Been real busy lately. Finally have some time on the lift here shortly to start testing fitment and then it's off to the dyno!

 

Last set of Dyno runs yielded 12 HP more than a Racing Beat Road Race Header., but more importantly, the header recently shattered the EP lap record at Roebling Roads. If you so desire the collector can be lengthened to make to a stock exhaust system.


So How are you documenting the results of your header? Are you back purging your TIG welds? What grade SS are you using?

 

Christ son! Calm down! I don't do the dirty work, they just told me "Go see what people think of this, and if it's positive, we'll dump some money into it."


But as for documenting it's gonna be with a wideband O2, a dyno, and a datalogger. You know, how most people document horsepower...

 

It would be great to have a header that would bolt straight up to the factory cat
for those of you in states that allow the modification of exhaust. In Ca unless it has a CARB exempt # you cannot have it on the car for smog. Which means that
It will not pass the visual even thought the cat is in place. For those of you that
can run a header but have to have the cat. It's simple, buy anytype of header you want and buy the appropriate flange that bolts to the header and a flange that bolts to the stock cat. Take it down to the local muffler guy and for $20-$25. they
will make you a pipe, it's no big thing. rx7doctor

 

What Material are you using? What are you welding it with? What Primary length? Where are you tuning for peak torque? How are you compensating for expansion? There is a hell of a lot more to header manufacturing than tacking some pipe together.

So just to be clear. You havent tested this header at all. HOW MANY HOURS, not pulls, HOURS of testing is this header going to have when you sell the first one?

 

^dude, we know you make a good header. but for those of us that dont want to spend $500, i would like to see what this guy can come up with.

 

What is it exactly that makes you feel the need to be such a *****?

All I'm saying is that it will be well tested, it will be built from quality materials, and it isn't going to cost a ton of money. This isn't some startup that has to jack up prices in order to cover initial overhead.

It's going to be ok, just take a deep breath.

A little friendly competition never hurt anyone.

 

So much misinformation here. Even the Pacesetter header will yield VERY noticable power gains over the stock exhaust manifold. Can it be improved upon? Yes, but for the price it is a good deal. Not everyone is willing to pay $500 for a set of headers. I've had both the Racing Beat and the Pacesetter headers. They both work very well compared to stock. There is always a better product out there somewhere though. I currently run a custom made system that I built.

Designing a very good performing header is not as hard as it is made to sound. It is very difficult to design a true header that can't outperform the stock exhaust manifold. You can guess and beat that cast iron shoebox. I guarantee that on this forum, a cheap header that provides some gains over stock will outsell an expensive header that provides a bigger gain. Most of these guys aren't rich and don't have alot to spend. If money were no object, then the SDJ headers would be a great purchase. I'm sure they perform very well. They do look great. The one with the H-pipe in the middle is an interesting design.

 

I would also be very interested in a reasonably priced header for my NA. But one thing I would like to suggest, since I live in CA and they can get pretty strict around here about smog, is that you put some small brackets on the header that would allow us to attach the stock heat shield to it. They don't have to exactly match up to the stock holes, I can drill my own, they just have to allow the heat shield to cover the header and look stock.

 

Yeah, I'm sure the $500 header is a quality piece but when I only paid $150 for the whole car a $500 header is out of the question. I was going to just order the monza header and be done with uit. I don't need anything cosmetically pretty or track proven on the greatest race circuits in the world. I just want something better than stock that won't cost more than my car did.

 

I think SDJ has another design for the 13B header...
Do you have info on it? The SDJ website is currently down.

 

See I disagree. It is the downpipe that is the clog on the non turbo when using a collected system at any point. The stock manifold is just fine when a good down pipe is used to replace the stock downpipe and pre-cats.

In fact with a stock engine there will be a pretty minimal HP difference between using a collected header like the pacesetter vs the stock exhaust manifold and a down pipe.

 

This has been dyno proven more than once. The simple fact is without doing some crazy stuff on the intake side you will not see much gain between the racing beat downpipe/stock exhaust manifold vs the racing beat (or any other) header.

It's just louder.

 

I have a 88 n/a and I got a header from a 7 shop in AZ installed that bolted up to the cat for $200

 

While I agree that Banzai makes a quality product, and has decent metthods for doing things, he doesn't need to be such a cocky jerk.

 

"A little competition never hurt anyone"

So true...this kind of competition will drive prices down.

And I respect that obviously a lot of work and effort went into making a quality piece (SDJ ) ... but I don't respect your kind of rant to discredit someone who is in the R&D phase of product development. It's this very kind of tactics that drives customer's away.

That being said, I don't know if $500 is too much to spend for a header, if they perform as advertised. The old adage of how fast do you want to spend certainly applies here. I've never built a performance exhaust system, but I've ported and polished and flowbenched my own heads. It's an exhausting process if you want to get it right. And if I was doing it for someone else, I'd expect to be compensated for my time.

I'm just interested in knowing what everyone has to offer, before I make my decision. And I won't be bullied into it, either.

 

I had a downpipe on my old '88 for a long time without a cat. The night I installed the Pacesetter header, the power gain wasn't even funny. It isn't like it was a slight amount that I might have felt due to a miscalibration of the butt dyno. It was a very big change. The Racing Beat header that I had also made a nice difference. The stock downpipe may be a problem but the biggest is the fact that the engine dumps through nonexistent length primaries into a plenum chamber stock manifold and then finds it's way out. There is practically no tuning this way and it doesn't encourage scavenging like a header does. Yes different headers are going to give you different performance gains. Some more than others. It is very hard to not outdo the stock manifold though. There is almost nothing that could get worse than it.

 

Maybe some placebo efect? Without numbers I am very sceptical. A guy who lives near me has a 91 vert with full RB exhaust (cat back, presilencer, header) on a fresh reman. It is not apreciably faster at all than my 90 GTU with the same exhaust only with a downpipe and stock manifold. My engine is 6.7-6.9 kg/cm2 on the compression graphs. Now yes there is an almost 300lbs wieght difference but you would think it wouild at least torque out more noticably in the midrange.

The effects of scavanging are not nearly as noticable or tunable for gobs of power on rotoaries because only two pulses can be tuned in primary flow design. Properly designed headers make much more direct difference on piston engines than rotories. Not that it isnt important it is just that there is not much to gain until you are flowing lots of gasses at higher RPMs. Quite simply back pressure from emissions (sound or gasses) controlling equipment is the main enemy of the rotary engine much more than piston engines. Again all of this is under the topic of mostly stock intake side of things.

There are MUCH WORSE stock manifold designs out there than ours. Take my 2003 tundra. The stock manifolds were so bad even changing to uneven length headers freed up 25 more hp and 20 ft-lbs of torque. The stock manifolds were AWEFUL. I should post a pic sometime. The reason for gains even without equal length headers was due to the truly poor stock manifold design.

This just isnt gonna happen on a 13b rotary. Because there are only two ports. Interference from one other pulse is much less than 2-3 others (or 3-7 others if tuning an x-dual exhaust)