You might me asking yourself.....What is Super Saab? Cobalt's arn't Saab's!!!
Well....Allow me to explain. Shortly after moving to Minnesota from Arizona I blew my cylinder #4. Now, a Cobalt SS's motor is a 2.0 LSJ. I looked for a replacement motor....All placed for a LSJ motor either had over 100k on the motor or wanted more than $1,500 FOR JUST THE MOTOR!!! So, I started noticing for some reason on Ebay the 2.0 LK9 motor. What is this I wondered. Started talking on the forums and came to find it was nearly the same as a LSJ motor, just with different cams and came on Saab 9-3's with a turbo set-up. I found someone who was doing the swap himself and a friend and I we're pretty sure we could figure out the swap. It was a pretty simple swap, all external parts and sensors from the LSJ were swapped onto the LK9. To be more exact I chose the LK9 B207R motor. After a lot of manual labor or swapping this motor during winter in Minnesota in a hardly warm garage and basic tool-kits from Walmart. WE DID IT!!! The day finally came that I had 80# Injectors, a 3.0 Pulley, and my tuner ready to go.....Kept trying to get it to fire over...Wouldn't even try...What's wrong? Well, came to found out that the LK9 and LSJ use different Ignition Coils, so I swapped them quick and we tried again...Crank...Crank...Crank... SUCCESS!!! Idle'd very rough, but had been in a junkyard for who knows how long, and had bad gas in the tank until I could make it to a E85 station. We drove to a station and filled the tank with E85. Re-tuned and runs like a normal Cobalt now. So, I've decided to make more people aware of the swap capability, and to prove Cobalt's to the 4 cylinder community. In short this LK9 motor cost me only $600 for the motor and it only had 33k miles on it. I would have had to pay 3 times that much for a LSJ motor with equal miles. Why? When you can just do a little extra work for the same final product. Now, thing to note about the swap thus far... 1. Start-ups are usually 1st-3rd maybe 10 cranks max...This is thought to be due to the Saab cams not having a perfectly places Hex key for the Cam Position Sensor. But the car drives like any other Cobalt on the road. 2. The cams are set-up for a turbo, which means there is "overlap" meaning on a supercharged application it's easy to say there is a 3-5% power-loss due to bleeding off boost. 3. The head/block on this motor is exactly the same, so you could easily do modifications as if it we're a Cobalt motor, along with internals in the block. See, GM at the time owned part of Saab. So, one can say the Ecotec platform is from Saab, thus many parts can be swapped and used between the two brands. In the future, the Super Saab will become a full track/race car....But for now I'm in college for B.S. in Automotive Engineering as this whole fisaco has let me very interesting in automotive's and how they work. So, if you want to help me, it's pretty simple. I don't ask for money, or donations. I just ask that you "Like" my Facebook page of the car, and Subscribe to my YouTube channel!!! Thank You for looking, feel free to browse the website and have a great day!!! |
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