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Reply to "3785 Gets a 400 swap, fabbed 180's and fabbed mufflers"

Here are the pipes out of the car and mounted to a 400 block and heads on a dolly. I can’t bolt them to a engine on a engine stand because they hit the arms on the stand.

This is the RH side header I am very happy with how this one turned out. I want to point out some design considerations on this side of the engine. The header flange bolts are diagonally staggered with the upper bolt to the front. This makes it easy to lay the pipes back towards the rear of the car and still have good bolt access. Because I moved my water tanks this also gives this side more room to run pipe and is easier to build with spark plug clearance. You can also see that the pipes take a longer route the closer to the rear of the engine they get.



Here is the LH header. I don’t like this at all. Frowner The space is so cramped to work in because of the fuel tank shield that you can’t see how it looks very well.



I cut all the pipes off so I could take and tweak that side. It’s better to take some time to fix something that is bugging you now than to have it bother you forever.



Here is Ver2.0 for the LH header. I like this much better. This side the upper header bolts are staggered to the rear of the engine so the pipes exiting the port can’t lay back as far and still have good bolt access. With the fuel tank shield you always have to be aware of how wide the header is during construction. You need to leave room to slide the header out away from the cylinder head for removal from the car.



The other problem the fuel tank shield makes is that the plug access is worse because you can’t run the #5 cyl pipe as wide as you can run the #1 pipe on the other side. The #8 plug will have to be reached from the bottom.Remember I am building these on a 400 which has a taller deck, a 351 will have more room here. Note that I have full access to all my valve cover bolts.

Last edited by pittcrew
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