So I'm almost done my motor swap with the 355. And now I'm looking to order some headers. I've done a lot of reading (have about 6 tabs open of variuos articles from here up) and I'm just getting confused as to what size to go and what will fit.

My motor is a 1st gen 350 from a 74 nova. Carbed and right now good for about 360 HP at the crank. I stil have my stock Y pipe on the car but prob will be replacing that, too. I do not know to go 1 1/2", 1 5/8" or 1 3/4" and what sizes the collectors need to be (i dont even know what those are for), and what size the rest of my system needs to be or if I need to even change it.

I kind of just want my car running right now. I can buy better headers later when I am more experienced and want a bit more HP but atm I want it back on the road andn ot using stock 305 manifolds

Any opinions? Oh yea, here are some pics of it

 

Bump?

 

depends on what you wanna do, if you wanna do dual exhausts, just use about any header out there for now until you are experanced enough to put better ones on, but remember you get what you pay for. i have a set of basic jegs headers on my car and they fit pretty well, but i got duals too, if you wanna use a y pipe and a factory routed exhaust, make sure you go with one that you can get a y pipe for. ive heard the hooker headers with the y are pretty good, but you need to modify the header outlet (just from reading other threads, thats what they suggest and i believe the headers are 2055's) dont quote me though, i could be wrong, id verify that before you buy em. hope that helps

 

I was more or less looking for some numbers. I don't know the stock size of my factory exhaust or Y pipes. All I know is I need headers that will fit those

 

i could be wrong, but if you order headers, you may just have to order the y pipe too, most headers arent made to bolt to the factory y, there may be something out there though but idk, good luck either way though

 

There are tons of um the book at NAPA was too big I just picked one but then we started wondering what size the primaries should be and he had diff. sizes that went to collectors and Y pipe i decided to figure out what is optimal.

 

Go to Summitracing

Plugin all of your cars information.

You'll get a list of headers.

Or, read the sticky's here and pay attention to them.

Bar none the best shorty headers you can buy for our cars are the SLP Tri-Y's, but those are out of production and have been for a long time. The 2nd best is a toss-up between the SLP 1 3/4. Good headers, bad Y-pipe design. The alternate is the ones I have the Hooker 2055's. Only a 1 5/8th primary, but a much better Y-pipe design.

But the best type of header you can get is a Full Length headers, aka Long Tubes. LT's offer the largest gain. But sacrifice the most ground clearance. Also, I don't know of any LT headers that come with a Y-pipe. (which is rather stupid of the mfg, why make a chassis specific header and not bother to design a Y-pipe for it.)

Header information.

Primaries is the size of the individual tubes that meet each exhaust port. 1 5/8th is MINIMUM. I didn't even know they made chassis specific options for us that were a 1 1/2" primary.

Collector sizes is the diameter of the header where all of the exhaust tubes meet and are "collected" into a single pipe. Dual 3" would be a little large for you I'd think.

 

These are way better than SLP's and they are 1 3/4" primaries

 

^ Very nice.

...I'd recommend 2055's. Excellent Y pipe. Factory ground clearance. Plenty of room to grow for all but the most extreme build.

If I was to ever run longtubes again, I'd box the frame rails for ground clearance, instead of going down under the tranny. Fixed one too many y pipes before i got smart and bought the 2055s.