School me on headers

So I got some cat bypass pipes...I cannot get my cats off my current headers and a indy (friend of mine) tells me it might take a couple of hours just to get the bolts out of the headers...Well even though he is a friend, I am still going to pay him something, hypothetically the bill might be $400 or $500 in labor... My header's bolts look pretty good (at the block), I started searching for header options as I might be better off removing the stock heads, and putting the bypass pipes right onto a new header set. (for about the same price). Has anyone tried Top Speed Pro's...link is here. http://topspeedauto.com/porsche-996-...steel-headers/ Any other CHEAP but good options (looking for quality over performance, a few hp would be nice, but want good quality). As long as the performance doesnt' go down, I am fine. Real life reviews are preferred.

I don't have an answer but "good" and "cheap" usually aren't seen in the same sentence. Just sayin

Use a nice, long breaker bar to snap the cat bolts and pay an exhaust guy $50 to torch out the six studs for you. Use stainless nuts and bolts instead of studs from now on so you never have to do it again. OR you can spend an entire weekend on your back with penetrating oil dripping in your eyes, only to snap the bolts off anyway, at which time you can pay an exhaust guy $50 to torch out the six studs for you. Please believe that it is a LOT easier to take the cats to the shop to get the studs removed (because you WILL want to put them back on) than it is to fix the one or two bolts you're likely to shear off and have to helicoil when you try to remove the headers from the exhaust ports. Cat delete pipes made my car unbearably loud - and I love loud cars. Cat delete pipes plus cheap Chinese headers...I don't even want to imagine the raspy, stinking mess. Also, a warning: If you are married, starting up your catless car the garage with laundry hanging will propel your wife into a new realm of pissed-off that you didn't even know existed. I did try a pair of cheapo headers on my Boxster - the fitment sucked just enough to make it a really miserable job, and they sounded terrible. I ran them for exactly two days before pulling them off and selling them.

Not that I'm a super engine builder, but I'd leave the stock headers on. Reason being Porsche mostly knows what they are doing and the bottleneck in the exhaust would be in the cats and mufflers anyway - so more benifit to messing around with them. Also, as someone else said, snapping off header studs or bolts doesn't sound like a lot of fun. Not to mention doing it just to put in some cheap headers that could very well be worse than the stock ones...

Headers = waste of money. And a very good chance you will snap some bolts in the block in the process..

Don't be surprised if most of the header bolts snap. This happens quite often turing a simple job into a nightmare. Over the years, I noticed header design has changed a bit for the sake of increasing the bottom line. If you are thinking of getting headers that actually improve flow, make sure you get one that has a thick flange, not too big primaries/collector for your given size engine(some ebay ones are way too big hurting performance), making sure it has a true merge collector, making sure fitment is great and you won't have to dremel any holes and such to make fit, making sure all the welds are clean on the inside as to not disrupt flow. FVD, Cargraphic, Speedtech, NHP are the decent ones that come to mind with Cargraphic being first on my list followed by Speedtech, NHP, FVD. Notice Cargraphic is the only one to offer customized setup for both 3.4 and 3.6L engines. My $.02 Here's mine showing true merge collector and port matched primaries. Notice no welds sticking out anywhere...

^ Cheap/Chinese headers do not look like that internally. Please feel free to take my word for this. The cheapo headers I got for my Boxster also had one O2 bung in the wrong location (well, I suppose the bung was in a great spot as long as you didn't actually want an oxygen sensor to go in it).

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Just to clarify, the pics of my headers are neither Cheap nor Chinese made. I was trying to show what a great header looks like.

There have been many reports on these forums and others about aftermarket headers reducing performance as opposed to improving it. Do your homework and be careful. I agree with the comments above; you get what you pay for.

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I agree. Most of the performance losses from Headers are from Ebay generic headers or from people that have that as their only modification. The correct combo can yield some decent results but not everyone knows what that combination is. Also to note that some mods, while not increasing peak hp, increases hp under the curve which can be important more so in a street car where you rarely see high rpms all the time. There are people that have tried it and others that speak from hearing about it but as Dennis said, do your homework. I'll just leave it at that.

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Not that we were quick with this, but I snapped flush one of the studs on my motorcycle exhaust. Took my friend and I a good hour in his machine shop drilling it out - although for reasons unknown (we knew it wouldn't work) we tried a easy out type thing with a torch first and snapped that off, which wasted another hour or so. Also was in a repair shop once where a guy spent a few hours (at least) grinding a few studs or bolts out that had snapped. It's not a lot of fun at all sometimes. Moral of the story being if you don't have a really good reason to take the manifold off then don't take it off.

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I suspect that those of us who have seen eBay headers would not mistake them as such. No ****.

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Ah gotcha, I guess I misunderstood what you were originally trying to say.

It's all good. The headers I bought looked like a bear's *** sewed up with a grapevine. Yours look sweet.

The trick to removing the factory head pipes is to warm the engine up just to the point where the cylinder head is hot to the touch. Then use an impact wrench but don't try to loosen the fastener right away! Instead, try to slightly tighten it first, just chatter on it long enough to see the fastener move about 1/16" of an inch. Then try to loosen the bolt with the impact. The impact will often break the fastener loose and zip it right out, where a manual wrench will snap it off. The hammering action is the key along with the heat in the cylinder head. Trying to tighten it first will keep the aluminum from galling against the threads as the bolt is initially being removed. Once the fastener is loosened a little bit you can use some penetrating oil to try to assist with the rest of the removal, and at this point you might also try to tighten the fastener again. I haven't snapped off a head bolt in 2-3 years using this method. The ones you have to watch for are at either end of the head pipes, those seize worst. The bolts the factory used are horrible for this, as they promote dissimilar metal corrosion, which leads to the issue. When you go back together with it, use some high temperature anti- seize on all the threads, and next time you take it apart, it'll be easy. I've yet to find headers for these engines that are optimized off the shelf. Al of them either have improper primary diameters, less than optimum collectors, and others are far from being equal length. Your biggest gains in exhaust with these engines comes from a better set of cats. The head pipes and mufflers are the strong points.

"The trick to removing the factory head pipes is to warm the engine up just to the point where the cylinder head is hot to the touch. Then use an impact wrench but don't try to loosen the fastener right away! Instead, try to slightly tighten it first, just chatter on it long enough to see the fastener move about 1/16" of an inch. Then try to loosen the bolt with the impact. The impact will often break the fastener loose and zip it right out, where a manual wrench will snap it off. The hammering action is the key along with the heat in the cylinder head. Trying to tighten it first will keep the aluminum from galling against the threads as the bolt is initially being removed. Once the fastener is loosened a little bit you can use some penetrating oil to try to assist with the rest of the removal, and at this point you might also try to tighten the fastener again. I haven't snapped off a head bolt in 2-3 years using this method. The ones you have to watch for are at either end of the head pipes, those seize worst. The bolts the factory used are horrible for this, as they promote dissimilar metal corrosion, which leads to the issue. When you go back together with it, use some high temperature anti- seize on all the threads, and next time you take it apart, it'll be easy. I've yet to find headers for these engines that are optimized off the shelf. Al of them either have improper primary diameters, less than optimum collectors, and others are far from being equal length. Your biggest gains in exhaust with these engines comes from a better set of cats. The head pipes and mufflers are the strong points. __________________ Jake Raby Flat 6 Innovations Co-Inventor of the IMS Solution Co-Inventor of the Single Row Pro Inventor of the Faultless IMS Retrofit Tool" ^This^ is a truly GREAT post and should be pinned somewhere useful ...It would be a shame to lose it to father time... Thanks Jake! Happy Holidays to all!

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Isn't this for most of the auto industry? Everyone, although I only casually pay attention, seems to complain about header bolts.

Just to clarify, ^That^ was actually posted by Jake Raby ... Header bolts are almost always difficult. There are several reasons for it, dissimilar metal corrosion just being one which happens to be relevant to our engines.

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I tend to agree with this but still think gains(albeit small) can still be made with proper headers/exhaust if the right combo is used along with tuning(tuning is essential imo), or else you'll just be running rich from the factory ecu.