Against the advice of many of the big distributors and major manufacturers on this site, I ordered a set of 304 Stainless Steel, OBX-R longtube headers with cat-delete pipes.
I must say, I was very surprised with the quality as other manufacturers were reporting these to be Chinese knock-offs of a major brand of header made in the USA. Oddly enough, I did not find a single "made in China" sticker anywhere on these headers.
Straight out of the box the headers looked like jewelry. The whole system is a high polish. The plan was to replace my stock cast iron manifolds and JBA catted midpipes with these.
As far as installation...it was a BREEZE. This was by far the easiest installation of a set of headers I have ever done. The driver's side fit with zero clearance issues and the passenger side also fit with no issues whatsoever.
It is worthy to note that:
1.) I re-used the stock exhaust manifold gaskets (metal) because they were one piece while the OBX graphite gaskets were two piece and I was eventually worried about blow-out. The stock metal gaskets will NEVER blow out.
2.) The collector to catalytic converter delete pipe bolts that were supplied with the kit were cheap metric 4.8 grade steel. I ditched these in favor of purchasing some metric 8.8 grade bolts. Also I did not like the tension "springs" supplied by OBX with the collector bolts. I ditched these in favor of lock washers to keep everything from loosening up.
3) The kit did not come with front O2 sensor extension wires. This shut me down for a week as I ordered mine from Racetronixs which is an outfit in Canada. You can buy the "high temp" extensions here:
http://www.racetronix.biz/itemdesc.a...4T-24T&eq=&Tp= I have since learned that Casper's electronics also sells extensions available in 12". You can buy them here:
http://www.casperselectronics.com/st...oducts_id=1267
4) Lastly, I purchased two 304 stainless steel O2 sensor extenders (fancy one piece 2" spark plug antifoulers) to keep the cat delete pipes from throwing codes.
So here is what I spent:
$404.00 OBX Headers (eBay)
$46.75 Racetronix front O2 wire extensions
$11 collector bolt hardware
$24 Stainless rear O2 sensor extenders
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Total spent = $485.75
The sound of this system is AMAZING. I am 100% satisfied with the quality and fitment of these headers. I am sooo glad that I did not listen to the naysayers and go with a more expensive header that would have performed the same.
Now let me shut up and on to the pics. I will post a video clip of the OBX headers, cat delete pipes and stock LS3 cat-back when I get a chance. I absolutely found the right sound for this car.