I've been looking into this for a little while. I noticed certain year model Equinox engines are 2.4 liter with direct injection. I narrowed it down to the 2010-2011 year model Equinox engines. Has anybody else looked into any of these cams as a possible upgrade to our LNF engines? Any positive input would be appreciated!

 

Doubt its worth it if even possible. Better to just go with zzp with upgraded fuel lobe.

 

My wifes 2013 equinox has the 2.4 DI motor.

Pretty peppy for a NA 4 cylinder moving 4000+ lbs.

 

There are alot of cars running these cams, increased lift and duration from LNF cams but same fuel pump lobe (no extra fuel)

 

I wonder if someone can provide the proper part numbers for which cams they chose, and how much of an increase the lift and duration is. This would be great information to have for those people like me in the process of a mild build.

 

A friend of mine has one, but I believe its the 2010-2011 model. They are nice vehicles IMO. Great for a small family.

 

the fact theres no increased fuel makes me feel like its not worth it. sooner or later your going to need it unless staying stock turbo. in that case there is no point in cams.

 

We love it.

Tons of room, awd & great in the snow.

Good on gas to. Avg. 20 mpg around town.

 

agreed

 

Yes, but all ZZP does is create a bigger "valley" in the lobe, therefore increasing the stroke of the HPFP piston. That's simple for the machine shop. At less than $100 for each cam with more lift/duration, the cost at the machine shop would still leave you way under the price of most other aftermarket cams for this engine. Seems worth it to me!

BTW, I have the Hahn s20g and opel injectors.
Right on. I tried to talk my wife into buying one last year when we was looking for her new vehicle. She chose a Pontiac G8 GT instead. I did not argue with her

 

like said above these are apparently running in a few cobalts but all it does is give you more lift than the stock cams, i know jeff (monogorat) actually measured and got all the correct specs a while ago and posted them on fb because there was a big fuss being made over it, but i agree unless your bigger turbo its a waste. and unless you know a machine shop that knows what they are doing to create that valley the way zzp does then its not worth it. i know the canada boys and their tuner rakes, got all butthurt about it because they couldnt provide proof they worked until jeff finally posted up specs. i think its worth a try, definitely cheaper, i think they were like 150 or something for the cams and then find someone to do the machine work on the fuel lobe. if you do it let us know how it goes!

 

Nice!

I wouldnt either, haha.

 

what do you think the purpose of a bigger camshaft is for it dose not matter what size snail you are on if you make it easier for the engine to ingest air/fuel then the engine will make more power with less stress and boost and less timing less stress = longer life

 

I would like to get Jeffrey (monograt) in here to post those numbers.

I do in fact know a machinist that builds race engines and he has agreed to cut the fuel lobe for me if I give him the specs. I know .050"-.060" can be removed depending on if you want the gasket behind the HPFP or not.

 

I have 2 questions.

1. Has anyone asked ZZP if they can make their fuel lobe changes to the Equinox cams and offer them for a slight upcharge?

2. These cams are designed for a N/A motor. How will the exhaust and intake duration and overlap affect our turbo charged cars and how does it vary from our stock cams?

 

i understand all that but fueling is our issue in these cars and its not THAT much of an increase i think with the lift, every bit helps though i suppose. the custom fuel lobe is what i would want out of a set lol. just would never spend that money on them. im good with where i sit.

hit him up on facebook, im sure he has the pics and stuff still that he posted on the cobalt page.

lol, going off the price equinox cams are, i dont think they would want to do that because everyone would go that route instead of buying their stage 1 LNF cams.

 

1. I don't see ZZP offering a smaller cam for less money. As cheap as the Cobalt community is, that wouldn't be a good business decision on their part.

2. Two great questions. This is why I posted this thread. If someone has already measured a set of these cams and find that they are compatible we can have answers to these questions. I ordered a set of Equinox cams. Part #'s 12608300 and 12604896. These cams fit perfectly and was timed exactly like stock. I measured the lift on the fuel lobe on both the stock cam and the fuel lobe on the equinox cam. The lift was identical.

Then I measured the lift on the two intake cams. The equinox intake cam had about .006" more lift than the stock cam. The equinox exhaust cam had less lift than the stock exhaust cam by about .008".

I have no way to measure duration, so I wasn't able to do that.

 

I read somewhere a while back that the newer DI version of the LE5 cams were discovered to be exactly what ZZP was selling as their "stage 1" cams;
At $600, they are not cheap, so any concrete information that could be provided.
So count me as at least one Canadian who is not going ot get all butthurt over this subject...

This cutting into hte HPFP lobe is new news to me;
Does this mean that it potentially has ZERO adverse effects on the ECM's calculated fuel readings, and associated mileage/range?
I actually use my mileage/range nearly every day because with over a seventy mile round trip drive to & from work, I often am earnestly trying to get decent mileage, and push the fuel range (while keeping my foot out of it).

Unless the valve overlap is to the point that too much intake charge is going into the exhaust unburnt, then I would respectfully disagree;
Camming engines is a tried and true thing;
Smaller duration/lift cams are often selected to create a smooth idle ect, and going bigger can have adverse effects on idle or low end power - but pay off in higher end power.
I am ALL for camming - but if I was to swap cams, I wouldn't want to do anythign that would give false readings with my fuel mileage/range ~ which is also why I would be hessitant to change my injectors (unless strides have been made in LNF tuning to compensate for these changes, of which I am currently unaware).

1) This is where I can empathise with a business;
Why should they share this?
They probably have overhead in R&D testing this all out, and disclosing this would unly hurt their bottom line.
Someone has to bear the brunt of any R&D with upgrades - be it a private guy buying different cams and testing, or a company brinigng an item to market..
Does that make sense?

2) I have understood that only the more extreme examples of cams, which have ALOT of overlap (to the point that an N/A engine required something akin to 13:1 compression to run the cams) would not work on a boosted appllication;
Then again, conventional wisdom states that you could advance or retard the intake and/or exhaust cam - but I am uncertain as to how much this would be negated with simply installing them 'straight up' in our motors, and the tune being modified to adjust for the cam timing...

 

I think all of you guys didn't understand what I was getting at with #1. Why doesn't ZZP buy Equinox cams, machine them to their secret fuel lobe, and then sell them to us for an adjusted price so that they are still making their profit? They would make money on this. The R&D money they sunk into their Stage 1 cams can be amortized by selling these cams too since the R&D didn't go to waste. I think if people were to start buying these cams and machining them on their own, ZZP would stand to lose a lot more, especially if someone found a magic number to grind the fuel lobe valleys down to.

For #2, if the measurements by rockstar are accurate, I would say swapping the intake cam would be beneficial as long as someone can measure the duration to prove that we wouldn't lose power there.

 

I am pretty sure I did.

What kind of a profit margin would you speculate that a company would need to have on products to remain afloat?
> I would suggest that with a high turn around, that the margains can be cut, but on average, many companies which buy and sell look to make about a 100% profit on anything purchased ect;
That is to say if they have $300 into a part, they would sell at $600.
Businesses have overhead, and financing charges which tend to further complicate things;
That is to say that maybe they have:
- $250 to buy the cams
- $50 to recut the HPFP lobe
But there are also costs for employees which are involved in shipping & recieving, as well as financing (carrying costs) for purchasing the cams, then paying a third party to grind the HPFP lobe...
So there could be "hidden" costs into this seto of cams which ammounts to an additional $100...

I am goign to be the LAST person to bash a small buiness, I wholly understand the sometimes insurmountable obstacles they have to overcome - and have been on the front lines time and again of having people whine that "X" is costing them more than they feel it should cost...

These are the costs of doing business.

 

the equinox DI cams are not $600, i know for a fact they are cheaper. thats what i was calling cheap lol. and obviously with them custom grinding the fuel lobe you would need a tune, im sure you would use a bit more gas just as you would with injectors too, that also really depends on the driver and tune though. as you can see i have an extensive mod list, but i have still gotten 32mpg on the highway......its all in the tune and the way you drive. but i completely agree with you about the bold sentence, it would only hurt their business if they were to accept equinox cams from customers just to custom grind the fuel lobes. they would lose so much money compared to selling their stage 1 cams because its been proven already that equinox cams are the same as the stage 1 cams EXCEPT for the fuel lobe.

aaron, that might be all they do.....and we just dont know. if thats the case they are making A LOT of money off them, but as said above, they are not going to disclose that information just for someone to buy a set of cams and go to another shop, that would be money out of their pocket. but i get what your saying, thing is........no one else has made a custom fuel lobe like they have. but as far as im concerned, you could gain a little power with the cams and a tune no doubt, but you'll still have the same fueling issues as we do now. only downfall to our engines i think.

 

just stop. I'm convinced you aren't reading my posts. I'm getting my masters in business administration, so I'm pretty sure I know the costs of doing business.

Please read my post this time before you reply with another lecture. I'm going to use round numbers to make the math easy to follow for everyone. If they are currently selling a part for $300, and $200 of that is just for parts and labor, that leaves them with $100 gross margin. If instead of making it from scratch, they start to buy a premade product and modify it saving them $50, they could sell it for $250 and still maintain the same dollar amount gross margin, but their percent amount gross margin goes up. THEY ARE STILL MAKING THE SAME DOLLAR AMOUNT PER ITEM SOLD. From an economics standpoint, assuming none of the demand determinants changed, the quantity demanded will increase due to the price decrease. So now not only are they making the same gross margin on each part, but they are selling more of them. Tell me how in any way, shape, or form this is bad?

You also can't tell me there would be more "hidden" costs using an Equinox cam as their starting point versus starting from scratch. I highly doubt ZZP is grinding these cams themselves, so nothing else is changing in the manufacturing process other than the starting point.

So if we get the specs on the durations, and discover that they are not problematic, I think ZZP would be making a big mistake if they didn't investigate the possibility of offering Equinox cams with their modified fuel lobe.

 

does quoting portions convince you that I read it?
Last time I looked into it, there were only a couple companies which cam cores could be sourced from, and even buying cam cores (as an example as Comp cams does), is pricey;
THe last set of DOHC cores I bought for a GM car were a fluke find, and I got for the smoking deal (no sarcasim) of $250.
As I see it, after factoring in costs to grind cams, all of a sudden costs go higher than just buying cams from GM to begin with.

I understand that a plethora of arguments could be made for a lower priced product, and I'm sorry that you percieved my post as any sort of a lecture - as that wasn't my intent;
I was purely trying to suggest that you might not have the full picture, and businesses need to make money - or they cease to exist.

 

Are we talking about this again? Guys, we've been through it. Read here: https://www.cobaltss.net/forums/2-0l...i-cams-288035/

 

One other thing I failed to mention in that thread- aside from the 2.4 intake cam position being off a whole bunch compared to the LNF intake cam, the oil holes do not even line up when you bolt the actuator on. You would need to use an LNF exhaust cam actuator in order to maintain cam phasing control. However, this wouldn't work either, because it would reverse the cam phasing, advancing when it is supposed to retard, and vice versa.