180 degrees or 2 90’s

I saw a picture of the 180 degree headers from Doug’s headers, formerly Doug Thorley. Repeat after me: Prenuptial Agreement.

The Doug’s headers aren’t a true 180 degree design. The idea of the design is to have the pulses of the exhaust to hit 180 degrees from each other. If you tie all of the ports together from each side, the natural firing order of the 90 degree V8 doesn’t work out. If you have the room, every other pipe should cross over to the opposite side of the engine. On the FE engine, the right side of the engine is numbered 1 thru 4 and the left is 5 thru 8. A 180 degree header for my car would have had the left header consisting of cylinders 5, 2, 7, 4 and the right should be 1, 6, 3, 8. Another important design feature is that the primaries should be as close to equal length as possible. Too short or too long from one pipe to the other could greatly affect the exhaust pulse minimizing the scavenging effect that the 180 degree design is supposed to provide.

With a basic design of what I hoped to achieve, I grabbed the third version of my header lego pieces and started piecing together the left side header.

I discovered two things: The first lesson is that I do not have the room to keep the pipes even close to equal length. The two pipes that cross over are super long compared to the two that stay on the left collector. The other thing I discovered is that I had gained way too much weight. I was having a hard time getting myself down and onto the floor creeper and even more problems getting back up. The night of January 3, 2021 I stood on the bathroom scale and discovered I was over 200 pounds. I should weigh around 150. Since I wasn’t making any head way on the header, I decided to take some time away from the car and concentrate on losing some weight. I know myself. If I continued to go to the shop, I would pick up some fast food burgers or frozen microwave burritos to quiet the growling in my stomach.

It would be over three months before went to the shop and even longer before I resumed work on the headers.