North star supercharger

[05boni]

I recently found a supercharger on eBay for a Cadillac Sts v with a 4.4L V8 northstar motor. Does anyone know if this will fit our gxp motor?

[crash93ssei]

It will not fit.

[00Beast]

The STS-V and XLR-V engines pretty much only share a name with the 4.6 in your car.

[repinS]

Thirded. Practically ZERO parts interchange between the FWD/RWD Northstars.

[sethjamesrimrodt]

Not to mention power steering, fuel injectors, fuel rail, fuel pump, heat exchanger, PCM programming, intake, and oh yeah head gaskets/ sure grip studs. I thought about doing it and the parts list alone was well over 6 grand. And way too much engineering.

Put the money towards something fast and right wheel drive.

[CMNTMXR57]

Quintupled. The LC3 and LD8 are nothing in the same other than the architecture (loosely), and the name.

Secondly, throwing that all aside and lets say it WAS interchangable... even if it mechanically bolted up, it would not fit under your hood. Air is sucked up two runners which run alongside the intercooler, then loop down to the back (which would be in your serpentine accessory drive), and enter the intake UNDER the supercharger. The supercharger then blows the air up into the intercooler (the black piece you see on the LC3), which then has runners that feed it back down to the cylinder heads. It takes up a metric sh*t ton of room.

Here is an exploded view of the LC3 Engine, Supercharger/Intercooler assembly, etc


Part 854 is the intake, which feeds part number 850, 850 feeds in under the supercharger (the bottom of part 800), if this were in your LD8 FWD car, you'd have the intake in your serpentine belts (where there is no room anyway), it then blows up through the upper portion of part 800 (which is the intercooler), which then feeds back down to the engine.

Here is an exploded view of the Superchager/intercooler assembly. Note how tall this setup is! The 4 laminova cores (four of part 831), which run 2 each in series flat out SUCKS for intercooling. Especially with an aftermarket CAI which will nearly double the CFM of airflow into the engine. Two to three WOT runs, on a 40* night (my IAT1's), sends my IAT2's (post supercharger/intercooler air temps), into the 140+ degree range. That's on a 40* night. Imagine a 90* summer day... It's bad enough that some of the really crazy guys with LC3 STS-V and XLR-V's are yanking the blower and going rear mount turbo.



Adding a bigger radiator and greater capacity pump up front only nets minimal results. All you're really doing is pushing around more Dexcool. The issue is the thermal transfer of the cores inside the supercharger that is inefficient. Even if someone could make it feasible to run the cores in parallel, that would net better results. But with only 2,503 STS-V's made, and nearly 1/4 of that in XLR-V's made, it isn't cost feasible.

My point being. Save the money you'd dump on this (if it were able to fit), buy a CTS-V (either gen), and add a roots type blower to a Gen1 car, or overdrive a Gen2 car and get appreciable, large, much more satisfying results.

More pics to show how much real estate is taken up;






Part 850 as it drops down in back and under the S/C;

[00Beast]

Wow, that's nuts.

[sethjamesrimrodt]

No thank you LD8's are hard enough to work on.

[CMNTMXR57]

The engine and other accessories are fairly easy to work on in this layout. Plugs are stupid easy. Alternator is easy, headers are easy (primarily the passenger side), and anything on top of the engine is easy. Doing cam cover gaskets on this car would be much easier than the LD8's back side (once all the *shoot* in the way is removed).

Things that are difficult are anything on the front of the engine, anything in the radiator (3 of them, 1 cooling system, 1 transmission, 1 intercooler), belts are a bitch (three of them one of which is a double sided grooved belt. 1 for accessory drive, one for S/C, one for A/C). One of the belts you have to put on from the backside of the pulley (best way to describe it, under that power steering resevoir), and the lower radiator hose is a bitch (I ended up actually cutting through the standard compression clamp as there was no way to get to the prongs even with my remote clamp remover). I think I mentioned awhile back about having to replace my low speed cooling fan which required nearly 10 hours of book time at the Caddy dealer and requires pretty much the entire front end of the car, transmission lines and A/C lines that run along the radiators. Then there is also the pump, and plumbing for the intercooler in that lower passenger front corner along with all the radiator mess.

So I'd call them a draw.

And despite all that complexity, I can do all three of those belts on the LC3 in the same time it takes to do the one on an LS4...

[CMNTMXR57]

Oh, and as one can imagine, the TB (where part 850 runs to), can be a tad difficult to get to.

It also requires 9 quarts of oil, and a coffe can sized AC PF26 filter that's about $13 a pop. It requires that filter due to the high pressure of the gerator style oil pump it uses.

[05boni]

Thanks guys, it looks like I will just do the cold air intake and then try to work out the little bugs in the car. I'm sure I can get get some useful input from this forum on things like irratic gas gauge and valve cover gasket replacement.