Header fitment rant, Doug's
Me too, D453.
Wish I had another driver side header to try on it.
I suspect Dougs quality control has something to do with it. Maybe, I don't know. Not gonna buy another set to find out.
I love your persistence in trying to blame the quality control on the Doug's while overlooking the fact that your ~50 year old car has factory body tolerances that are probably at least 3-4x as big as what is allowed for the headers. I mean come on, it's widely accepted that the rear axle in these cars can be shifted to one side or another by a 1/4". Or that the quarters can be off by that much or more. The tightest controlled measurements on these cars are the suspension points, and even those only had to be within a 1/4". But you want to blame the brand new headers? It's widely accepted that the quality control on all of the American made muscle cars was marginal at best, and that's coming from guys that love American muscle cars.
And that was before you used engine mounts that are known to be significantly different than the stock ones, or any of the other aftermarket parts you have that might effect engine placement and header clearance.
Have you tried using a pry bar to shift the engine over on its mounts? With the biscuit mounts especially if you loosen all of the engine and transmission mounts you can usually shift the engine from one side to the other by a good 1/4". If you have a little room on the passenger side you may just be able to shift the thing over. Heck you can probably shift the whole K frame over almost an 1/8".
It seems like your expectations of how easy should be to bolt a set of headers to an A-body is a lot different than what reality is. I mean seriously, if you search "header fit" 396 different threads come up, most of them talking about interference issues of half a dozen different brand headers. I would HATE to be the guy that was responsible for designing a set of headers for production on these cars with body tolerances in excess of a 1/4" and header to body clearances that are usually less than an 1/8". Think about that for a second. When they fit perfect the header clears a bunch of different parts by an 1/8", but the tolerances on the car are a 1/4".
Everybody wants bigger diameter tubes, access to all the spark plugs, clearance on two completely different steering boxes (the power box is gigantic),
three different transmissions and a several different linkage options, and they want them to be cheap, buy them off the shelf and have them fit perfect. Ain't gonna happen. Try designing something for production and you'll see how ridiculous of an ask that is. It's amazing the Doug's and TTI's fit as many of these cars as well as they do.
Welcome to hot rodding, if this was easy everyone would do it. Instead even most of the guys that do it pay someone else to do most of the work.
