Originally Posted by kjlindgr

I would definitely not knock any of the shops on this board that sell header kits or the price they sell them for. As mentioned, there is R&D time, fabrication time, advertising, marketing, the cost of materials, shop/store overhead and I'm sure other costs involved just to break even...not to mention any profit margins. Shops NEED to make a profit to just stay in business. Economies of scale also play a part in pricing (i.e. these are Mercs, not Hondas or Mustangs). Remember that too.

I put a lot of work into these headers, but my labor is free so I only pay for my materials. I built them in my garage which is attached to my house so overhead is also a sunk cost.

Try to keep all this in perspective when you are pricing things out. My costs are artificially low where as a shop's prices should be more realistic. You'll know when you see one off the chart expensive though.

Originally Posted by kjlindgr

I feel ya, but here was my reasoning. I heard a lot of people say that you need to merge the pipes to equal out pressure. They said it helps give you a much nicer sound. To prevent the car from sounding like a donkey, I decided I needed a connecting pipe of sorts.

The stock car uses an H-pipe. Everyone else seems to be going with X-pipes. Here's what I don't like about X-pipes. Look at the picture below. You take two 3" pipes in and effectively cut your flow in half where it meets in the middle. I'm no fluid dynamics physics expert, but I can calculate surface area and I can tell you that the surface area of a cross-section of the center is way less than the combined surface area of the inlets.





Because of this, I opted for an H-pipe. I was going to try to run without either, but I didn't want any rework so I put it in right away.