With the vacuum lines run and in place, Jay tightened down their band clamps and zip tied them together for a cleaner routing.
ProCharger's kit calls for the complete deletion of the passenger's side PCV system. Jay unhooked the connectors from the cylinder head and the intake manifold and removed the tubing.
Jay then capped off the fittings on the engine and clamped down the port on the manifold.
Before he could get started on the driver's side PCV system, Jay had to assemble the intake going into the supercharger. We opted for the system with a curved inlet tube to help get the filter a little farther away from the engine and excess heat. Jay started out by fitting on a 90° coupler and using ProCharger's supplied T-bolt clamps to hold it in place.
Then Jay fit on the one-piece curved inlet tube into the coupler.
Before tightening down the clamp holding the inlet tube to the coupler, Jay installed the mounting bracket stand for the inlet tube by rotating the assembly up toward the supercharger and bolting it on.
With the bracket and tube bolted down and secure, Jay tightened the clamp on the coupler.
Jay had to drill a 1/2" hole into the top of the filter included in this kit. Then he fit on a barb that's designed to accept the passenger side PCV line. With that completed, Jay dropped the filter onto the inlet tubing and hooked up the PCV hose provided by ProCharger onto the barb and rand it to the driver's side port on the cylinder head.
After he got the filter on, PCV line fitted, and the filter clamped down, Jay started to install ProCharger's new coolant reservoir tank. He first took ProCharger's tank assembly and fit into the lower mounting bushing before bolting it to the inner fender.
Jay then refit the main coolant line and overflow lines onto ProCharger's new reservoir tank.
The last bit of hardware we needed to install was ProCharger's MAF sensor extension harness. Jay hooked the first connector into the MAF sensor harness and ran the extension's cord through the headlight opening, over the intercooler along the upper radiator support, and down to the MAF sensor provision on the passenger's side of the intercooler.
Jay then installed our MAF sensor which was still in our aFe Stage 2 intake. He screwed it into the intercooler and connected the extension harness.
After Jay got the MAF sensor done, he reconnected our headlight wiring and placed them back on the truck.
Jay then bolted the headlights back onto the frame.
On a hardware front, our ProCharger Stage II Supercharger install was complete. We still had to upload ProCharger's performance tune that was preloaded on the SCT X-Cal 3 device included in the kit. We got the tuner hooked up to the truck and loaded the tune titled "procharger" under the custom tuning section. While that was going on, Jay got some coolant and distilled water to fill up ProCharger's reservoir and filled the head unit up with ProCharger's provided oil.
Once the tune was loaded, our ProCharger install was completed.
Now, we did run into an issue when driving the truck around. At high RPMs, the engine would start to break up, sputter, and just fall on its face. This was remedied by throwing in a new set of spark plugs gapped down to .034" (ProCharger recommends using one-step colder plugs like the NGK 6510 Iridiums). Swapping out the plugs instantly solved our problem and our truck was able to put down 418 horsepower and 398lb-ft of torque at the wheels. That translates to about 545 horsepower and 515 lb-ft of torque at the crank given a 23% drivetrain loss. While lower than ProCharger's advertised numbers, our truck did its run slightly heat-soaked and with ambient temperatures of over 90° Fahrenheit. All in all, we're extremely pleased with this kit's performance and it's relative ease of install.
