No hassle headers for 66 dart w/360?
I certainly have.
Even with the Doug's Headers I had leaks to the point where I had to pull them several times to weld them up, thereby negating the whole point of Doug's in the first place as the TTIs are not slip-fit headers. With power steering and brakes and a manual gearbox it's very, very difficult to get it all to fit. And if you find trouble you have to disassemble the brake, steering, and clutch stuff to get it out of the way to fix the never-ending exhaust trouble. Even with a hydraulic clutch setup I spent way more time dicking around with the exhaust than driving the car. What a total pain in the ***.
It's the kind of thing that sounds great in the planning stage but in the real world it's awful unless you like ripping out all the above mentioned stuff over and over again.
Admittedly my 360 with Doug's Headers was a joy when it mostly worked - fast and beautiful sounding. But that almost never happened. There were always exhaust gasses finding their way into the cabin. Very rapidly the car became something I hated to work on so it sat and sat for months in between repair efforts.
I started with the 273 manifolds before I went with Doug's but they really were quite limiting. The ports are too mismatched and too small. My solution? I sold the 360 and rebuilt the 273 with go-fast parts. Of course it isn't nearly as fast but since I've bought the car and grown up a bit my need to go fast has diminished. Plus, my 20/20 hindsight is that an early-A designed for a Slant/6 engine isn't the best candidate for a hotrod unless you really go all in or live without power steering and brakes.
My '65 Barracuda is really more of a GT car, a tourer, a gentleman's cruiser as I like to say. I'll take driveability and reliability over all-out performance at this point in my life. It still sounds amazing and to me that's the best part - that's where the visceral joy is.
But that's just my opinion. Your objectives might be different than mine.
Cheers.
Reading through all of the posts on headers in a 66 Dart is discouraging and convincing me that the best option is keeping the 273 exhaust manifolds. I am not willing to give up PS so the rare 340HP manifolds won't work. Not cutting up the fenders. But have a 340 and 360 in the garage waiting to get rebuilt and dropped in.
Has anyone used that setup? Wondering how much the turbulence from smaller exhaust ports would affect performance.
