Custom Made Headers ~ All custom made headers are produced at our standard hourly workshop rate. Your car and engine needs to be supplied to our workshop.

This price here is indicative of a relatively straight forward custom pair of V8 headers in polished stainless steel as you see here in the photos.
 
Double click on any of the pics to see larger

We prefer to make the headers before the car is painted - we do not like hanging over show car painted panels trying to weld, grind and fit custom made headers. Quite frankly we can refuse some jobs becasue it is all too easy chip or scratch the paint with all the trial fits on and off after every weld to check for movement, especially in tight areas, so plan your build becasue we will not fix chipped paintwork or scratches.

The headers we custom make are primarily for street driven cars. So that means we are practicle how we produce them; for example.

• We allow for good ground clearance
• We pay attention to minimum clearances to the chassis and steering components
• We pay attention to radiant heat produced by the pipes and their possible impact on nearby parts
• In most cases we make them so you can get them out with the engine still in the car or allow them to be sat back a little so you can get the heads off, if any maintenance needs to be done.
• We try to make them as free flowing as possible with longest pipes that are practicle for that application.
• We make Try-Y and 4 into 1 style headers ~ however the best results for street driven cars is Try-Y they produce much better torque that you can feel and in the rpm range that street car engine works at.
• And finally headers are all about shape, they have to look dam good so your mates go "wow they look great"

What we don't do is race headers or try to fit big bore headers into rediculously tight spots.

We use all our own stainless steel exhaust products and all joints are tig welded fused together. If filler rod is required then we use proper stainless steel filler rod so that no part of you headers can rust.  We can custom make header plates if needed to suit rare engines.

We employ some welding and joint techniques to keep the cost down for the budget consious and still provide an attractive polished set of headers.

Or we can do fully dressed but joins for show cars so it looks like there are no joins at all and all pipes polished to a high lusture. However for a show car set of pipes you could expect to pay a lot more becasue it just takes a bucket load of workshop time.

Myths and facts about stainless steel headers

•  Myth ~ Stainless Steel headers crack - this one has been around a while and it is just not true. Usually the real question is what caused them to crack.  The cases we have seen and heard about is that they cracked at the head flange, stainless steel is not so easy to weld, it is a lot harder than mild steel to weld and welding a thick flange to a thin pipe is not fun so who is to say that was not so good in the first place. Also all metal will fatuige, stainless quicker than mild steel, so if your exhaust system does not have proper exhaust hangers to support the rest of the system then this could be the cause also.
• Fact ~ Polished Stainless Steel do not peel like chrome headers and they do not go blue and black. However polished stainless steel headers retain most of their shine but they have an orange yellow tinge to them where they have the most heat. A fairly stock to mild engine is fairly easy on the header appearance, where as a stinking hot engine that produces lots of heat in the exhaust will dull off the stainless and for that matter any other performance coating also.
• Myth ~ Stainless Steel headers cannot be ceramic coated for Example HPC - Our advice is yes it can be coated but more attention has to be payed in the sandblasting preparation with a fine grit.  Still if you are going to HPC coat them you may as well get us to make them in mild steel in the first place.