Boosted Club - Gauges/No Gauges?

Older Boost/AFR gauges can let you know if you have a potentially unsafe boost or AFR situation, but chances are you 'll damage your engine before you can process that info and let off the gas. Newer Boost/AFR gauges have the capability to shut things down if they detect unsafe boost/AFR conditions, but the ECU Reflash by Bob doesn't have any method of communicating with the new boost/AFR gauges and some folks have reported using the new Boost/AFR gauges to try and act on their own can be a very difficult situation to get them to work properly with the boosted tunes. IIRC, some folks are working w/Bob to try and address this situation.
Having Boost/AFR gauges or one of the new combo gauges can still provide you some warning if your engine is experiencing a potentially dangerous, but not yet damaging Boost/AFR situation, so it probably makes sense to get a combo gauge or separate gauges, whichever you prefer. Eventually, the boosted tune and the newer gauges capable of shutting things down to protect your engine should be working better together and that would be the ideal situation.
As @WI_Hedgehog posted above, if you're running a supercharger, the need for gauges is less because the boost is directly related to rpms, unlike a turbo. The biggest danger with a supercharge, I guess, is if you get an obstruction in your exhaust and the back-pressure that would cause.

@TravAZ beat me to it (he's awesome!), gauges without purpose is just rice-racer. If you don't want them, invest in something that will make you happy (there's tons of other stuff to spend money on here...). If you do want them, I'd suggest a good gauge or set of gauges. The AEM Failsafe takes inputs from other AEM gauges, which as TravAZ said is useful if you're looking at logs over time to determine the health of the system. That's a great reason to put them in when everything is new, so you have a baseline you understand before things go squirrely and there's mess everywhere.

The other thing to consider is gauge installation is going to take time, effort, and money, and in the end you may find it worth your time and money to get a good gauge set for what you'll have invested. Since it's a supercharger you may find the whole thing a waste of time and money, can't determine that for you or say what you'll be doing with the system once you've had it for a while.


What you might consider (to open a whole barrel of monkeys) is that typically superchargers make power lower in the RPM band, turbos in the upper range, except for Alpha's setup which can make power down low and gobs of power up high if you set it up to do so. Personally, I think the Slingshot has a lot of torque for first, second, and third, and if you change the manifold and remove the cats you'll probably agree it has a lot of power up top in 3rd and 4th. I like to make HP instead of torque because torque can lead to detonation, and all roads from there lead to rebuild. A turbo is the evolution of a supercharger, actually called an exhaust turbine driven centrifugal supercharger (yikes!). They make power up top where belt-driven superchargers tend to fall off in power, and a lot of it, which admittedly can lead to a whole host of other problems if the boost is "too high." They're also less predictable since they're fan driven instead of belt driven, so they're not necessarily "better," just "different." If the boost is kept under control they can be fun and safe without being parasitic. Just something to think about...

We just finished our swivel dual pods.Alpha Swivel Dual Gauge Pod for Polaris Slingshot