Custom Made Headers
As much as it needs to be said I don't have a problem saying it! Headers, WOW! The prices of headers have been climbing through the roof! Why so? Obviously material costs contribute and the popularity of mandrel bent tubing. 20 years ago nobody knew anything about the science of headers other than bigger primary tubes supported high rpms and longer tubes supported more low-end torque. Then the step header came, a by-product of more knowledge, then the merge collector and Tri-Y collectors. Now it's the call for stainless, stainless everything! I've heard cost of up to 7k for a set of headers, no doubt you’re paying for highly skilled fabricating labor as well as the science of making Hp.
With so many different car projects and demanding engines combinations we've built over the past years, we are evolving around the science of exhausting the engine. We make our own headers here because most header companies although great fabricators aren't really engine designers. We spend endless hours on the dyno testing engines of every style and size with every type of camshaft or induction combination we can possibly conjure up. The engine in the upper picture during dyno testing we made 3 different sets of headers for it, while each header savaged the engine differently creating a completely different power curve requiring a separate tune for each header used. A 50hp difference between the three, this much difference is not the norm mainly it's because of our unique induction system, consisting of the heads, intake and camshaft events.
For the average basic available header they will work fine in most cases for lower power engines because we need them to fit our vehicles, so we try to choose the best available header to work with the engine design. The header plays its biggest roll when there is no exhaust system behind the engine just the header. Headers are used for scavenging the exhaust from the cylinders while scavenging the intake charge to support cylinder fill. The primary header tubing size plays the biggest rule when using an exhaust system behind the header. That is unless the exhaust is larger enough not to create a restriction, which is never the case when using a muffler. Exhaust systems create back pressure and back pressure is not what we want, we want air velocity to continue down the pipes as long as possible creating scavenge on the previous without the exhaust pluses running into each other.
