Christian Steffen
I'm Awesome
Thats whats so great about America you have the right to disagree. I have spent hundreds of hours on engine dynos all the way back to the early 80's Have several NHRA records and was on the cover of Hot Rod Magazine in 2005. I know for a fact a header does not do hardly anything at 2500rpm to 3000 rpm. I only mention these things because I have been around awhile. Even if headers would work they need primary tubes to be extreme in length 36"38" which you cannot buy and very small in diameter 1 3/4 with a very small collector 2 1/2 in dia and bout 18 inches or longer in length. That's a custom hand built header at a cost of around $3000.00 dollars or more and I doubt you could find anybody to even want to build them for that. Any knowledgeable header guru would agree with this. Headers By Ed, Jack Davis Headers/Belanger headers.......These are the leaders in header tech. I own at least 5 NHRA records and in our day we ran 2 & 3 step headers before anybody even heard of them. I doubt you would even be familiar with any of this.........Mass produced shorty or store bought headers are worthless below 3000 RPM period. Now add to that fact that anything you can buy in a box are all junk. The flanges crack .pipes at welds crack and the bolts come loose, ignition wires are an issue and they wont last to long besides the ring and ting your going to hear as the torque of the engine is hummig. Pulling a trailer all day long will be a maintenance nightmare with the cooling and heating that happens. Your going to have issues and who wants to chase the problems. You wont see a 1/3 mpg increase.
Too finish this rebuttal to a guy who knows not to much.. every drag racer in the 70"s tried cams/headers/carbs/intake manifolds etc. Some of the best minds in engine building like Rehr Morrison etc tried everything. We pulled 40ft gooseneck trailers with 454 chevy duallys.....stock they got 6MPG and with thousands of dollars poured into research we all still got 6 MPG no matter what we did.
Most who had headers went back to Cast Iron manifolds and took the PIA headers off and got some peace and quiet as we got white line fever. It takes years of experience to learn these things and when we were all young the first thing we would say is lets put some headers on our trucks and after some experience with the headaches and non performance....they all came off. I have been building engines for 50 years and that has taught me some valuable lessons.
I will say that ~500-$600 will get you headers that seem to be pretty reliable, at least so far my JBA's have been completely trouble free, and the ceramic coating does a decent job at keeping heat on the inside.