I never said anything about ebay... Or generalizations about the parts sold on it...

I simply said that the imperfections were most likely due to being cheaply mass produced.

I will probably buy a set for myself someday. Not hatin', just statin'.

 

Do the second gen ram 5.9 engines have the metal spark plug shields?? By the looks of the pacesetter headers you posted, even they wouldn't fit on my truck without grinding away the baseplate for clearance. I had to grind significant crescent moons on the eBay headers to make room for the plug shields and the look to be the same thickness as the pacesetter bases...

 

Ok point made and understood.

 

I do in fact have the shields...I've heard other have had to grind the flange for clearance too and although I cant be certian until I actually install them but these look to be identical to the pacesetters as far as the footprint on the head.

 

Just pull those damn plug tubes out! They are known to catch and hold dirt around the plug until its time to change them, then they drop all it into the cylinder when you pull your plug

 

The plug tubes are nice in that they help prevent cross threading of the plugs that are hard to get to (straightens the socket). The headers shed significant heat too, wouldn't the plug wires see dangerous levels of heat worhout those shields?

 

Somebody with more knowledge than I correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't headers be cooler than manifolds in that they dissipate heat faster and don't hold it?

 

Plug boots will be fine without the heat shields regardless of if you have headers, or cast iron manifolds. There's enough room there, and the plug boots are DESIGNED for high-heat applications..... Wanna reduce under-hood heat? Ceramic coated headers.

 

All true about Chromium content and 304 but the act of welding causes the chromium to move out of the base metal not at the weld itself but at the somewhat cooler bands on either side of the weld (it only happens at a particular temperature band, so the weld itself is too hot).

There are special steps you can take to minimize this but my gut feeling is such a time consuming procedure was unlikely with these particular headers.

If you avoid welding (clamps, bolted flanges, etc) it isn't an issue, of course, so with the remainder of the exhaust there is probably a genuine benefit to the high chromium 304 (also called 18/8, meaning at least 18% chromium 8% nickel).

With this particular application, just because it's 304 doesn't necessarily mean it's automatically superior to 4xx through-out the header. Doesn't make them a bad deal, though, in my opinion.

 

It's the other way around (iron dissipates a bit better, runs a bit cooler overall and cools a bit faster) but in the grand scheme of things they're pretty close to each other relative to, say, aluminum.

Cast iron also has extremely high Emissivity ... emits infrared heat which helps cooling rate. Iron = 0.95, SS (polished) = 0.07, perfect is 1.0 and useless is 0.0

That's not a problem though ... you want a poor thermal conductor in your headers so that you can keep as much of the exhaust heat inside the pipe; exhaust gas expands and slows down as it cools; you want the opposite where it stays as hot as possible and keeps moving at a high velocity.