Hello All. My name is George and I own a 2002 Dale Earnhardt Edition. I'm 65, so this car is a serious hobby now.. I live in Chicago but will now be spending a lot more time in Hilton Head, SC. I am adding a K&N and ZZP catback exhaust. I look for info on the mere thought of a top swap and the steps and estimated costs. Just for an fyi purpose. Thank you.

 

Its a fairly involved swap - its basically replacing everything from the heads on up (intake manifold, fueling, tb, etc) and more stuff on the 'front end' of the engine - balancer, everything related to the SC belt circuit. Then its a couple minor wiring changes (map location moves substantially and you can optionally add a wire back to the pcm for the supercharger bypass valve), which there is a cheap aftermarket harness available for. Lastly its pcm tuning to flash in the settings for the SC engine.

In parallel, people usually do a few mods too. The thing is that many supercharged 3800s develop sensitivity to spark knock as they age even on the stock pulley size. By putting that package as is on a bottom end with nearly 1 more full point of compression, you'll most certainly run into knock issues. To alleviate that, you can either add engine mods (the k&n and catback you mentioned don't really help for this) or put on a larger SC pulley to slow it down.

Prices run an enormous range as it depends how much you pay for the parts and labor. If you do all the work yourself, have a cheap local junkyard as a source for parts, and find a local 3800 member to flash the pcm - you could get this down to a few hundred bucks plus fluid + gaskets. Thats really the end of the spectrum where the top swap is so appealing.

At the other end of the spectrum is buying a kit of pre-sourced parts from one of the 3800 vendors (not sure if anyone even offers them anymore) for $1500 + high end fluids and gaskets $200 + a canned tune $150 + custom shop labor more than doubling the cost of everything else. You can quickly end up spending the whole value of the car on the single mod.

 

Thank you for this great information. Just going to shelve the idea but I appreciate your response.

 

Welcome to the forum!

Other options are do a full L67 (3800 Supercharged) engine swap. Or bolt up a turbo kit. ZZPerformance is one of the last vendors left that cater to these engines (Intense Racing is also still around, but less talked about). There might be a couple other lesser known ones out there that I am not remembering but might still be in operation.

 

I'd second that one if youre ok spending the $ on it. Its much more expensive than a top swap, but is far easier to install and makes a lot more power. Also the prices are pretty reasonable having seen what turbo kits go for on some of these newer cars.

 

Thank you all for this fantastic info. Doing the ZZP system and K&N and will take my time from there. This is the exact info I needed. I truly appreciate your knowledge and thoughtfulness to share.