The story of Joe header

Yes, yes, yes, I know. I’ve said that the headers are finished and they are…mostly. I want to get them ceramic coated in an attempt to keep the heat down in the engine compartment.

But that’s the destination, let me share a few of the steps that got us here.

Someone I was told about early on is a guy named Doug Garifo. He’s also known as Precision Oil Pumps. Besides oil pumps, Doug sells various engine parts. He even has a small selection of parts for the Cammer. A God send.

I bought a set of header flanges for the cast iron heads from Precision and then years later another set for the aluminum Robert Pond heads. Doug became a distributor for Pond so it’s only natural that he had the flanges made up, lucky for me.

You’re maybe wondering why I didn’t use the cast iron flanges on the aluminum heads. I wanted to, I had hoped I could but the RPM (Robert Pond Motorsports) heads are slightly different.

The cast iron heads use five bolts to hold the exhaust headers onto the head. The RPM heads have provisions for ten bolts. The biggest difference though is that the RPM heads have a raised exhaust port.

This is a shot of the RPM flange on the OG heads. The shot was taken while lying under the car so as you look at the picture, the engine is upside down. Looking through the flange ports the flat part of the D is the top of the port and you can see how much higher the RPM exhaust port is than the stock cammer port. If I’d used the OG header flanges on the RPM heads, part of the exhaust ports would be slightly blocked.

Here is the same flange on the aluminum head and you can see that the flange ports line up pretty evenly with the exhaust ports on the head.

I had both heads on the work bench, Combustion chamber side down. I needed to find out for sure if the raised or lowered exhaust port was true or if it was merely a function of a whimsical placement of the exhaust manifold bolt holes.

The overall height of the heads are the same and that’s good.

I measured the distance from the table top to the centers of both the lower and the upper bolt holes and the measurements are near identical.

Using the table top as reference, the exhaust ports on the aluminum heads are slightly higher than those on the cast iron heads. A confirmation of what I saw with the exhaust flanges.

Why go through all of the checking you may ask.

My plan had been to have the engine built by a professional shop and in the meantime, I would be building the headers myself.

If the RPM heads were at the machine shop, I would be using the OG block and heads inside the car from which to build the pipes. If it turned out that the mounting bolts sat higher up on the aluminum heads than the cast iron ones, that could create problems later on.