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Date:    Fri, 28 May 1999 18:39:22 -0400
From:   "Tom Lawrence"     tom@argustech.com
To:       Dirt

Well, today I finally finished up the installation of a set of Borla stainless steel headers on my '99 V10. Quite an interesting little project:

First, the stock exhaust manifolds came off very easily. Both can come out from the top of the engine. I had to remove the plastic air intake hose, the ignition coils (and wires, since I was changing them out), and the rubber hose from the air pump on the passenger side. The plugs can remain in (and it's a good thing, as I'm sure DC had their impact gun set on 800 ft. lbs. when they torqued my plugs down)

Having learned from past experience with the cat-back installation, I simply cut the collector pipes at the last connection point before they hit the cats. Use a 7/8" flare nut wrench to loosen up the oxygen sensors. There's enough slack in the wires to twist them enough to unscrew the sensors - just be careful not to touch the end of the sensors with your fingers. Once done, the passenger side collector came right out. The driver's side needed a little coaxing, but it CAN be done without removing the transfer case skid plate.

Once that was done, the truck sat for a week, waiting on the Mopar performance header gaskets to come in (the gaskets Borla ships are garbage - do yourself a favor and throw them away). The Mopar gaskets are nice... at least twice the thickness of the Borla gaskets.

Another reason the truck sat was that I was waiting on delivery of a cover plate and gasket to close up the EGR port on the passenger-side header ('99 V10's don't have an EGR tube). Borla was supposed to send it out, but never did (something about not making any for a couple of weeks). Do yourself another favor, and just have a welding shop fill the hole up. This is much better than a cover plate and gasket, anyway (no chance of leaks).

Once those two problems were taken care of, the headers went in. Both sides require a little fiddling to get them in, but it's not too hard to get them down. As I posted before, make sure you disconnect your battery before doing this - the driver's side header has a nasty habit of grounding itself to the positive stud on the starter.

On both headers, start the very back bolt FIRST. You have to be able to tweak the header a little to get the bolt in, and get a wrench on it, because of the way the primary tubes on cylinders 9 & 10 partially cover up the bolt hole. Once these are started, start the rest of them (use a 5/16" 12-point socket or box-end wrench with the hardware Borla supplies - and ONLY this type of socket - anything else will strip the heads, and the locking cams won't fit on). Don't tighten the headers down yet, as you'll need a little play to get the collector pipes on.

Ahhh... the collector pipes. Oh, what fun. Things may be better on a '94-'96 V10 (which these kits were actually designed for), but the '99s are a little different. The passenger side goes on fairly easily (as long as you leave the header loose). The driver's side, well... let's just say it required a little bit of "thinking outside the box". When everything fitted up properly, the support rod (the rod that's welded to the collector, and is supposed to slip into a rubber bushing on the transfer case) was about 3" shy of the support. After thinking about it a bit, I decided on using some lengths of 3/8"-16 threaded rods to replace the bolts in the transfer case. This let me mount the support about 4" to the rear, and made everything fit. Granted, this was a cheesy solution... the right thing would have been to cut the rod off the collector and re-weld it in the correct position. I was lazy... sue me.

Once that little problem was taken care of, the rest of the pipes clamped together nicely. I used a couple of 2.25" couplers to connect the new collectors to the stock pipes into the cats. I used ones without the dimple in the middle of them - this let me slide the coupler completely over the stock pipe, then slide it back to grab the collector pipe.

The header bolts were then tightened and torqued. A socket with a wobble extension, a universal joint, a 12-point 5/16" socket, and an el-cheapo 5/16" box-end wrench are needed to do this. The reason for the el-cheapo wrench is that you need to cut it almost in half. On the passenger side, you simply can't get to the bottom bolts without this.

After all bolts were torqued, the locking cams were installed. These are neat. They look like a lobe on a cam shaft. You slip them over the bolt head, in a position where the cam is touching the header, which will prevent to bolt from backing out. An e-clip is then used to hold the cam on. Getting these on can be a little tricky (especially the back bolts). If you really want to get them on, you need to jack the truck up, pull the front wheels, pull the inner fender wells, and (possibly) bend the fender's sheetmetal up and out of the way to get to these. It's one thing to insert a bolt and tighten it from up top - it's quite another to work with a couple of REALLY SMALL pieces of metal, especially if your hands are anything like mine (ever see those soda bottles with the picture of Shaq's hand on it? 'Nuff said...)

That was it... all the stuff on top of the engine was put back on, including new wires (I opted for the Accel ExtremeDuty wires, for their heat resistance). Along those same lines, I also installed a starter heat shield (the wrap-around, velcro-attach types. Yeah, I know... but it fit, and it was cheap).

The truck sounds different now... not so much louder, just more pronounced. I don't know about any power increases - that will wait until I get to drive it a little more. However, the nice rumble is overpowered by the STENCH! Blech.... these things stink. If I didn't know better, I'd swear someone was holding a blow torch to my tires. I'm told it's normal, and well go away in a couple of weeks. Until then, I'll be the guy driving down the highway with the gas mask on.

Seriously, this was a pretty fun project to do. Aside from the driver-side collector, the overall fit was good. I had very little problems bolting the headers to the engine. This project was spread over a period of two weeks (an hour here, two hours there), but if I totalled it all up, I probably spent a good 6-8 hours on this.

As usual, if I had to do it again, I could probably do it in half the time. If anyone else is thinking about doing this, I can provide pictures and further details.

-Tom