[Schumi]

So I have a lift and time on my hands so I decided to try a non-name, $130 pair of stainless, cat-less headers from ebay. They were cheap and I was curious so I said screw it. They were here in 2 days and so I threw the car on the lift and went to town.

Firstly- the stock headers are incredibly easy to remove, especially with the lift. After 11 years, nothing was rusty or seized, everything came apart in about 10 minutes.

Now to get these new headers on. Thankfully I was doing all of this in a full machine shop.

They did not fit whatsoever. The exit flanges were a good 1/2-3/4" shorter than where they needed to be to mate up with the secondary pipes, which resulted in me yanking and stretching on a few things to get them mated.

The holes in the flanges to the heads didn't line up with the heads that well, and I had to drill/slot some of them a bit before I could get all six bolts in each head without cross-threading the holes.

The passenger side rubbed against the metal backing to the plastic aero shield under the front of the engine, so I had to massage that bit away from the pipes as to not burn the car to the ground.

3 out of every 6 bolts on each side had zero tool access for assembly- so I had to torque the bolts down with a combination of flexi shafts and odd extensions on the end of the torque wrench.

Finally, after a few hours of work, I go to scren in the O2 bungs. These headers had 2 O2 ports on each side, one forward one on a primary and the secondary one past the collector. Except the one past the collector was rotated down on the pipe too much on either side, so the wires to the sensor BARELY stretched to fit (probably not the best for the wires) and now those two sensors are sticking well low past the engine skid-plate (by about 15-20mm) which is something I must fix by welding some new bungs on (already ordered) before I bottom out on a pothole and rip half my exhaust off.


OK, so now they are on. I fire the car up- mind you, previously I had replaced my stock mufler with set of Borla glasspacks (already a very loud setup) several months ago. With these new catless headers.... Jesus, it's ridiculous.

It really is an orgasmic sound. They develop an awesome higher pitched resonance past 4000 RPM that is reminiscent of a Ferrari 355, and similar to a GT3 Cup car.

Power? Eh. More like a loss of torque down low (the primaries of these aftermarket pipes are WAY too large in diameter- like 2", and they need to be about 1.7") and a small gain in HP past 5,000 RPM. For city driving it may actually be a downgrade. The needle does leap forward with never before seen vigor after 5,000 RPM though, and it pulls hard all the way to redline, no small dropoff like stock. Throttle response has also improved, which is very nice.

The amazing bit- no check engine lights. The placement of the sensors does a good job of fooling the computer, I guess.

Am I going to keep them? For now, yes, they were a ***** to install, and the sound is wonderful albeit attracts way too much attention. There is no sneaking around in this car. And for $130 you really can't complain. Seriously, don't complain. It was a good fun project.

Another bit is they do actually look very, very nice after finally installed. After a few days of use they have started to blue very very nicely, and the stainless is indeed a nice stainless, not chromed mild steel. The merge collector was actually rater nice, and the inside was nicely ground and devoid of any crappy weld spatter.

I do believe it would be best to have the ECU retuned to make use of the massive amount of extra air flow the car now can use- I think I could see far greater benefits from tuning now.

And finally, disclaimer: these modifications were made for track use only as catless headers are illegal in the wonderful state of California.