reinhardt02

I am in the middle of the install still. Life is hectic, and the car is a toy. I am having trouble getting the passenger side header in. The driver's side went ok, had to pull the oil filter to get it in.

02 NHRA

Niota, IL basically where IA, MO and IL meet on the Mississippi.

ds98formula

iTrader: (3)

Kinda far or I would help ya

reinhardt02

I got the headers in tonight. The passenger side was hell. I had to undo the motor mounts, jack the motor up, and then push it over to the driver's side until the power steering pump was touching the abs unit. BTW... you can put headers in by yourself, it isn't fun though.

I ran into an issue with the wiring going to the starter. The wiring loom is approx 1/2" from the header. Is this going to burn the wiring? Is there a way to shield it from the heat?

Tomorrow I hope to finish the install up and drive the car. Just have to put the alternator back in, swap the pins in the PCM plug for the o2 sensors, fire it up open headers, and last but not least install the y pipe.

orthopod

iTrader: (1)

I know exactly what you are talking about with the wiring loom as I dealt with the same issue last month when I did my headers. I posted up a few times to no avail and finally decided to double wrap the loom (on top of the factory heat resistant wrap) with DEI Cool Tape. I then zip tied above and below the area of concern to pull the loom tight against the inner fender well panel. There is no way for the loom to now touch the header and I have had 1K plus trouble free miles since. There is a nice metal bracket (more of a protrusion) below the area of concern where you can loop a zip tie around the second loom down there and the bracket and the loom that is close to the header to not only pull the wiring close to the fender but to also pull the looms together into the space between two header primaries to give even more space for peace of mind. This is all with 1 7/8 primaries. If you want a picture I can take some tomorrow as I will be in the engine bay installing the chrs1313 ram air and I can post them up.

reinhardt02

a pic would be nice. thanks.

reinhardt02

I have everything buttoned up except attaching the y pipe to the catback. The previous owner used a cheap exhaust clamp on the stock y pipe to the catback and the pipe is fubared. Tomorrow I will use the sawzall to cut off 1" of the catback to delete the fubared chunk of pipe. There will still be 2" of pipe overlapping, figure that should be enough. If it leaks, then I will weld it.

BTW... I did fire it up open headers to uhh.. uh... make sure everything was hooked up. The neighbors loved it.

reinhardt02

I got the car back together and mobile. It sounds ok, I wasn't expecting great with the current catback. That is my next project for the car. It is LOUD though. I am concerned that may draw the wrong attention. Noticed improved performance from 4k rpms on.

I noticed additional vibrations from the poly motor and trans mounts. I think it will be easy to get use to.

02 NHRA

Have to ask, how high did you get the car? I know people say as high as possible, but I'm wondering what is passable.

My plan before even starting was possibly running the rear up on ramps then jacking the front up to match...idk yet.

reinhardt02

I don't think that will be high enough. I had the front cross member 20" off of the ground. My jack was maxed out to lift it that high. I may have been able to avoid jacking the motor up and over if I could have gone higher.

orthopod

iTrader: (1)

You want the car at least maxed out on 3 ton jackstands. When I did mine I had the rear on ramps and the front on 6 ton jackstands that were about halfway up. Getting the collector perpendicular to the ground really helps slide the headers right up. I had to do my driver side header twice as the first one had a o2 bung in the wrong spot from TSP. The second time I did it I didn't even have to take anything off it just slid right up as I knew how to angle it and the collector was definitely perpendicular to the ground.

02 NHRA

Ok thanks for the tips guys. I have it set up with a buddy of mine who works at a grain elevator to do the swap in their shop over the weekend (I have the next week off from work but hopefully I don't need it) and between all the write ups and info that I have gathered I am feeling more confident that it should go without issue...but we all know how that works lol.

reinhardt02

I thought I would get mine in a weekend. It probably took me a total of 30 hours to do headers, ORY, and mounts. I am not a slacker or stupid, just kept running into issues and hiccups.

02 NHRA

Well me and a friend got started on the project Friday after work, and finished up today. Although I don't really count Friday and Sunday actually time put into the work. Friday was mainly a "get stuff ready for tomorrow" day. I took off the lid, belt and coil rails (per a write up) and it wasn't needed. The only things that we had to remove were the steering shaft and starter. And then today was just aligning the tail pipes.

All said and done we had about 8-9 hrs into it, and we definitely weren't working at break neck speed. One thing that really helped was the undercarriage of my car is almost spotless and everything came apart like butter.

madmike9396

iTrader: (29)

its easy pull all the spark plugs and get to wrenching that old crap out ! be gentle with the head bolts not to strip em

02 NHRA

I didn't even take out the plugs lol, they were put in not to long ago so we just kept in mind that during installation, to just be careful. And it might not have been needed but we used his torque wrench to get everything to specs.