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Guys it is no secret that we all like a great deal on a product that we put on our car. It is even better when we can buy a part for half of what an apparent equal goes for so that we can purchase more go-fast jewlery.
I spent literally 9 months looking for solid reviews with detailed pictures of the OBX 1-7/8" Primary Long tube Headers and found several threads which had some ok write ups but none that ever really explored the ins and outs on these headers. I did note that many that installed reported having to dent the primary on the driver side which has been a common occurrence since headers were designed but not as of late with higher end units from Kooks, ARH, or Stainless Works.
I think I read 30 some odd threads concerning OBX headers. In most threads, the poster that inquired about them was told to "use the search function" before asking another question. Gentlemen it is a disservice to this community when we do this to everyone that asks a question. I submit that I personally will begin offering up threads in responses to requests rather than suggesting the search function here is why.
I have a career that allows me to take my time doing things to my car as my daily can vary between an MD-88, a 737, or an Uber cab.
After sifting through the threads, which were on average fairly light on a solid review of these headers, I decided to buy a set to play the game of "Just How Bad Can They Be?". Thankfully I had some money to do this and was in no rush to get them installed.
Well as some of you will have undoubtedly already seen the facebook post where I dumped some pictures of the copies that I received this week, there are some things to consider when making the purchase of a set of headers.
The Good:
$635.00 shipped to my door via Amazon.
They really don't look half bad once you pull them out of the box and hey, they even come with those little bullet resonators to fool the inspector if you decide to run without cats. The price was right and look at all those shiny surfaces coupled with neat little TIG welds. At first sight I was excited because I felt like I was seeing a decent product coming from a young company that was trying to make a name for themselves.
Oh that's a nice touch welding your company logo onto one of the primaries. Looks oddly familiar...
Welded all the way around with stack of dime goodness. Well actually they are welded all around because....well more on that later.
Overall I was initially impressed and pleased with their heft and their construction. I marveled for a moment at how they were able to weld headers out of stainless like this, sell them at half the price of a set of Kooks and still make any money after shipping them directly to my door.
The kit came with a set of hardware to clamp the bullet resonators onto the cut off ends of your stock exhaust as well as stainless hardware to bolt the collectors onto the bullet resonators. Also included was a set of paper gaskets that were destined to go right into the trash before install.
The Bad:
They are welded all the way around because the primaries do no extend through the flange or have a perimeter weld on the inside like the counter parts that they are to copy.
My collector arrived with some factory installed areas of fatigue and cracks already beginning to form in welds. Cracks that if you pushed on the primary would open up.
The primaries are not a uniform diameter, in fact they were put into a pipe flaring tool and the already extremely thin gauge stainless which is indicated to be 16 gauge and is most likely to be 20 gauge, is stretched even further to meet the diameter of the exhaust port opening in the flange.
Notice too that the holes in the flange are all oblong and some are extremely rough. After examining a set of Kooks closely and reading up on these it was decided that the holes where oblonged to allow play while torqueing the header bolts down and trying to get alignment with the exhaust ports. Built in expectation that a product will not have a quality fit is not a real confidence builder.
The Ugly:
Yeah... not much to say about that.
Or that
Or even that.
So here is the deal, almost every single port was out of alignment. As you will see in the next picture the primary on one cylinder was welded so high up on the flange that it is nearly poking up above it. The gap between inner wall and edge of flange on that particular cylinder was 1/4"
After seeing that I wanted to look at the collectors to see what they looked like.
The first one was meh...
The second was, WOW for lack of a better word. This joker would have had probably hummed or had some kinda funny Bub Rub whistle tip sound.
Looking further down the pipes I started noticing some light coming through a hole but thought "nah...no way, it had to be a reflection". I was wrong I found 3 different pin holes in various primaries. I managed to get pics of the two worst but could not negotiate the camera into a good enough position to get a pic of the third. Unfortunately the camera would not pic up the light inside the primary well at all.
The holes looked to be caused by welding slag or an errant touch with the tip of a tig welder with no wire.
So there is my experience with the OBX brand. The headers were packed back up after nearly 8 days of waiting for them to arrive and are destined to head back to Califorinastan tomorrow. I sent these pictures as well as some comments to OBX via Amazon to which they initially tried to have me pay to send them back. That was summarily shot down as an option by me. Never did they offer an apology or even offer to send me a second set to see if I had just gotten a bad copy. Hell even their email communication was short and deliberate so that Amazon would not catch on that they were aware their products were an abortion to the aftermarket community.
I know that this thread will be met with mixed reactions, and that some of you have had great luck with your OBX headers which is great. The fact is that these headers are not worth the current going price of $635-$735.
In my estimation they are worth about $350-$400 bucks if you get a good copy without tons of flaws to fix. At the current price point $635 + $150 for a metal shop to correct multiple issues and up to $300 if I wanted to re-align the primaries with the collectors, was just throwing good money after bad. When you consider that I could potentially pick up a set from a quality brand for between $250- and $300 dollars more after corrective work was performed I would rather just go with the better quality product.
If you are the kind of guy that enjoys the do it yourself route and wants to take the job on yourself good for you. I would caution that any more than 1 hour of your own time is reason enough to visit a quality vendor for a set of well built headers. Heck even Pace Setters are built to more exacting standards than these OBX products were and prevent you from having to spend time fixing a flawed product rather than driving your car.
The message is clear here and it is if you want to install and not worry about your headers I would suggest you look somewhere else. Others will argue that I am wrong but hey that is their choice to do so and I am not claiming to be an expert just a better than average parts consumer. I would rather choose to put a set of slightly more expensive headers from Kook's, or Stainless Works rather than ever chance wasting money on a product that not even OBX will stand behind.
The fact that you think pacesetter are made with better quality
I guess you need to do more research. Oh and I have obx and had pacesetter. My obx headers are night and day difference from the ones you received.
Glad you posted this. I plan on ordering a set in the near future and was planning on doing the same thing. It seems that nobody had done a legitimate review. And even this one isn't complete considering you didn't install them to see the fitment.
These headers are sourced out to multiple different manufacturers in China so the end result is going to vary, without fail. I think you ended up with a lemon, for sure. I have talked with several guys who had the exact opposite experience. Unfortunately it is one of those luck of the draw situations.
I hope I get better results...
Ps, a lot of these fixes would be extremely easy for the average DIY'er. But I do not knock you for not wanting to return them. Also, OB has been around for close to 30 years so I wouldn't exactly call them a young company.
I have also bought a set of OBX+HF cats and installed them some weeks ago, but can´t confirm the experience you have made with them, rather the opposite like the others told here!
I think i can say i´m an practitioner with some welding and mechanics, if they had look like yours, i have registered this!
Looked after some pics of them in sharp dimensions, but didn´t found some to explain mine where the opposite of yours!
I agree, that your set would be a exception, not the norm of them!
Had to dent 2 Primaries, thats right, but i know this before i bought them and wasn´t a matter for a good mechanics to eliminate this!
Some of my best pics:
The only thing that scares me now is some quite whistling sound by acceleration, hope there is no mini hole from contact with the tig welding needle like yours have and driver side is louder then passenger side, when you hear from under the car near the fender, but i will do some research here and report then!
John and I both bought obx headers round the same time. We both got a very good quality product, nice smooth one size primaries, full tig welded with no weird areas or cracks. Our flangers were clean and the inside ports were welded and blended smooth. Everything went great. Only issue was slight clearancing for the steering shaft. And now over a year later, both sets look fantastic. But those pictures look like a waste of money.
HOWEVER,
Not every set and not even most sets of obx headers you see look remotely that bad. So for people to throw down a blanket statement that all obx headers are garbage....is BS.
Yeah. My OBX headers have none of those problems. Seems like you got the one bad set I have heard of. All my primaries were perfectly smooth transition. There were no cracks, the fact that yours have them is amazing to me. But not as amazing as the pin holes. Looks like you got a bad set plain and simple. But I'm with the others, to just say they are all junk is horse. And I inspected mine along with several others before I had them ceramic coated. Lastly, OBX is far from a young company. They have been around a long time on the import scene.
Mine looked nothing like that either. In fact, I was super impressed with the quality of construction and welds. Mine didn't have the badge on them. Perhaps their quality has gone down due to some cost-saving measures or perhaps a new producer?
Mine didn't have the badge either. And mine were easily 16ga thick on the tubes. It was a bitch to dimple the spots for my steering shaft because the rigidity of the steel.
The fact that you think pacesetter are made with better quality
I guess you need to do more research. Oh and I have obx and had pacesetter. My obx headers are night and day difference from the ones you received.
Any chance your pacesetters looked anything like my OBX's...no they didn't. You gotta realize that you answered your own backhanded attempt to be cute in your own final statement.
Pacesetters aren't pretty but I have never seen any set look as poorly constructed as these did. Having shiny surfaces and some sexy folded welds is like messing with a hot stripper with herpes, she looks damn good but a few weeks later you will be wishing you had stayed the hell away from that "private show."
Moving on:
I will share with you all that the process to get these returned has been a PITA and I still have not received the credit back to my account. There is some BS within OBX's "sellers return policy" that all returns "REGARDLESS OF REASON" will receive a 25% restocking fee and all shipping charges are the responsibility of the purchaser. I am in the process of working that out and will let you know the outcome.
Guys that have these with good results in the past, would you really recommend purchasing these headers to a friend or anyone else now? Good results 2 years ago would be fine for a product that is held to a standard and built by one group, but I am willing to bet quality has slipped on a building a product for a car that they most likely only get a small margin of orders for every year.
The return policy and the method by which they sell their products through ebay or Amazon speaks volumes and frankly it tells me that they won't stand behind their product because they know it has issues.
I would also like to note that in order for a returned item to receive a full
refund minus the 25% restocking fee ( $160.00) and the shipping fees to and from ($90 both ways) for a total refund of $384.00 out of $634 the product must be in 100% "Re-sellable" condition...that is for lack of better French, fucked up like a football bat.
I think the policy alone more than warrants a blanket "buyer beware".
I feel safe saying that a large amount of the owners of our platform now are not in the position to gamble with their money in the event that they also receive a set of headers like mine and thus I made the sweeping judgment against them.
I am willing to agree that this review comes with several very obvious detriments. One obvious one, is the fact that I never installed my set of headers, the other being that I do not have multiple orders of the same product to compare quality against. Thus we have this post to openly discuss what we are all seeing and I welcome anyone to post contrary information here if they have had a different result with a recent purchase.
I'd be just as pissed as you are. Frankly, whether hundreds of others have had "good experiences" or not really doesn't mean sweet **** all if just one customer has received a product looking like this. Especially without any attempt to right their wrong, or even a full refund. I appreciate the heads up. And "fucked up like a football bat" is definitely being added to my repertoire... thanks for that too!
Thinking... did you pay via PayPal? Wouldn't this constitute an official dispute?
I'd be just as pissed as you are. Frankly, whether hundreds of others have had "good experiences" or not really doesn't mean sweet **** all if just one customer has received a product looking like this. Especially without any attempt to right their wrong, or even a full refund. I appreciate the heads up. And "fucked up like a football bat" is definitely being added to my repertoire... thanks for that too!
Thinking... did you pay via PayPal? Wouldn't this constitute an official dispute?
Agreed. The quality of those headers are disgusting....
Well the return policy nightmare makes all the difference. That is worse than the quality of those headers IMO. Sorry to hear that op. I hope you keep fighting till every cent is returned to you.
Mine didn't have the badge either. And mine were easily 16ga thick on the tubes. It was a bitch to dimple the spots for my steering shaft because the rigidity of the steel.
same, it took a while to dimple mine. But i still suggested OBX to people. granted this was a few years ago.
I have the Maximizer headers which you can almost call an OBX knock off. I did a thorough inspection before I installed them and had none of your issues. I wonder if you got (un)lucky or their quality control dept called in sick that day.
Any chance your pacesetters looked anything like my OBX's...no they didn't. You gotta realize that you answered your own backhanded attempt to be cute in your own final statement.
Pacesetters aren't pretty but I have never seen any set look as poorly constructed as these did. Having shiny surfaces and some sexy folded welds is like messing with a hot stripper with herpes, she looks damn good but a few weeks later you will be wishing you had stayed the hell away from that "private show."
Moving on:
I will share with you all that the process to get these returned has been a PITA and I still have not received the credit back to my account. There is some BS within OBX's "sellers return policy" that all returns "REGARDLESS OF REASON" will receive a 25% restocking fee and all shipping charges are the responsibility of the purchaser. I am in the process of working that out and will let you know the outcome.
Guys that have these with good results in the past, would you really recommend purchasing these headers to a friend or anyone else now? Good results 2 years ago would be fine for a product that is held to a standard and built by one group, but I am willing to bet quality has slipped on a building a product for a car that they most likely only get a small margin of orders for every year.
The return policy and the method by which they sell their products through ebay or Amazon speaks volumes and frankly it tells me that they won't stand behind their product because they know it has issues.
I would also like to note that in order for a returned item to receive a full
refund minus the 25% restocking fee ( $160.00) and the shipping fees to and from ($90 both ways) for a total refund of $384.00 out of $634 the product must be in 100% "Re-sellable" condition...that is for lack of better French, fucked up like a football bat.
I think the policy alone more than warrants a blanket "buyer beware".
I feel safe saying that a large amount of the owners of our platform now are not in the position to gamble with their money in the event that they also receive a set of headers like mine and thus I made the sweeping judgment against them.
I am willing to agree that this review comes with several very obvious detriments. One obvious one, is the fact that I never installed my set of headers, the other being that I do not have multiple orders of the same product to compare quality against. Thus we have this post to openly discuss what we are all seeing and I welcome anyone to post contrary information here if they have had a different result with a recent purchase.
My pacesetters had weld splatter all over the place. Second you do realize when you are buying of off eBay or Amazon you are typically buying from a smaller retailer not the actual company. There's no doubt about it you got a shitty product but doesn't mean everything is ****
Let's talk about customer service I was the first to rip a cs mount in half(hard lunch) that was before they revised their design. Now because I bought the motor mounts from a forum member instead of them they didn't quite stand behind their product. However they did revise the mounts and sold them to me at a hefty discount which was pretty fair in my opinion. So if I was to bash a company for one mistake then a lot of people would think twice about buying their products even for the majority everyone has no issues.
09-26-2015, 12:02 AM
OBX Headers-An Honest Review 
