Performance - Getting more out of your vehicle

Exhaust Headers
This page will cover information regarding adding exhaust headers to your truck or car to improve performance and horse power.

Exhaust 101

For those of you that have little schooling concerning the operation of a combustion engine, I'll try to scratch out an explanation of what a exhaust headers can do to increase performance.

A combustion engine is basically a explosion factory. It's main product is horsepower or torque, it's by-product is exhaust. It's main raw materials for manufacture is gasoline and air.

In order to be competitive in today's economic market this factory needs to produce torque efficiently. It has to use it's main ingredients of gas and air wisely and be able to rid itself of byproducts efficiently.

Exhaust is a by product of the explosions that are produced over a thousand time a minute in your engine. It is vented from the engine by way of the exhaust manifold through the catalytic converter, through the muffler and with autos so equipped through the secondary muffler, the resonator finally exiting through that pipe somewhere towards the rear end of your...............car.

Getting back to the engine for a minute, for it to be an efficient factory it has to get rid of this exhaust quickly. Why? .... you might ask, .....well inside your engine are things called pistons they suck in air and gas and spew out exhaust, while there trying to spew out the exhaust the exhaust ahead of it is trying to get out of the way, but it's having a bit of trouble just like the guy ahead of you might be on the San Bernadette freeway (or whatever freeway). Your probably thinking I'd be further up the road if all them other........... people weren't in the way. Well that's something like what your engine might say if it could talk. Instead of the pistons spending all their gas and air on producing torque there wasting a percentage of these resources because the back pressure of the exhaust gas is pushing back on the pistons. It's like having the majority of your team yelling go, go, go, go, go and some of them yelling no, no, no.

If you could reduce the back pressure you could increase the horsepower. This is where exhaust headers can be used to reduce the back pressure and increase the horsepower.

After Market Performance Headers

Replacing the stock exhaust on your car with a sport or racing exhaust system will not only increase horsepower (6-18hp), but will also assist to give your car a more aggressive look and sound.

The average amount of Horsepower gain is around 8 to 14. It depends on the quality of the stock header your replacing.

Most righteous header companies tune the resonance of the header to create a pulse wave to suck the exhaust gases out. The exhaust pulse travels at around 800ft per second. pulling at the exhaust valve when its closed creating a more efficient exhaust scavenging which is really important in header design.

Headers are designed in different exhaust ratios from low end performance to high end performance. If you do a lot of city driving or if you want better take off when pulling a load you'd want a header tuned for low end performance. If you want better performance for the open road at high speed you'd want a header tuned for the high end.

There's a lot of header manufactures out there, I'm going to have to do more research before I can make a decision on who's and what type of header I'd want to put on my Quad.

If you have any information you'd like to share with me and the readers of this pages concerning exhaust headers, don't hesitate to write.

I'll be adding more information about headers to this page as time goes on.