Any advice on where to locate a crossover or H-pipe? Am thinking of adding one to my car to mellow out the exhaust a little and hopefully pick up some HP. There's a real easy spot to put one just behind the front U-joint of the driveshaft; any farther forward would be a PITA however. Is there a rough guideline to how far away from the engine the H-pipe should be? FWIW this is a Studebaker 289.
Or I suppose I could just lay down some Dynamat, which would probably be easier...
thanks,
nate
The easy way, paint your head pipes, use cheap engine enamal, go for a short drive, check where the paint's burned off, thats the best place for the cross over...
SteveL
I've heard that before, you mean you mount it where the paint stops burning off?
About how far back is that, usually, for a typical V-8 engine? All the way behind the transmission? That's the only good place I see for a crossover. If it should be farther forward I will probably not even bother.
Also, does anyone make a crossover kit in stainless, or am I stuck having it custom fabricated? The ones I see in all the glossy color catalogs that show up at my house every week all are aluminized steel, and as I have a full stainless exhaust I would prefer to keep it that way. Stainless makes me happy. Finally, is there any real advantage to the new X-style crossovers as opposed to the traditional balance tube that's just tee'd into the exhaust pipes?
thanks,
nate
I've been researching the performance increase of using a custom exhaust system on a street car for about 30 years now. Every hot rod mag that I've read where they build up a hot setup and add headers, bigger pipes and low back pressure mufflers has always indicated that adding headers to a street vehicle is a waste of money for the performance gain that you get. The car mags will never admit though as they make a lot of money through header advertising. They always end up lumping in the big increase in power from headers with adding new free flow mufflers and larger pipes.
Don't get me wrong, headers do give a performance increase BUT above 4500 rpm! Below 4500 rpm is where 99% of your street driving will be and you'll see no performance gain.
Back on topic about where to locate the exhaust crossovers. Anyplace that is convenient between the mufflers and exhaust manifolds. Tuning the exhaust to find the "perfect" placement may gain you 5 hp high above 4500 rpm but you won't notice any difference for 99.9% of your driving.
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