Did you have it on a IS350? How much loder was it compared to just an aftermarket exhaust

 

It was louder... But not by that much.

 

Umm. OK. I saw those headers. The internal welds (where they really count) looked worse than most first time welder's joints. I've seen lots of cracked headers. I haven't seen a quality built header crack unless it had an unsupported turbo hanging off of it. I have yet to see a Taiwanese or Thai made header that was well made. They focus on pretty welds on the outside for visual performance, but fail to exercise the same level of concern over the inside where mechanical performance begins.

And no, I don't have my experience tuning or engine building from forums.

 

I wasn't calling you out, you're the voice of reason in most of these threads and clearly have a solid tuning background.
I'm just saying that there is a lot of uninformed opinions floating around here that are perpetuated by other uninformed opinions.

I haven't personally seen the Megan headers so I can't say what the internal welds look like, but I had Megan down-pipe back exhaust on my Subaru, the welds were nice inside and out...

 

not saying this was directed towards me but you have no idea what my background is... i've been working on cars and building old muscle cars since i was very young so i know how things work. inside welds and the collector is very important. the outside maybe nice but the inside isn't quality.

look at the honda/acurs. the premier tuner comptech, who is now under new management developed a set of headers for the 3.0/3.2 CL/TL's. their headers coast a lot but they are quality headers, which not one i have heard has ever cracked, i had them on my old acura among other comptech parts. i also had a pair of SSautochrome/DC sports on my car before the compechs, the quality was sub par, they were cheep, they didn't fit exactly right, and they cracked and sounded horrible. I then bought the comptechs and never had a problem, they were perfect. you get what you pay for. megan racing downpipes on the subies are pretty good quality will not doubt that. not everything they produce is quality though IMO and experience.

i take things that are said on this forum and forums in general with a grain of salt, but there is some very good information that can found.

 

^^^word.

DC stuff has fallen apart on me as well.And yeah the welds are poor quality as well. It doesn't help that AEM bought them out. Their stuff is known to hit the consumer before through testing. Their electronics are especially problematic. Their CDIs caught fire on over a dozen supras.

Comptech stuff is way superior. Out of over 100 products I've installed of theirs not one of them has ever fallen apart or had any sort of issues with. I still have cars running out there with over 8 year old parts that still hold together w/o a problem. And yeah their welds are perfect.

 

I don't think the fitment or quality is really the biggest reason not to install Megan's IS250 header on a 350. I don't know much about header design, but I would expect that the optimum sizing of the primaries and collectors would be different for the 350. On top of that, I've owned other headers "that fit" from Lightspeed and DC Sports, and they made zero gains, and I've seen many cases on other cars where they made losses.

 

i concur with this opinion. just because the headers fit on the IS350 does not mean that the headers will perform as desired. If header technology was that simple, then any "joe" could weld some pipes together and get a performance boost.