Best Headers

Equal length or you're wasting time and money.

 

Nice article. I added 1 7/8" Stainless Works long tubes to my 17 345 T/A along with a dyno and hooked them up to my 2 3/4" stock Active Exhaust. The performance difference was night and day. The car is also much louder (especially when I step on it) and it doesn't have that raspy high pitch you get from muffler/resonator deletes. Then I installed a Stage 2 cam along with non MDS lifters and pushrods because I have the 8 speed auto and H A T E MDS. The total house power and toque was amazing. I can't wait to race a Scat Pack.
The first dyno is long tubes only. The second is dyno long tubes and the stage 2 cam. All readings are at the rear wheel.

 

Already have the 1 7/8" Kooks long tube headers. Is the Stage 2 cam improvement worth the cost for a daily? And if it the Stage 2 cam is worth it, what else should be done as long as you have the front bumper off?

 

Those are good gains per $ spent! Significant savings over supercharging it would seem. Similar power gains available for 392. Gear heads are alive and well in North America!

 

Consensus seems to be the shorties are as beneficial with the benefit of not having to change / modify factory exhaust. For a variety of reasons the resulting sound of long tubes with modern day exhaust systems doesn't much resemble the 'old school' notes.

 

Consensus and facts are not synonymous, and often diametrically opposed.

To further destroy the idea that consensus equates to anything that may be related to reality, facts, or even sanity, I quote from this article:
https://www.mopardiy.com/gen-iii-hemi-headers-shootout-finding-the-perfect-header-for-your-hemi/

"The scavenging effect offered by these headers from American Racing Headers was worth nearly 20 hp"

Equal-length long-tube headers are superior to short-tube and unequal-length headers. This has been proven for decades by actual facts.

Long-tube headers become even more beneficial when they are combined with more modifications that take advantage of their design superiority. These modifications can include a cam, valves, and a PCM/tune.

Long-tubes scavenge exhaust so effectively, they flow MORE air for supercharged engines with less backpressure, leading to a reduced intake manifold air pressure reading while simultaneously flowing MORE air.

From that article again:


With long-tube headers, even a turbocharged engine can benefit, contrary to the stupidly-short-runner "turbo manifolds" shilled by so many hucksters looking for a profit at the expense of literally anything that isn't their wallet. There are turbo systems that put twin turbos on the collector end of long-tubes on Hellcats, and even F1, whose cars are famous for extremely high revs, where one may theorize they would thus want super-duper-short primary tubes, had long, long, LONG primary tubes leading to their turbochargers, in direct opposition to the "wisdom" espoused by so many hawkers of short-tube turbo exhaust manifolds.

Long tubes of exactly the same length work and work well, despite the "conventional wisdom" of "Well, by gum, GM puts on log manifolds, so they must be the best!" or whatever anecdotal opinion someone may quote as gospel truth.

 

No disputing that engine mods at a certain point require exhaust improvements (long tubes at the top of that list). I should've qualified that my comment to IntimidatorRT is based on the understanding that he's factory performance, with which shorties for street use are the best choice because test after test on stock (even mildly modified 8's) consistently indicate low to mid range power loss with long tubes.

https://www.americanmuscle.com/challenger-header-options-and-benefits.html
Article describes short header "low to mid power advantage".

Even from the article you've sighted Moparisto, which describes beneficial exhaust mods to a mildly modified 5.7 "Shorty headers are very popular; they are easy to install and often emissions legal. The problem or limitation of shorty headers is that while they make flow better than a set of stock exhaust manifolds, especially the cast-iron Hemi truck units, they do not offer the necessary primary tubing length to produce the desired scavenging effect. This test illustrates that on a mild 5.7L Hemi application, the shorty headers offered nearly as much peak power, but note the gains offered by the long-tube headers through the remainder of the curve. Run with the shorty headers, the IR injected Hemi produced 461 hp and 413 ft-lbs of torque. After installation of the headers, the peak numbers changed to 462 hp and 418 ft-lbs of torque." Low end power loss on a stock or mildly modified (cammed) street car is going in the wrong direction for a long tube hp gain of 1 somewhere in the power band and a torque increase of 5 ft-lbs.

 

There is no such thing as a bad improvement. Long-tube headers are always superior in function. Only people under the gunpoint of oppressive governments or the insane care about "emissions legality."

Long-tube headers work better. They ARE better. They are never worse. Reaching far out in left field for the most minimal improvement doesn't invalidate the FACT that long-tube, even-length headers are superior.

Long-tube equal-length headers help in all circumstances, UNLESS they are intentionally sized wrongly so someone can make a point by screaming about that one time uncle Ned put 4" primary tube headers on his lawnmower and it didn't work as well.

The fact that headers that were that large (one and three quarters inches) did that well was in itself truly surprising, as that size of headers is just not used on engines of only 354 cubic inches or whatever. I notice they did not use 1 5/8" headers, a FAR more common size for engines of that size.

I quote from the article:

https://www.motortrend.com/how-to/gen-3-hemi-header-test/

The stock Ram manifolds might fit well and last forever, but this test clearly showed they were not designed for power. Compared to the 1 5/8-inch Hooker headers, the manifolds were down 27 hp and 25 lb-ft of torque. Many enthusiasts incorrectly assume that stock manifolds offer more torque, and this disproves that notion. Long-tube headers greatly enhance torque production, in this case through the entire rpm range.

Notice how properly-sized headers work better than improperly-sized headers. Do you advise people that size 12 shoes are useless because you have size 4 feet, also?

The following from the article:
Like the smaller 1 5/8-inch headers, the 1 7/8-inch versions offered even greater power gains. We expected gains on the top end due to the increase in tubing diameter, but the bigger headers also offered gains down low. At the peaks, the big headers were worth 36 hp at 6,100 rpm, and 30 lb-ft of torque at 3,300 rpm.

Long-tube, equal-length headers are good in all ways and in all circumstances and in all applications.

The facts found to be true by thousands of people over dozens of years are not undone by opinion, legality, convenience, or budget.