I have a question for the experts here. What is the difference between turbocharging and supercharging an engine? I'm no good with this stuff. Ask me to build a big block chevy with dual quads on it, and I'm fine...guess I'm kinda old school. Thanks in advance.

Google it! I'm sure you'll find thousands of pages on the two!

The basic end result is the same.

Instead of the engine sucking air in by the piston moving down you use a fan (for the sake of simplicity) to force air into the engine and in fact build up pressure in there. Add more fuel to compensate and it's like having a much bigger engine. If you have a 5.0L engine and force air in at 14psi it's like having a 10L engine.

The "fan" in the supercharger is driven by a belt off the crankshaft pulley.
So some of the engine's power is used to actually turn the thing (like the way A/C or power steering rob engine power but on a larger scale).

A turbo does the same thing, but instead of being turned by a belt there's another fan in the other half of the turbo that is put in th exhaust pipe stream. So the exhaust gas shooting past spins it. That part is connected by a shaft through to the fan on the other side of the turbo that pushes the air into the engine.
On the plus side, the turbo doesn't really rob the engine of any power as it's being turned by the passing exhaust gas.
On the downside, it needs the exhaust gas to be passing at a certain speed before it even has the force to turn the turbo. Hence at lower rpm's the turbo doesn't do anything as it's not spinning fast enough to create pressure in the engine. This is the lag you've heard about.
The bigger the turbo the more pressure it can make, but the more lag you get.

The turbo is more efficient and can produce greater power at the top end.
The supercharger produces more power lower down as it doesn't have the lag problem but uses some of the engines power just to turn it.


To add complication there are a couple of different types of supercharger, centrifugal and roots. The roots one is the type you often see sitting on top of the engine. They put x psi of air into the engine all the time, even from low revs. So just like having a bigger engine.
The centrifugal type builds up pressure as the revs rise (like a turbo but without the lag) and can put in more pressure at high rpm than the roots. So, say at 6,000rpm it is putting 14psi into the engine, at 3,000rpm it's putting in only 7psi (for example).


However all is not so simple.
To reduce cylinder pressure the more boost oyu out into the engine, the more you have to lower the compression ratio. So if you have a nice all-motor engine that makes asay 500HP at 11:1 compression, if you wanted to boost it you'd first have to lower the compression ratio, how much depends on how much boost you want to run, but a common figure is to 8 or 8.5:1 Now the engine will no longer be making as much powerbut the boost will more than make up for it.
In addition, you can't run radical cams with lots of overlap. If there's overlap, instead of pressurising the cylinder with the air/fuel mixture you're just gonna force it out of the still open exhaust valve...
By pressurising the air, you heat it up. Hot air makes less power than cool air, and is more likely to make the engine detonate.
So you need intercoolers (in effect a large radiator but with the engine intake air running through it rather than the colant) or other solutions to bring the temperature of the compressed air down.
In addition you tend to run a boosted car slightly richer than a non boosted one. So in terms of fuel usage, a boosted car uses more fuel than an all motor engine producing the same power levels.