My local exhaust guy made 2.5" exhaust pipes on both sides. He didn't use the collectors that came with the headers -- he made the exhaust pipes with flanges that bolt up to the headers. He did trim a bump off the bell housing on the driver's side. If someone were going to use the collectors that came with the headers, I suppose the cone would be cut off to mate with whatever size pipe is being used. No offense intended here, but if you do a tech article I think it would be best to include your personal experience, not what someone said. :Handshake If you post your location, you might get some good recommendations for custom exhaust shops.
I am going from long tubes to shorty’s and changing nothing else, so shortly I'll be discovering just how much penalty I suffer for the increase in ground clearance. I’m hoping the bone stock 89 EFI 5.0 won’t slow down by more than a tenth. Going 13.91 at 99 now. What is nice though is now the 02 sensors are closer to where they are designed to be at, might do something good for mileage.
I agree with that. It was my experience and one others on here, to be denied at the exhuast shop due to how tight of a bend there would need to be on the driver side to come around the bell housing and miss the pitman arm on a hard left turn. We all shouldn't have to cut up our bell housings or compromise our exhaust pipe or change the collector angle when we choose to spend the big dollars for the headers designed specifically to fit our cars and for our cars alone. The geometry is down there to make a header that fits better than that.
Just from reading all your posts here, I can honestly tell you now that no matter whose headers you buy, you'll have something negative to say about it. Not only is this an observation into you,(no offense intended, just my observation) but it's also the "nature of the beast" in headers in general. You can build the worlds finest headers, but no matter how hard you try, headers made on an assembly line will never fit every vehicle they're tried on. As for you thinking you're somehow going to "lose" something in going to shorty's from long tubes on a bone stock 5.0, I can tell you now that you're not going to lose an ounce worth of performance in your case. You're sitting there insisting on having 1-5/8" tube primaries, which is ludicrous in itself, seeing as the ports on stock 5.0 (E7TE heads) are far more restrictive than what you think a 1-1/2" primary offers. Pull your long tubes off, then try sticking your finger into any of the ports and see if you can touch the backside of the valve head. When you do that, you're going to feel a large protrusion in the roof of the port that's sticking down almost halfway into the passage, a passage that barely measures an inch square without the Thermactor bump hogging the passage. THERE'S your restriction, it's not the headers, nor the sub 2-1/2 inch exhaust pipe. Invest in some REAL heads, then come back here and you'll have something to complain about in header restriction.
That is so true but what a shame though. It doesn't have to be like that. There are headers out there that fit and bolt up right out of the box no issues what so ever. Fox headers are amazing at doing this as I have seen. Granted, there is more room everywhere in a fox but my issue with these shorty's is not shock tower clearance, both the DT and 88400 are great at that. Its the angle and location of the collectors. It could be improved alot so why do we all have to suffer. If it was just me and i got a bad set, I would live with it chop up and dent what was necessary and get on with my life. But if everyone has to struggle in a similar way, something should be changed. I'm ok with buying a cheap set of headers that aren't supposed to fit my car and make them fit with a welder and a hammer but it’s not going to happen when i drop 460 $$ for ground clearance. It seems you think that there is so much variation on the assembly line that leads to each header being different from the next, where I think it’s a design problem and that if I buy 10 pairs of Doug Throley shorty's they will all fit unnoticeably different than the ones I have in my hand now. Long tubes are better at pulling exhaust gas from the cylinder before the piston forces it out so I am expecting to lose something from that. We will find out soon enough I hope you are right. I do agree that an E7 exhaust port could probably be at home on less than 1 1/2 inch tubes. You could probably take the tightest cross sectional area in that port (near the end of the thermactor boss) multiply it by 2 and still be less than the area of 1 1/2 circle.
Ok, it seems here you're under the (mistaken) impression that there's some huge market for shorty headers to fit Mavericks. If there was, then someone would have filled that niche. (DT did, didn't they?)You're making assumptions here, but failing to consider the fact that header fitment is not a one dimensional deal. There are variations in manufacturing from company to company, header to header (no matter how slight, there will be variations in this regard) then there's variations in 30+ year old vehicles that it seems you're failing to consider as well. All this adds up to the fact that I stated before, that no matter whose headers you buy, there's no 100% guarantee that it's going to fit perfectly on your car. Thinking they will is living in la-la land.
And good luck trying to convince Hedman their headers need alterations. Been-there, done-that with their V8 Ranger swap headers. A bunch of us on the TRS website got together and tried that once. It got exactly nowhere. Their 89500 shorty's leave a lot to be desired in regard to the passenger side header, their 88400 actually solves these problems in Rangers, but try convincing them that. They obviously sell enough 89500's to ever consider there's a problem with them, even when simply dropping that part number and replacing it with the 88400's would cost them nothing to do so.
I am not under that belief at all. There is only one shorty out there right now that says they will fit a maverick and that’s the DT. So in my opinion that header should fit way better on a maverick than a header that is designed for some other car like the Hedman 88400. But yet they are clones of eachother as far as fit goes. This is treachery. Hedman has every right to add Maverick and Comet to that list on 88400 because that header fits our cars as well as the DT header which is dedicated to our cars. Yet, they don’t for some unknown reason. It’s likely because they don’t think the driver side steering clearance is there, which I would agree with. It’s not about variation in manufacturing. An ideal, driver side maverick shorty would look different than both headers in question. It would have the collector aft of the bellhousing instead of in front of. It’s a design thing, and putting the collector in the area they have it in, is exactly the type of spot you are talking about. Such a tight spot that manufacturing variation has to be zero to have it fit every car. If lala land is a place where you can expect things to fit the exact application they are designed for and they do just that, than I wish I was from there. I bet the people there enjoy working on their cars alot more than the people here do. Maybe we should work to make the place we live in such a place.
How many Maverick/Comet owners do you know (for a fact) that are as unsatisfied as you are with both Hedmans and Doug Thorleys ? If there are as many as you seem to think there are out there, start a petition, fill it with as many names as you can, then submit it to both companies to register your complaint. And do this instead of the article you proposed in the start if this thread. This will go much further in rectifying your problem than an article about your experiences with your car will. And if you do decide to start a petition, let us know how many names you get. There's a much larger market for something such as windshields for our cars than there is for shorty headers.
Petitions don't get parts made.....money does. Show a company how they can make wheelbarrows full of money....they will make the part.
That's where a petition comes in. Unless they're mind readers, and do some kind of market research, how else would they know there's a market out there for yet a third shorty header to fit these cars ? These are not the most popular cars made that fall into the catagory that the aftermarket aims their sights on.
I have always liked the idea of going to the DT shorties once my long tube Black Jacks are dead. If they need some kind of improvement, why not let someone show us where and what can be done? Sure they may not all fit exact from one car to the other, but surely it could be better if someone takes it to another leval. Did the article get written and I missed it?
Me personally I am really interested in shortys, of course I have to drive over half a dozen speed bumps to get to my house and listening to my collectors drag across most of them is getting old. Heck Im to the point of buying a 3" to 2 1/2 reducer and taking it up and having the shop weld it on just so i dont have to replace any more torn out collector gaskets.... 3 sets in two months is ridiculous, of course watching me drive to my house from the entrance is like watching those japanese guys do that obsticle course on the cable shows just so I dont make too much noise... Start out by driving on this guys driveway head over too the other side and drive into the field, then straddle the drains stop at this one completely and edge over it because it scrapes no matter what...that on the way in going out is a completely different route..
I haven't written a install helper yet because it sounds like I was a minority in the "Shorty headers don't fit that well" department. I might be asking for too good of a fit some were saying. I think the collector angle on both sides could be improved alot. The passenger side points almost straight at the fire wall, yet it is tipped down a touch. The driver side points staight at the pitman arm when going full left turn, makes the pipe bend too tight for a muffler shop bender, have to homemake the bend. If you get either set of shorty's (Doug Thorley or Hedman 88400) and are just as sad as i was, I will probably write the article. I purchased 6 sets of shorty's in order to find the primo mav shorty, and it had to be made. I finally went with hedman header and cut off both collectors, extended them so the flanges were aft of the bell housing and angled them correctly. I would have paid $$ if what I made was available on the market. These are deticated maverick shorty's for sure now.
