So one night myself and a welder friend of mine were talking about how to take the rasp out of my exhaust on the cheap because why not. Currently, I run a one ball mod with a set of eBay headers and a 14-inch vibrant resonator. I like the way it sounds up until about 3500rpm when it turns into your average 3:00 AM honda civic lol. So in lew of doing the smart thing and getting another muffler or a cat-back or even reinstalling a cat, we decided it'd be best to give it the Subaru rumble as best we can to mitigate the rasp and deepen the sound. We've got an ok idea of how we're going to do it but, more or less we're just sending it. Any tips or ideas will be appreciated and I will update this after everything goes down.

 

Street only car..?

1. Use the next size up tubing from stock.
2. Use stainless material.16 gauge.
3. Make sure the flange AND primary tubes are slightly larger than the ports in your cylinder head.
4. Make the system a 4-2-1 design, with clean transitions into the collectors. Copy from existing 4-2-1 designs.
5. Be sure to use a flex coupler...NOT...only a "ball" connector to the rest of the system. A ball style connector is fine, but the flex joint also needs to be in the system.
5. Use a high (200) cell count converter. Don't forget the bungs for the sensors.

Have fun.

Mike

 

Thanks for the tips we'll keep them in mind today. Also yes it is a street only car.

 

So we finished them and they sound decent, need to get a couple of gaskets to fix a couple of exhaust leaks and then I will post some sound clips.

edit:: something I want add is this was done for $0 and even if you wanted to do the same starting from ebay headers (because they will be much easier to work with than stock but not as good as custom) you can find these headers from good sellers with decent welds for$90-$120.

We needed some extra pipe (all 1.5 inch) for this but we more or less did it with one elbow and some scraps as well as the piping that was already in place.
What we ended up doing was making runners 1 and 3 short and runners 2 and 4 long.
Runner 3 was left untouched to keep the manifold in the right position and because it was already a shorter runner than the others at 13ish inches.
We then cut out runner 2 and put it in place of runner 1. Then we made runners 2 and 4 roughly 30% longer making them roughly 17 inches long.

This turned out to not be too hard and I am pretty happy with the results. Also I can say I noticed no appreciable power loss and they been put through the rev range and taken to 100 mph at this point. Overall I'd say if you enjoy the sound of the rumble 9 out of 10 would recommend.

Here are some pictures of the process as well.


The collector

overall shot

headers we started with

 

If I were doing this from scratch this is definitely the way to go But since we were starting with the ebay headers and we had my stock headers as a backup we decided to do this quick and dirty. I will keep this updated with how they hold up though and if I decide to make a v2.

 

A welder friend or a friend with a welder?

 

As a Subaru owner I am not sure why you would want to do this, they sound like **** we are going to get a equal length header for our new 86

 

Lolol probably should have clarified, a friend with a welder and while they aren't pretty they are decently song I believe and I have confidence in the welds.

 

Well I did it because I wanted to, there's not too much more to it than that. No one else in the r53 community had done it so I decided I would and also because I still think the Subaru rumble sounds better than a raspy high pitched exhaust. And at least my car doesn't sound like a Honda Civic with a fart can any more and I didn't have to spend $800 to get it that way.

 

You be you. Great little project.

 

Thanks, I appreciate it lol turns out the flex joint broke when we reinstalled them but I'll get it replaced eventually. For now, I'll attach the one sound bite I was able to get with them though it is from inside the car.

 

Certainly sounds good from the inside. Any noticeable difference in acceleration - either plus or minus?

 

I would agree haha, and no there was no gain or loss of acceleration that I could tell.

 

Anyone who is curious the headers have gone through a little bit of work since I last posted here about them. I have gotten a new flex pipe, which is actually a flex bellow for a Duramax, and is much stronger than the flex section that came with the eBay headers. I talked to a few people about them and they said that the collector that we had to modify for the headers could have contributed to the failing flex joint. Also I can think of a couple more things that may have caused it to fail as well so I decided to upgrade the flex joint a good bit and see how it works. I will be welding in the new flex joint soon and we'll make another video and update the thread when I have results hopefully they come out okay and will sound good like I hope.
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A friend of mine spent a little over 6 years making headers for a nationally known builder (still in buisness). Mostly American engined, drag and road race cars.
The owner had his own race cars also.

In all his years of building various headers for various engines and body styles, one of the things that they found, the better the collector design, the more it made up for unequal primary tubes, power wise.
That is, if a well designed collector was used on the dyno, and on the track both, would make up for a (if I recall correctly) 3.0" difference in primary lengths.

No idea about the bad (like the OEM collector) collectors like many of the Mini headers have. I doubt those stubby little things on many Mini headers will help equalize the exhaust pulses very much...but...I have not and do not know anyone that has tested these. But me, buying or building headers, would never use the stubby little collectors in the first place.

Mike

 

Thanks for the tips I'll apply them to a proper set of headers if I ever make some haha. These were mostly made for fun tbh

 

Hey all it's been quite some time since I updated on the UEL headers but they are finished now. I replaced the original flex section with a flex bellow which has proved much stronger. I like the way they sound and even though I run them catless with a one all mod and an vibrant resonator they are not that droney and they are quite poppy. The video attached isn't great by any means but it shows a couple of clips of the exhaust at different speeds I'll try to get better clips soon.