anybody with any experience in building do-it-yourself headers? since I think I'm going to have some severe clearance issues I've started looking at a DIY setup -- at least a mockup. In looking around there are flanges available and a wide variety of pipes and collectors/flanges. I'm confused tho' on what J bends/U bends do? the bend in the J bend pipe (either pipe for that matter) seems too severe to be usable, can somebody help me understand how you would use them? Would you cut them somewhere in the middle to get the angle you need/want?
Yes, you cut out pieces and weld them together. Not for the faint of heart, or those who are in a hurry.
I almost ventured into the world of homemade headers. I had a good plan, so I thought I'd share. T/A sells the flange, and I was going to buy that. At Napa, They sell heat riser ducting in 1 3/4" sections. I think they also had them at home depot for dryers. Anyway I was going to use those to mock up the headers. I was going to bend them all in, and then take some hot glue, and lay a bead of glue the length on the pre-bent tube. I was then goig to take out each "primary" and make it out of real material. I talked to a guy at Monroe, and he said he could probably bend each primary for about 5 bucks. I might have had to re-work a few bends, but nothing crazy. I was very excited to do this, but I junked te car and bought my Buick. Good Luck :beer
Joe, thats a good idea. was thinking about the same thing. the only problem is that the pipes bent at the muffler shop wouldn't be mandrel bent (at least my shop doesn;t do mandrel) so I was going to cut and weld myself from J and U tubing. Besides, it gives me a chance to use my new MIG welder that I got for xmas given where the collector location is on the TA shorties, I don't think I have a choice but to custom fab a set up. I need the collector moved towards the front of the motor, I've got the firewall directly behind the rearmost cylinder so I don;t have room to get a downward bend in on the exhaust pipe with the collector in that position. I've got a triangulated area in the frame where I need to route the exhaust thru to get it under the car that sits right below the 5-7 and 6-8 cylinders lots of interesting info -- some very conflicting -- on header design, tri-y setups, pipe length, pipe size, equal length, vertical or upswept exit designs so far I've found the info on shorty vs full length headers on the TA site (wonder if the lack off significant difference to torque in the lowend range between shortys and full length is a scenario unique to buick motors ?) also design info on the headers by ed site (http://www.headersbyed.com/bildbetr.htm) tri-y design info at a variety of sites (this topic returned the most amount of info) including http://www.ssheaders.com/header.htm, http://stans-headers.com/tri_y.htm, and http://www.popularhotrodding.com/tech/0310phr_burns/ (really nice work shown here)
this is the best site for info and parts yet: http://www.burnsstainless.com/TechArticles/Construction/construction.html
Tri-Y, long tubes, and equal length are all good goals to shoot for, but the reality is that if you're really pressed for space, those aims will need to be sacrificed just to be able to make the headers fit.
455 "Block Hugger Headers" My father and I built a set of "block hugger" headers for our 455 that has been transplanted into a 1940 Ford Coupe. I purchased both J bends and U bends for the tubing (from summit racing) and a set of flanges with stubs from TA Performance. To mock the design, we used the heat riser ducting and bent each duct to the form that we wanted. With the four ducts in place and bent the way we wanted them, I used a rubber band at the bottom where the collector would go to to hold the ducts together. This gave us an idea of how the header system will fit and look. The ducting held form well enough to match it's shape to the mandrel bent tubing so that we could cut the angles we needed and tack into place. As far as tuned headers, or any of the other performance issues, we were not to concerned, we just wanted a set of "block huggers". As was stated by others this is a time consuming process, but very doable. I have some pictures of the finished product. Give me a little time to figure out how I can download them to a post.
The "flex-pipe to find the shape" route was what I was thinking of doing if I ever decide to throw that 455 in my s-10. The thought I had on having a muffler shop do it is if you started out with 1.75" primaries, even if they did kink it a little when they bent it, it would probably still be more than 1.5" the whole length of the tube. That should flow fine on most motors. - Freed
If the muffler shop couldn't mandrel bend it, the flex pipe would still make a good mold for the welding.
pictures of custom block hugger headers Here are the pictures of the headers my father and I built for our 455.
Boy that Buick red paint sure has faded!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Good job on the headers. What thickness are the flanges 3/8"?
