Quote:
Originally Posted by MarylandSpeed
Now I am not going to insult you, as I am certain you are pretty intelligent, and knowlegable on the issue. However I personally have have the headers we are discussing...and if you somehow think they are better than a premium, US made header, that seriously hurts your credibility. The Chinese headers have had issues with cracking, and warped flanges for years. That is why the Chinese stuff you see now has tubing twice the gauge of a US made header, and has half inch thick flanges. Otherwise the inferior materials tears in the benders, or cracks over time, and the flanges warp. Also, it is not even that scientific. We take both sets to shows so people can see the difference. You don't have to be a weld inspector to see that there is a huge difference in quality between a premium header and some overseas knock off.
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OK, i'll be done after this. You spent time on that reply, and I'll give you the courtesy of a reply to your statements.
1. Never said OBX or any "knock off" was better quality. I specifically said the welds were crap. But I also specifically said that I performed a PMI test on the metal and it is not crap metal. The elements in the metal are on point. I can't really explain it any better, but I'll try. Everything is made of elements, I have a tool (specifically, this one
http://www.olympus-ims.com/en/xrf-xr...d/delta-alloy/) that is made to detect the elements in a material. I do not care where the ore came out of the ground, where it was smelted, where it was rolled or forged. If the metal has the same % of each element then it is that grade of metal. Here is a basic chart of what you find in 316/317 steel.
When you pull the trigger on that PMI gun it tells you EXACTLY what is in that material. Don't care how many sets of what brand you have on your car, if the things contain the same % by weight of each element, then the base material will last the same amount of time. The only factor would be if the headers were "normalized". But you would need to do so after installing them on the car and that would mean holding around 800°F under your hood for a few hours. I doubt anyone is doing this. They can tell you they "stress relieved" the headers at the shop, but at the shop they were not under any load yet. Stress relieving or normalizing (basically the same shit) is to take the material over its critical temp as to realign the grain structure after the part has been in this case bolted up.
So to finish #1, metal is metal. If the elements are the same % by weight, it doesnt matter where it came from.
2. The flanges on the OBX headers on my car are .43" thick. Kooks offers .375" thick flanges. So I'm not sure if you did you homework on that one.
3. OBX headers 16 gauge (1.5mm) kooks headers 18 gauge (1.02mm), not sure where you got "twice the thickness" from, hurts your creditability though.........
Now I'm done.