The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Engine Shop Home made headers??

I saw there was a topic on this posted before, but i want to know if there are any strict guidelines to follow. If there has to be a certain degree of bend, or certain size of pipe. I have been thinking about this quite a bit, and it doesn't seem like it would be overly difficult to weld a set up. What are your thoughts?

I have been looking into it. Clifford has full specs on the headers they sell, and I was just going to copy theirs. They even sell a flange kit which has stubs welded to it which makes it easy. You will need to bolt the flange to the motor when you weld so that it doesn't warp. You will need two differant sizes of tubing if you are doing a stovebolt since the outer two exhaust ports come from one cylinder and the inner two come from two. You can buy mandrel- bent J- or U- tubes almost anywhere. You cut the U in the middle and that is your pre-bent tube. You can buy pre-fabbed collectors but since you are just merging two tubes if you are going dualie exhaust you can just cut the end of one tube at the proper angle and cut a hole the proper size in the other tube and weld them together. If you are going single exhaust you either do a 4-to-one collecter (V8 type) or a tri-y set up- 4 into 2 into 1.

I am going to do one eventually once I get my 235. I may go turbo though which would be somewhat differant. When you fab headers you want to weld them so that the bead inside the tube is minimal- you want them as smooth as possible inside. Get some extra tubing and practice. I am going to weld an oxygen sensor bung into mine so I can monitor air/fuel ratio and tune my carb. I am planning on doing a mild forced induction setup with either an Eaton M90 supercharger (from a Buick 3800 or Phord 3.8) or twin Garret T25 turbo's feeding double deuces on a custom manifold. I should be able to get 300 HP easy with 6-10 lbs of boost.

Dubie, check out Headers by Ed . You can get kits with all the tubing (and the different bends). You tack it up and weld them yourself, or you can buy them ready-made. Caution: this is not cheap like a set of Hedman's or Hooker headers .

You can also by factory mistake bends. Check out
( www.STAHLheaders.com ). They sell boxes of bending mistakes 40 to 50 bends per box for $125. Thats alot of bends! Joe