Why is it that nobody uses Northstars?

If Lemons track performance is the inverse of street reliability, this is a good idea.  What RWD manual transmissions mate up to it?

Northstars are/were notorious for becoming great oil and coolant mixers, or exhaust and coolant mixers, or any combination you can think of relating to heads, headgaskets, and head bolts.  One of my good friends works at a "non-PullAPart" junkyard.  They purchased a dozen Seville/Devilles one night at an upper end auction, each with ~100k miles.  TWO made it the 45 mile trip to the junkyard without overheating.  I owned (unfortunately) a Seville.  At 99,xxx miles, it started getting a little hot while at road speed.  No radiator issues, so I put a new water pump on it. Two weeks later, I could sit and watch the exhaust bubble out of the coolant tank every few seconds.  I called around and none of the shops would touch the heads if I wanted them rebuilt.  I traded it in the next day.  Absolutely nothing else wrong with the car.  The motor was designed for the 1st owner, not the 3rd/4th/Lemons Race Team!

https://york.craigslist.org/cto/d/2005- … 44190.html

I'm planning on building a northstar powered car soon, Already have the race car and the caddy. I daily drove the Cadillac off an on over the course of a year till the tag expired, beating it senseless every chance I got. They do a great job of absolutely incinerating front tires.Temp never rose. 2004 and up Northstars had coarse head bolts that aren't as likely to pull out of the block allegedly, My donor is an 05. The problem isn't with the head gaskets, its the fact that the head bolts were a fine thread into an aluminum block, and the coolant would erode the threads letting the bolts pull out of the block. Northstar perfomance sells a head stud kit that allegedly cures that. The holy roller Deville that ran at MSR was equipped with that and had no issues.

V6 camaro trans will bolt up, minus one bolt. A simple bracket can be made to mate the last bolt. Apparently you can redrill a 2.8 V6 cavalier flywheel and it will work on the northstar. The fiero guys have all this figured out. Engine management can be handled with a LS1 computer with a flashed tune for a shelby series 1. They were the only factory manual trans northstar powered car built. It was a 4.4, but from what i read will run a 4.6. Northstars also had a crazy toothed wheel in the middle of the crank, which changed several times throughout production. None are interchangeable with each other. I was going to just put a 24x wheel on the crank pulley and be done with it.

The northstar is pretty equivalent to the Ford 5.0 weight wise, but much bulkier with the large, wide, DOHC heads.  I've been keeping an eye on cadillacs in the junk yard recently with the 4.9 Cadillac Miata build and its always surprising to see the number of northstars in the yard.

I'd say the major reason swaps like the northstar don't happen even outside of Lemons is that there are always far more LS 5.3's and 6.0's in the same yard that will cost the same, make more power, and probably be more reliable.

With accessories I've read a Northstar is 475, an LM7 is 520. Aluminum block LS's are about 100 pounds lighter than iron block truck engines though.