Series 60 Headers

I've noticed several companies selling their high priced, dolled up exhaust manifolds for the series 60. I've only been able to find a handful of articles about someone building custom headers for some off road competition vehicles. Aren't there any off-the-shelf headers for a series 60? As much trouble as they have with cracking exhaust manifolds, I'd think that there would be a better solution available than a hogged out and coated factory designed log. Is the only solution to custom fab your own?

 

I'm not looking for custom fabricated headers. I can do that myself. My question is are there not any off-the-shelf headers? If not, why?

 

The benefits of headers over a cast iron log are more than just flow. I'll remind you that a series 60 is a 6 cylinder engine. That's 6 tubes. You may not be aware that there are plenty of V8s running twin 92mm turbos (larger than the 171702 on my series 60) held up by 4 tubes. Surely you're not suggesting that using headers would bend 6 tubes over and drop a turbo on it's poor little noggin?

Cast iron is far more likely to crack than steel or stainless. In an environment that's subject to rapid temperature changes it's far more beneficial to use a material other than cast iron for exhaust.

Headers can take up as much or as little space as you want. In the case of a turbo, you don't have to worry so much about tuning length since the turbo will be doing most of the work. However, you can spool the turbo quicker by arranging the tubes going into the flange from adjacent cylinders in the firing order to produce a spiral "swirl". You can imagine that when you start arranging tubes from far ends of the engine to go into one side of the of flange that it could take up a significant amount of room. In a "consumer line/non-race" config, there's still a lot of benefit from pairing cylinders 1,2,3 and 4,5,6 and arranging into the flange in a spiral swirl. While not as optimized as the former solution, it's far more compact. If your concern is fitting everything underneath the windshield of the truck, I see no reason not to build a "header-ish" manifold (exhaust ports dumping into a common tube) out of steel or stainless tube. The result would be a far superior product than what's currently offered at nearly half the price. Maybe THAT'S why...There's far too much money to make off of all of us suckers buying up high priced modified factory junk.

 

Anyone that knows anything about fabricating headers knows that blown gaskets are caused by using thin flanges. Anyone that knows anything about metallurgy knows that steel bends and iron cracks. Anyone that has read the rules of this board has read that it's possible to disagree without getting personal.