02 bung / no 02 bung
shouldn't be too big of a deal, I ran into this myself. You can call napa and get an 02 bung. If you've got a w eld-machine and a drill, drill out a spot and weld in the bung(s). If you don't have the equipment, I can't imagine anyone charging you more than maybe $25 to do it...should take about 10 minutes. My headers came with flanges where the collector bolts to the rest of the exhaust. I decided to install my bung right there. It was the first place where all cylinders met. I also like this because I'm not drilling into the header pipes at all...instead it was just a minor component that could be cheaply replaced.
If you can manage to snag stainless headers for around that $120 mark, I'd say that's really good. The cheapest headers I found for my 89 1-ton were around $170, made by Hedman, included all of the necessary hardware.
A few considerations-
I know each vehicle is different, but for my header install it said something about "modification to the catalytic convertor pipe may be required" or something like that. Well, the headers are longer than the exhaust manifolds by a good amount and that meant the Y-pipe would no longer fit without modification. I certainly wasn't capable of making any of the modifications to the tubing myself, and perhaps an exhaust shop could have salvaged the y-pipe and made it work...but I just took the rig to a shop and had them install a custom dual exhaust...yeah my wife is going to kill me. Something I expected to have done in a day and cost around $200, ended up taking alot longer and cost alot more. Just tryng to give you the heads up in the event you encounter the same thing, because it is a little bit of a bummer.
Next-
Many years ago, one of the online debates revolved around header wrap. Some people believed that it trapped moisture up against the headers and caused them to fail prematurely, others said this was bogus...others said you shouldn't wrap your headers unless you've got a racecar...blah blah blah. I think the moisture argument is weak because for as hot as headers get, it should cook off any moisture in short order, but I don't know for sure.
If you don't go with stainless or ceramic or anything exotic, you're going to want to spend some time cleaning all of the black paint that the factory puts on the headers to prevent them from rusting while they sit in the warehouse. If I read the directions for the high temperature paint correctly...they want you to bake the parts at 250 degrees or something. I said screw that and just painted mine. I'll run the truck some more over the next few days and shoot some more paint on them hoping that it will take. If they rust, oh well...where I'm from, rust is a pretty common thing. Although it's unsightly, I suspect it would take a long while for rust to eat through pipes and cause any structural issues with them...but I'm just speculating.
if you decide to wrap your headers...I have a suggestion...only because I once wrapped an exhaust and it wasn't fun by any means. I'm not sure if someone more experienced with this will disagree but I would recommend wrapping the headers before you install them! Why? If you've ever dealt with header wrap, it's just fiberglass cloth...really itchy stuff. It would be much easier to sit in your garage and wrap the pipes nice and tight rather than have to climb around in the engine compartment or up underneath the vehicle after the headers are installed.
When I wrapped, I had the wrap rolled up like a roll of tape, and I had hoped to just keep passing the roll around the tube and I would unroll it as I needed...that worked until I got to places where the roll wouldn't fit...I had to unroll all of the wrap and feed an end around and pull 50 feet of the wrap through...(hope I explained that well enough to get the point across).
I think they also make a paint that you are supposed to spray on the outside of the header wrap.
HTH.
