Tinman

The new plan of attack. The primaries are held together on the collector end with a simple hose clamp and some steel plate shims tack welded in a cross pattern to hold them exactly as they slip into the collectors. To further lock them in position there are three pieces of scrap 16ga. stainless sheet tacked between the tubes just past the hose clamp. Now I can fiddle with the remaining two tubes on the bench instead of under the car. A few back and forths from bench to car will be required to check for clearance and ease of installation along the way but much easier than how I was doing things.

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A few other things going on in this picture. Yes, I'm aware of the fire hazard of the insulation facing near the weld bench. Relax, the hole is from various parts falling off the backside of the bench over all the years that I did not put up any drywall or other actual interior wall type finish, not from a previous fire.

Secondly, these 1 1/2" diameter pieces of ducting make great visual planners of the paths needed to get the lengths equal.

Thirdly, wish I could take credit for discovering this one, ping pong balls in the coffee can. The perfect easy way to measure centerline length. Drop them in, multiply by 1.5, done.

Are you going to have them coated?

I considered it but due to the slip fit at the collectors, I didn't want any coating to cause an issue. If a coater is able to mask off the slip fit area, I might consider it again down the road.

can you run a primary that close to the oil filter without any adverse effects?

The picture might be a little misleading. There is a 3/4" gap between the filter and primary at the closest point. If I do see a rise in oil temperature, there is the option of wrapping the header at that point.

Small update. Driver side is proving to be not as easy as expected. The angle of the spark plugs does make things easier but to make the primary lengths equal, the outer two must be established first as they have the shortest and longest distances to the collector. Once they are established, the inner two banks can do whatever is needed to match the outer banks in length. On the passenger side, the outer two banks entered the upper collector making the inner banks fairly easy to work with as they were under the previously established upper two primaries. On the driver side, it's the opposite situation. The established primaries are on the bottom and I'm now between a figuratively rock and a hard place with the inner two primaries being between the established outer primaries and the bellhousing/block.

#1 and #7 complete with the #3 and #5 being worked from the collector forward. It takes a lot of bends to make the #7 as long as #1.

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#1 and #7 as the make their way to the header flange.

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At least one detail is done. O2 sensor wiring routed and through the new tunnel plate.

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I happen to know someone with professional audio video recording equipment for this when it's time to make her fire I'm sure we can get you setup to get some awesome stuff together. Great work so far, keep up the artistry!

Excellent. Hope to be in contact soon when all is done and ready to make music.

Passenger side header welded out and done except for the collector retaining tabs, still not sure what style I'm going with on those.

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I've been working on the driver side and it is not cooperating. So, I took a break from the stainless steel side of things and played with some aluminum.

New tunnel plate made from .100" thick 3003 aluminum.

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I went with a hat channel style that gives me more clearance to the exhaust where it is stacked top and bottom. Went from 1/8" clearance in the tightest spot to a full 1/2"

Even though it was far stiffer than the factory plate, I went ahead and added two channels at locations where the exhaust clearance is not an issue, the merge point of the collectors and after the V-bands that the X-pipe will connect to.

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Out of curiosity, does anyone make a long tube you could have started with as a base and cut the end and modified as needs to make it fit your needs? Just thinking that if so that would have solved your clearance issue to start

I did look into that and could not find any headers with the primaries in the orientation needed to fire into flat collectors in a 180 degree fashion. Rearranging of the off the shelf headers would require something that looked worse than a bundle of snakes, more of a can of worms and the primary lengths would end up all over the place. No easy buttons yet to be found on this project.

Passenger side, version 3.1. Got to this point and once again, no go.

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Even with the starter removed and the motor jacked up on the passenger side, she wasn't going in.

Time for slightly drastic measures. I cut the first half of the #6 primary out to allow the #4 primary to take it's path. Then the #6 was directed to the outside of #2. Everything came in within 3/8" of the target length. As a huge bonus, as I was sliding into place for it's final test fit, it appeared it might slide by the starter. Bolted the starter in and the header slide right by! No jacking of the motor or starter removal required. Only the large positive wire to the starter and ground wire to the block need to be removed.

Version 3.2, the final version!

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Only thing left on the passenger side is to weld it out. The driver side should go much smoother due to the larger area to work in, the favorable angle of the spark plugs and the lessons I have learned on this one.

Somebody needs to donate some professional audio recording time to this when done. The work behind it alone warrants a recording better than GoPro or iPhone fidelity.

That would be much appreciated if anyone has the equipment.

The headers on my C5 required me to remove the stater, slide that one halfway in, and install the starter before putting it the rest of the way into place. The passenger side is not fun and I can certainly understand why it would give you trouble. I'm sure you'll get it worked out, thank you for continuing to post the progress it's cool to watch.

Good to know on the starter RnR required for other long tube headers. Thanks for the heads up!

Stay tuned for more minor victories and crushing defeats on the way to wonderful 180 degree music.

:doh: Major fail #2. Got all the primaries tacked to the header flange and short of removing the cylinder head, there is no way it would come out in one piece. I broke loose the #4 tube and jacked up the passenger side of the engine to get it out.

Looking at it on the floor and remembering the sticking point when removing it, I figured it was actually the #8 primary interfering with the A/C line, not the #4. So I made a quick little jig to hold the primaries in position at the collector end to allow me to tack #4 back in place. Then I removed #8 from the equation and tried to slide the 3/4's of a header in place. No dice. It's just plain too wide in the area around the starter and A/C line.

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New plan of attack. I have more room directly under the flange, near the block between the motor mount and starter to snake the pipes around and take up the distance #4, #6, and #8 need to equal #2's length. So, I will run the four primaries from the collector tight to each other all the way past the starter and A/C line pinch point and then start throwing bends where they need to go to get my equal lengths. This will also allow me to build a good percentage of it on the bench which is far easier than under the car.

turbo blanket for the starter or anything thoughts that way?

The primaries are not very close yet they will be radiating heat upwards to the starter. I might make a heat shield for the starter from some .040" 3003 aluminum sheet just in case.

A little more progress.

O2 bungs welded into the collectors. The upper collector being so tight to the tunnel plate required that I cheat it's position slightly in order to maintain a downward angle of the sensor to prevent damage due to condensation. I was able to get a 5 degree downward angle by placing the bung off center and grinding it at both an angle and radius.

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And a pile of passenger side primary pipes welded up and ready to go back into position to tack weld to the header flange. They came in at 38", 38", 38 1/8", and 37 3/4" in lengths. Crossing my fingers, toes, legs, eyes, and anything else I can in hopes that the header, when assembled, will slide out of the engine bay without major surgery. The #4 primary is run close to the side of the block making the header pretty wide in it's mid section, kinda like most Corvette owners.

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Love just love ,can you make a viper sound better ?

Yes, but it would require the removal of the odd fire V10.

I absolutely adore Vipers but I've never heard a pleasant sounding one. And dammit, now you have me thinking of ways to make one more musical.

Really freaking cool. How would one change the clutch short of pulling the headers?

Thanks. Changing of the clutch in a C5 with any longtube headers would require removal of the headers. And I'm sure I'll be visiting said situation at some point.

Finally onto the primaries. I started with #2 as it has the longest path to the collector. The #1 primary is actually further away, by the width of a connecting rod, from the collector but because the spark plugs angle forward on the driver side and backwards on the passenger side, the #2 had to go around it's plug unlike #1 that can take a straighter shot.

It came in at an acceptable 38" long while leaving room for the rest of the passenger side pipes to make their way to the collector at the same length. The #8 primary fought me quite a bit. Finally, the third routing option ended up getting both the length at 38" and leaving room for #4 and #6 to make their way.

The first half of #8

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And how it fits around #2

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Back to square one.

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The V bands ended up a little lower than I had hoped, even with the bottom of the seat rails. I needed the room up top to allow the clamp to slide over the flanges. In hindsight I should have gone with 2 bolt flanges but I hate gaskets and 2 3/4" V bands were only a few bucks more.

Im surprised they are equipped similar to a drivers ed car, where the instructor has a brake pedal or other form of control. All they had in my car was a dial control to reduce power.

When a car begins to get out of control at track speeds, the last thing you want to do is apply any kind of braking.

Anticipation is strong with this , very cool you had a idea and the ability to do it and are following through on it, that's dedication.

 

Has this idea really been done before on the same vehicle? Seems like it's a good idea but many don't try for lack of knowledge and or ability

From what I understand it has been done once before, http://www.corvetteforum.com/forums/c5-tech/1323232-bizarre-exotic-corvette-noises.html

Although, I'm not very impressed with the sound from the one known set to exist and am hoping for a much better result. My guess is the above set is not equal length or maybe it's just due to a crappy microphone from a early 2000's era camcorder.

Finally back to where I started. The 4 into 1 merge collectors are complete.

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I had to offset the location of the V bands as I could not get both of them side by side in the exhaust tunnel. I gave myself a little extra room as they will probably be a bit of pain to slide over the flanges as tight as they are to the sides and top of the tunnel so they are spaced a generous 2 1/4" away from each other.

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So I'm curious how much thought you've put into the oxygen sensors? I would suppose bank 1 and bank 2 would still work relatively well unless there is a cylinder imbalance. The ECM would continue to make adjustments without results until fuel trims are maxed out. I suppose changing the computer to stay in open loop might be the simplest way to prevent issues.

From what I have read, it is possible to assign cylinders to either O2 sensor via HPTuners. I am hoping this is the case but have zero EFI tuning experience to know for sure. I was planning on getting a bench tune in the near future where this might be able to happen along with deleting the rear O2s and airpump.

Anyone familiar with HPTuners want to chime in? Paging Dyno Brian to the white courtesy phone... no, the white one.

Those ^^^^ look amazing

Looks awesome Matt. Still the Champ!

Thanks gents.

Artwork! About there being more room on a Camaro...I may know a guy who would

Be interested in your services

Appreciated but, with the Camaro's transmission being located in the front, the primaries would have to be at least 5' long and performance would suffer greatly.

So when these are done I'm going to steal your Corvette long enough to remove these and swap them with my store bought headers, okay? sweet.

Return it with an LS7 between your store bought headers and you have deal.

A little more progress,

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I was worried about ground clearance with the stacked pipes but all looks to be okay. They lower pipe is level with the seat rail brackets, slightly lower than the floor itself.

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Back to the bench to get the side by side action happening. Beer can bottoms make excellent purge caps.

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I should have this section of the exhaust complete by the end of the weekend and finally be back to square 1.