General Motor's Quad-4 Engine First Modern GM Engine

December 21, 2019

#344

Gentle reader,

My wife and I refer to our first marriages as, "In a former life..."

That said, in a former life, my wife seemed content to pop out a new baby every two years and stay home while I had to work two jobs. But I digress.

I have been a car guy since I was tiny, Mom said that I could identify any car by age three. Me thinks she exaggerates.

Since my commute from Stafford County, VA to Washington, D.C. was fifty miles, I needed a car that got good fuel mileage. 

Prior to my career working on D.C.'s subway cars, I was a new car dealership mechanic. Since a Chrysler-Plymouth dealer was my last job doing that and I was familiar with cars, I chose a used 1982 Plymouth Reliant K-Car. It was a four-door sedan, same color as the two-door above.

It had the very good 2.2 liter single overhead cam four cylinder engine, shown above. That image is of the one in the 1985 Dodge Aries wagon. I found a chrome plated cam cover and put it on the engine. That adds like five horsepower, for sure. ;-)

That Reliant was a plain-Jane sedan with bench seats, column shifter and automatic transmission. Which failed one afternoon as I was about to leave work (it would go into reverse, but not drive) in D.C. Thank goodness I had (and still do have) AAA because that tow was free.

Obviously, I needed another car and since we had four kids, it needed to be a four-door.

On a used car lot was this 1989 Pontiac Grand-Am. Nice looking car. "Turbo-Power" was written on the windshield. I opened the hood, no turbo, but it did have GM's Quad-4 engine. The intake manifold had four equal-length tubes, similar to a racing exhaust header:

I painted the cam cover red, normally it was unadorned aluminum.

Here is another view of the Grand-Am, I was trying to sell it at that point. These photos were made with a JCPenney 110 film camera. 110's used 16mm film, so the negatives are quite small.

Below, are a series of images from other people I found doing a search for Quad-4 engines.

Here are two that are better quality images of the lower output (160 horsepower) Quad-4 engine with it's equal-length long-runner intake manifold.

The image above is of the engine with the cam cover/ignition removed.

These two images must have been from GM when it introduced the Quad-4 engine.

The Quad-4 was GM's first modern engine: Twin camshafts with four-valves-per-cylinder. The first with individual coil packs instead of a distributor and (I think) with individual fuel injectors. 

An excellent cutaway drawing above and the bottom of the cylinder head below.

While powerful and with strong torque, the engines were prone to head gasket failure. Mine blew on the way to work in D.C. one winter morning. Fortunately, even though it was well out of warranty, GM replaced the head gasket for free.

These are photos of the High Output Quad-4. They put out 180 horsepower and used short runner intake manifolds. Above is a partial cutaway display engine.

I was not the only one to paint the cam cover red.

Can you imagine how many more Pontiac Fieros would have been sold had it a Quad-4 engine instead of the 1950's "Iron Duke" four cylinder?

I like Fieros and always thought a Quad-4 would be ideal for swapping into one. More than twice the power and less weight. What's not to like?

Quad 4 swap (lot of pics) - Pennock's Fiero Forum 

The link above is for a Fiero that has a Quad-4 in it. If you would like to learn more about the Quad-4, here is a link to the Wikipedia page:

Quad 4 engine - Wikipedia 

So, what became of that Grand-Am? Well, since I had to work two jobs, one of them was delivering pizzas. Between that, and the 100-mile commute, it began to develop problems. The first was that it would die when in drive. I had to put it in neutral at stop lights and rev it a bit and drop it into drive hoping it would not die. 

That eventually led to the automatic transmission to fail. That was IT for me and autos. 

Since then, every car I owned has a manual transmission, including my current car, which I will keep forever, a 2005 Volvo V50 T5 M66 wagon which has a turbo FIVE cylinder engine and the super-rare six-speed manual transmission.

I hope you have enjoyed my little article about the once great GM Quad-4 engine. 

Thanks for taking the time to read my humble blog. It is our kind words here on via Facebook that keep me writing.

Scott

December 21, 2019

#344