Made a V8

>made a V8
>made it shit

Why GM? You could've had a sweet ass engine

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Aussie here I don't get why these are so hated.

Seemed like a pretty neat engine for the time.

Also a shame fwd V8 transverse died out we never got any here

Transverse V8s are total arse to work on and understeer/torque steer monsters. Transverse is the domain of smaller engines.

>why these were so hated
Poor reliability.

Sounds like a fun recipe for a comfy drag landbarge

Throw some drag slicks on the cunt

Same question from me, they also went in some RWD applications didn't they?
Is the dislike meme tier general trolling or are these things dorito worthy?

New engines are just as bad see ecoboost and lt4 supercharged having endless issues
Pretty sure a Cadillac coupe got one based on the c6 ?

They seem nice until it's serpentine belt time, then everything is just *blocks your path*. You want a drag land barge, you get a RWD one.

It's called the XLR and it was based on the C5 chassis. The STS was also a rwd platform with the Northstar.

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My ecoboost is nowhere near as bad as my moms deville with the North Star. Stop thinking memes are actual arguments.

I mean now we have turbo V6 with 400hp+ but yeah back in the day it was a insane idea to put a 300+ HP ls in fwd barges

I like the way Northstar era Cadillacs look I think they aged damn well
Ye that's it

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Did you miss the part where I am Australian?

We can't be serious ever if we are there's usually a bad reason behind it or ya justa cunt

looks straight of an early ps-2 game

Shelby our Lord and Savior came to the rescue and gave these engines the treatment they always deserved. it put one of them in a longitudinal setting in RWD Manual sports car known as the shelby series 1. without being bogged down by an auto FWD slushbox they were able to make 320 HP which may not seem like a lot but in a 2,600 lb car it was basically a Super Miata. i think he ironed out most of the issues you'd come to expect from a typical north star and he actually sold them as crates.

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Actually now that you brang attention to that it does look low poly
I'm still pissed the miat never came with a V6 like it was meant to instead they shoved it in a Mazda 3 and forgot about it

Didn't know the Northstar even came as a crate let alone Shelby sold em
Til

Your car is 5 years old max, hers is 20+

I doubt in 5-10 years when those ecoturds have 100-200k+ milage on them nobody will touch them

They suffered from major headgasket issues, I think like 40% of all engines from the mid 90s to early 00s had that issue. At that point youre looking at 2-3k to rebuild an engine on a $2k landbarge

Is this really the reason? Damn, this whole time I had no idea what the hate was about. Are they decent engines after replacing the headgaskets?

May not even be related to the head gaskets at all, plenty of old smallblocks had bad cooling layout and used to get hotspots which would nuke head gaskets.

That’s really interesting. Is there any way to mitigate that at all, or is that a fatal flaw in all instances?

If you were to get it rebuilt its a solid engine otherwise. You could probably get 150k miles or more on it.

For comparison my 1998 Deville developed headgasket issues in 2014 at 99,000 miles. The car was only 16 years old.

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Why does everyone have to FUD and meme on the northstar? Take the NorthPill: Northstars are actually fucking good. Old people just didn't change coolant or go over 3000rpm in their northyachts. Most 90's to mid 00's luxury cars had fatal flaws anyway, not just Cadillac. I'd take an 02 Eldorado over any 2002 equivalent Mercedes, BMW or rebadged-camry Lexus.

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>02 eldorado

my nigga. too bad any left have been niggified or neglected on maintenence

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Pretty much this. These engines are excellent if you just maintain it, like most engines. Notice that most engines with head gasket issues are 90% due to leaving old shitty coolant and oil in there long enough to become acidic and eat through the gaskets? The one exception is the Toyota 7M engine, but that's due to head bolts coming undone.

>Subaru headgasket meme
>Northstar headgasket meme

All preventable.

I'm buying one from an old lady in a few weeks. 02 red esc with 85k miles, bose and wood steering wheel. They are just complete comfy, great styling and take off when you punch it. Literally why would I want some e46 with a shattered plastic cooling system, w210 that has the spring perches fall out, or gold-badged camry.

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pretty jealous. ive never found one that looks that good on CL or anything really. Enjoy her

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yes. its like a 50/50 shot buying one.

its not the gasket, rather the head studs being undersized. some guy in canada on the forum was making kits to redrill and tap for much larger ones years back.

its bad to the point that gm puts coolant copper tabs in the coolant to bandaid this as regular maintenance.

unfortunately, avoid the northstar at all costs. get a ls4 instead.

The Volvo S80 until 2010 had a transverse Yamaha V8 boat-engine. It was literally a land-barge

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Hers was new when she bought it. It was sold at 60k miles because we were sick of the engine problems. My ecoboost recently hit 60k miles with no issues.

>shame that fwd v8 doesn't out here
Lmao. How is that a shame?

Sup br/o/stars

Here's mine... took me forever to find a triple black post-facelift ETC that wasn't beat to shit.

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>3x black
nice man. my dad was a 3x black cadillac guy bakc when he used to lease cadillacs in the 90s. His last leased caddy an 03 deville was black on black. After that he started going with black on lite gray interior

>Transverse V8s are total arse to work on and understeer/torque steer monsters
Can confirm. My Grand Prix has terrible torque steer.

>both Ford and GM come out with DOHC 4.6's in the early 90's
>one is know for a block that takes 4 digit horsepower all day, the other is known for being an oil burning headgasket eating unreliable pile of shit with a starter under the intake
Really makes you think.

Yeah, GM didn't get aluminum blocks right until the LS.

The LS had issues too which were rectified

>acting like Modular 4.6s dont have their own problems

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There's literally nothing good about them, they were unreliable, underpowered, heavy, and technical nightmares. Americans can't into OHC.

On the contrary. There weren't unreliable, for the most part. There were other issues at play.

Now the unreliability. They were known for blowing headgaskets. The problem was the headstuds were weak. Replace them with strengthened aftermarket headstuds and they're shockingly reliable.

So what else caused these things to go wrong? The demographic to be completely honest.
The engine is a high revving V8 that needs to hit the redline from time to time to keep carbon buildup at bay. And these engines went, almost exclusively, into big luxobarges bought by elderly retirees who never went over 3,000 RPM.

It isn't just headgaskets. Actually most of it's issues with headgaskets may merely be a symptom of overheating from other causes, such as coolant leakage from the silicone seals coolant and water pump manifold at the rear of the engine. The plastic form that holds the silicone in place gets brittle and breaks allowing the silicone to be pushed out of place. Much the same as the 3x00 V6 intake manifolds.

Even without overheating a significant number of the engines had problems with the headgaskets leaking oil into the center valley. This would manifest itself to the owner as an oil leak from the rear of the engine that looked every bit like a rear main seal leak. What was fun about this was that every one would pull at least one head bolt thread, and frequently multiple threads, out of the block during disassembly. Front bank, no problem. Rear bank, you might end up having to pull the rest of the engine out for access to perform a thread repair. Imagine being the owner that just got a significant upcharge because GM cannot into aluminum.

Then there's the good old case-half seal leak. This requires the bottom half of the crankcase be removed, which includes the crankshaft main bearing caps (it's all one assembly), and you guessed it it's almost certain that one or more main cap bolt threads will strip out on disassembly. The threads stripping out of the block is so bad that many dealers refuse to do significant disassembly of a N* and if it needs headgaskets or a case-half seal they'll only replace the engine with a reman.

Then there was the time that piston rings came out with insufficient tension and either the rings had to be replaced or the engine replaced depending on how badly dealer had been burned by Northstars before.

Don't recall any valvetrain issues so at least it's got that going for it.

s t a r t e r u n d e r i n t a k e p l e n u m

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That's why you mount them longitudinally.

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Here's the story on the Northstar.

It actually has a design feature to prevent overheating, where it will run as a 4cyl engine, alternating banks to keep the engine cool. Being an all aluminum engine, this is critical, as the consequence of a overheat is severe.

However. as GM often does, they made an oversight, this time not making the system aggressive enough in implementation, only engaging during severe temp spikes.


Around the time of the northstar release, GM introduced its new long life coolant (dexcool), designed for a service life of 100,000 miles, or 7 years IIRC. However, another oversight, was the implication of allowing the coolant to exceed this interval allowed the coolant to become dangerously acidic, and eating away at gasket surfaces, and corrode aluminum.

However, these all overshadow the main flaw of the engine, the head studs. The studs themselves anchor straight into the aluminum block, with no steel insert or coil system. Arguably, the size of the thread used, vs. the clamping load required, was at the design limit. Now, add acidic coolant, eroding away the very threads holding the studs in place. The undersized studs, which are holding two pieces of aluminum together.

Many aftermarket warranty companies (like what used car dealers sell) will not issue policies on northstar engines (nor the chrysler 2.7). That alone is fairly strong indicator of failure rate. An insurance company won't even gamble the repair cost with you.

user, there are millions of all aluminium engines out there which do just fine with conventional cooling. If a manufacturer can't cool their own stock engine effectively in the 90s and on then material choice is the least of their problems.

In its defense, the Northstar starter is pretty easy to do even though its under the intake. There are ALOT worse starters to do than those.

>Americans can't into OHC
You yuropoors can't stop memeing bullshit for even a minute can you.

You haven't done one so you don't know shit. They are not hard to do at all.

that's exactly what the problem with the northstar is though, not the head gaskets going bad but the entire head bolts stripping themselves out
the entire lower half of the engine is a three-part cradle with lots of seals to go bad as well

>FWD vehicle with known reliability issues
>better than any of the other cars listed

AHAHAHA volvo suicide

They were notoriously unreliable hideously engineered, and frustrating to service and work on The starter is underneath the intake manifold in what would be the lifter valley area of an OHV V8. This should be obvious why it is annoying. They also had an "intermediate" oil pan, which basically meant that the top half of the oil pan unbolted from the bottom half which made it very prone to leaking, and since it was a transversely mounted v8 it was hard to fix those leaky gaskets. They were also underpowered. They also had head gasket issues.

>neglected
Can confirm.
My buddies grandpa bought one brand new just to spite his wife and then left it sitting in the driveway.
Last time i was over we swapped batteries and it only had 1500 miles on it.
Damn shame cause its in the nice dark blue with gold trim.

Your buddy's grandpa sounds like a neat fellow.

Why not? More interesting than a 2 tonne AWD SUV with a i4 turbo making 150hp
This
Holy shiet
What the fuq
Unreliability aside I find these engines fascinating.

Why the fuck put the starter under the manifold?
Why not put metal inserts and bigger head bolts?
Why?

They tried to copy the Mark viii and Continental and failed. 4.6 4v Ford master race

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>Unreliability aside I find these engines fascinating.
they are a huge disappointment though because as much as I love the old school Chevy small block and the LS, I think would have been awesome to have a non-chevrolet V8 in a GM vehicle like in the old days where pontiac, olds, buick cadillac and chevrolet all had their own engines.

Funny it was such a spectacular failure even 9 years later they haven't made another dohc V8

Why didn't they just take the lt5 heads and shove them on a LS3?

Even that mercury boat engine has dohc and it's basically that

mercuryracing.com/mercury-racing-reveals-sb4-7-0-automotive-crate-engine/

Its called the Lincoln Mark VIII
>RWD
>4.6l 4v DOHC v8
>dual exhaust
>290 HP
>Coupe landbarge
>90's Aesthetic
>old man driven
>easy to manual swap
The perfect comf car.

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because OHV is just better than D/OHC

As someone that had their LS1 throw a lifter and fuck the cam at barely 150k miles I'm gonna go with no
Bad enough it had piston slap

>muh copy
Both engines launched at the same time, meaning both were in development for years. It's just a coincidence that they were both DOHC 4.6L V8's.

The Northstar wasn't originally Cadillac's project. It was originally an evolution of Oldsmobile's Quad 4 4 cylinder. 2.3L + 2.3L = 4.6L

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so you are going to let one bad instance turn you off? yeah you had to eat shit and im sorry that happened to you but that kind of thing hardly ever happens. Overall the LS is known for legendary reliability.

Can't argue with that, I withdraw the copy comment. But dang the Teksid 4.6 didn't have half the problems GM's Northstar did. How did they fuck it up?

The head studs were a HUGE contributor to the problems. The head studs weren't very strong so they'd warp over time and cause most of the known issues.
The coolant based issues didn't start until 1996.
What happened at GM in 1996? Anyone?
They abandoned the industry standard ethylene glycol (green) coolant in favor of red Dexcool (propylene glycol), They did this because Dexcool has a longer life, allowing a vehicle to go 100k or more before the fluid needs changing. Unfortunately, it's also more corrosive than normal coolant, which led to the stuff eating through gaskets. GM didn't totally solve the gasket issue until 2001. Since then, other manufacturers started using Dexcool because of its longevity, Toyota among them.

idk how many people have actually driven a cadillac with a northstar but that engine is silky smooth. it was let down with a shit transmission

Whoa, that's pretty cool. I knew there was a bunch of shit Olds developed over the years that was planted in other GM divisions (and sometimes kept from their own models), but never realized the Northstar was derived from the Quad-4. Were all the fuck-ups of the Northstar's design part of the original design, then, or was it due to later modification by Cadillac/corporate? I mean, Olds had pretty fucking good luck with engines previously (aside from duds like the 403 and the diesel 350, and even that had some redeeming factors), and I don't remember ever hearing about the Quad-4s having nearly as many issues as the Northstar.

The 4T80e is famously one of the most overbuilt FWD automatics every created. The transmission wasn't crap.

The single cam Quad 4 variants were known for problems.
It's unknown whether the Northstar issues stemmed from Cadillac or Oldsmobile. Only that they exist.

man that transmission was CRAP. my mom owned one of the last deville's built and that transmission was on its last leg with only 110k on the clock. but that engine, man that engine was gold

>coupe landbarge
i never understood how big mark viiis are until seeing one in person, it's literally only a couple inches short of a Town Car, they're fucking HUGE

>why not
Because it's a shit idea. Just buy rwd if you want something interesting.

I still can't believe this car exists.
It launched at the same time as the C6 while using the older C5 chassis, had less power, less torque, and didn't even have its power as accessible at low revs as the C6's LS2. It needed a supercharger (that totally won't cause reliability problems down the road) just to approximate the performance of a base C6.
Just what the fuck was GM thinking with this car?

Forgot to mention: IT COST ALMOST DOUBLE.

It was gimped. CLEARLY, you don't know the history of GM killing cars for potentially killing the Corvette. The only way that car got approved was if it had worse performance and didn't compete with the Corvette. The XLR was meant as a Mercedes SL competitor.
Pic related. Second gen Fiero. Killed to protect the C4 Corvette. V6 second gen prototypes (powered by a 210 HP 3.4L LQ1 V6) were beating C4 Corvettes around GM's own test courses.

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Huh, interesting. I did some scrounging and found the PopSci page that is cropped from, and speaking of Lincolns with , is that a VIII concept I see at the bottom?
>miniature televisions for sideview mirrors
oh shit ford what the fuck are you doing

Oh god I'm a fucking retard herf derf horf.

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>The only way that car got approved was if it had worse performance and didn't compete with the Corvette. The XLR was meant as a Mercedes SL competitor.
That kind of thinking makes no sense
An SL should be able to keep up with a corvette in a straight line but its pigfat luxury will make it slow in the corners, which is fine
If you're going to make it a luxury car that's heavier than a Corvette then it needs to have the same power because the end result will still be slower. Higher-trim SL's had a lot more power anyways. In fact, I'm not even sure if the rather unimpressive V6's were even sold in the US.

>That kind of thinking makes no sense
Welcome to General Motors.

That kind of thinking went out the window with the 2009 bankruptcy. Part of it was the government mandated eliminating that rule stating it stifles innovation. The new thinking has shown. There have been Camaros faster than a Corvette nowadays. If a Camaro is faster than a Corvette, that's now Team Corvette's problem to rectify.

That's a disgusting hood.

no u

Well I did limiter bash it for 2 years 15k miles because I'm a madman