The header flange hits all four bottom head bolts.


Ground a small flat spot at each of the head bolt collision points.

 

 

The passenger side is done. All in all, pretty easy one man job. If the body was on though, you would definitely need a second pair of hands holding the headers up from below the car. I was able to straddle the frame, and use my feet to support the bottom of the header to align the bolts. I'll tackle the dreaded drivers side tomorrow.

 

The drivers side fit pretty much the same as the pass. Pipes came pre "dimpled" to clear the steering box. I'll let you decide if dimpled is the correct description or not.


One bolt hole was slightly off. The factory hole size is 0.4500" I drilled this one to 15/32", which is something like 0.468". Not much difference, but it made it work.

Here's the smashed,, I mean "dimpled" pipe.

 

 

 

 

The drivers side collector is about a 1/2' farther out from the frame rail. There were no directions with the kit, so I'm not 100% sure how the mounting hardware is meant to be used. I'm gonna research it a little, but I will probably make a whole new mounting system. both pipes are currently skewed, and not square with the car. This might be on purpose, to pull the pipes closer the the car where the doors are?? No matter, I don't think its a big deal, this is easily modified later to whatever anyone wants. I also can't see the half inch difference being noticable to anyone after car is done. Maybe if your looking straight down at it from above, but I still doubt it will show. So all in all, I'm pretty happy with the OBX sidepipe kit. Time will tell how they sound, but there's several utube vids with before and after installs to hear them. Some of the pics look like the tubes are touching the frame, but there is clearance right now. However, there's no gaskets yet. The driver side may be in contact with the frame once gaskets are installed. I might dimple this spot before the ceramic coating is done.

And that dimple looks deeper than it really is, it's really just about right. Could have been a little smaller, but it's probably better than I would have done, which I was expecting would be needed.

 

New hardware for side pipes.

This is what was supplied for mounting. No room for adjusting the pipes parallel with the car.

 

Some pics of headers after ceramic coating. As you can see, they are far from perfect. This was after 12 weeks at the paint shop. I'm not sure what all the trouble was, but they redid them 5 or 6 times, before telling me they were done. When I went to pick them up, they were still really bad looking. coating was polished completely off in some places, and still rough white in others. They gladly redid them again, and this is the final result. This is my first experience with ceramic coating, so I really don't know how they are supposed to look, and in the end the whole point is to reduce engine compartment temps, I may or may not have the sidepipes done. Gonna wait and see how they look when its done, and see how hot they get. That will decide if ceramic will stop burned legs, or if shields are needed. I think these long headers are too big and bent in too many ways for the tumbler/polishing machine to evenly polish them. they outside edges polish way faster than the inside bends. Just my guess tho. If I did it again, I think I would leave the headers unpolished. They actually looked pretty cool dull white, and I would think the heat reduction would be even better with the thicker coating.

 

This build has been stalled for a long time now, but maybe, just maybe, I'm gonna get it finished now. I figure I'm halfway there. The wife said I could get the SST transmission after I took her to Europe. Hmm, Europe? She didn't specify what part of Europe.. I'd like to say Hi to my new friends in Killarney Ireland!! If you get the chance, spend a month or more there. Wonderful people. We missed our chance to visit Scotland because we enjoyed This small town so much we stayed longer. Countryside is awesome, and the smaller towns are cool. Larger cities not so much for a country boy like me. Anyhow, I got that taken care of, and my new trans kit from Silver Sport transmissions arrived today. The budget has officially been blown. Glad I don't have to worry about that anymore. I truly think this will be worth the cost tho. I went with the 5 speed option for the lower gear ratios. 3.27. 1.98, 1.34, 1.00, .68. The six speed version started with 2.87 in first, and ended with .64, and .82 for fifth and sixth gear. With the tall 3.08 rear end I have I felt like the lower trans gears would help. Hope I made the right choice. The kit includes everything to convert the car from auto to manual. Or at least I think it does. I've never done an auto to manual before. After a quick read thru the instructions this afternoon, I'm pleased with how well they are written. Seems at first glance, they have covered everything with good detail. The only unexpected thing was the tight tolerance for the bell housing to input shaft requirement. It must be within .005" I must have missed this during my research but that's ok. The straighter it is the better, and I'm good with that. The drawback is I may have to order special offset dowel pins to correct any misalignment. And that will add time. Everything else seems pretty cut and dried. Basically a clutch job. So I'm looking forward to getting started on this, and once it's done, the only thing I can think of to do before putting the body back on is cleaning and painting the engine compartment

 

coming along nicely , those pipes fit but to me ,just not quite right ,Seems to be the norm these days anyhow. You didn't mention what insert muffler packs are in there ?

Sounds like travelling is good for you as well

 

I believe they are the "Max Flow" Not 100% sure about that. None of the OBX retailers I looked at gave an option for the inserts. All I can say for now is they look just like the old style glass packs. Probably going to be way to loud, I hope to find out by spring

 

I'll start the install of the SST trans swap here. Since I'm doing it with the body off, it probably won't be of much help to most.


I pulled the old 400 and cleaned the surfaces with a wire wheel. Important to check mating surface for any protruding scratches. Make sure bore is clean and grease free for pilot bearing.



Tap pilot bearing in with a socket until flush. No farther!! That little space behind it is just enough room to fit a bearing puller into should you need to replace it. If you push it in all the way, you'll be forced to use the ol grease and pin method to remove it. Trust me, nobody wants to do that while laying under a car.


Flywheel installed and torqued to 70 ft lbs. Use threadlocker. Important to clean face of flywheel with brake cleaner or something before installing clutch, but I'm not doing clutch yet.

 

I forgot to mention that all the parts and hardware for the trans came with the kit from SST. I'll try to point out anything that's not included.

 

The next step is to install the bell housing, and then check the runout from the crank shaft and the bell opening. I watched many video's on how to do this, and they all made it look easy. It's a simple enough process, but the devil is in the details. Most of us don't have a special drawer full of specialty dial indicators. The process is to mount a mag base to the flywheel, anywhere near the centerline. Then mount the indicator so the needle is running just inside the bell opening.


The problem is the mag base most of us probably have wont fit anywhere in the middle of the flywheel due to the bolt heads. No way to get the base to sit flat against flywheel. And if you move the mag base outside the bolt pattern, then the indicator won't fit inside the bell hole. I saw one video where they removed two of the flywheel bolts to solve this issue, and that may be a perfectly acceptable method, but I had already torqued the bolts with threadlocker two days before trying this, and I didn't want to remove those bolts. I have second mag base that I used for some other project, where I needed to cut the shaft off the base for clearance, and decided to try that one in the bell housing. The shorter shaft didn't help at all, too short. But all the sudden, now I could get the base to sit flat in the center. So I installed the longer shaft onto the old base and was able to get the readings. I'll show the difference in the bases later. You will need a second set of eyes for the tests. I'm not gonna post the procedure for getting runout, because I'm lazy and would not include all the pertinent info probably. But basically you just find the highest number, (closest point) zero the gauge at that point, spin moter again, and record the largest difference. Note which direction needle is pointing as if on a clockface so you know which direction the housing may need to move. I did this three separate times, with both the new, and the old indicator, and they both showed offset in the same place, so I'm comfortable its accurate. The new indicator showed 22 thou out three times, and the old one consistently showed 27 thou runout. I thought about getting out the feeler gauges and checking which one was closest to correct, but really, who wants to do all that? So my actual runout is either 11 thou, or 13.5 thou. I went with the average between the two or 24.5 thou divided by two equalling total runout of 12.25 thou. I have a set of 14 thou offset pins that should get me back into the 5 thou acceptable range.

 

After removing the bell I discovered why one mag base fit.


The slightly larger base was just big enough to get a good purchase on the flywheel over the pilot hole. The smaller one wouldn't fit flat.

 

The larger base measures 2.5" x 2"

 

Thanks for the writeup - it helps. I'll have to go through this for the first time soonish... Happy Thanksgiving!

 

I pulled the bell housing and used a punch to drive the passenger dowel pin out from the front side. No problem there, but it would be alot easier if the headers were not in the way. Still not to bad tho. I saw someone on youtube use a bent punch to get the drivers side out. Maybe that would work if the headers were off, I don't know. There was no way it was gonna work with them installed. So the following pics are the various ways I tried to remove the dowel.

I first drilled an 1/8" hole through the dowel just so the bent punch would have a way to stay on the dowel as I hit it. Waste of time. Since I already had a hole, I tapped it for a 1/4-20 bolt, and tried a make shift slide hammer. another waste of time.

Tried a piece of 5/32" plate steel to use with two bolts in the block as a puller

As you back the bolts out, it puts pressure on the plate which should pull the pin out
All this did was bend the plate. So I doubled the plates.

Bent them both. I still kept trying to hammer it out while I had pressure on it from the homemade puller. No luck.

So I tried to pull it this way. Just broke the bolt.

This is getting crazy. Upped the stakes by drilling and tapping the dowel for a 3/8" bolt. Should have skipped all the other crap and did it right the first time. Came right out.