4bbl or 2bbl (Page 2 of 3)

Wow.  As someone who runs a 2.0L I-4 Honda (no VTEC) with about 150HP to the wheels, 190HP from a 400 big block V8 is just plain sad.  Especially with the weight penalty.

As a fellow MOPAR (street) car owner though, I love that V8's sound!

All your torque belongs to me!

I say go with the headers first. If your going to stay below 5k get the smallest tube headers you can find. Then do an aluminum intake and a small 600/650 4bbl. Make sure you get a dual plane low rise intake manifold. You don’t want to run into hood interference and have to run a narrow air filter or fab a scoop
   One of the huge benefits of this swap will be all the weight you get off the nose of the car when you toss the heavy 2 bbl intake and exhaust manifolds. If you have not moved the battery to the trunk you need to do that too. Change all those things and you will have more HP and a LOT less weight on the nose of the car

we run a 5.0 with a 4 barrel carb, rev limiter has been increased to 4800 RPM!  Quick fuel, which is a cheap holly, vacuum secondary.  Started with a 600 CFM, went down to a 450 and the car seemed to like it.  Was a little faster at Pittrace than the previous year.

For you, headers and a small (600 cfm)  would wake her up a bit.  I'm 100% certain it'll sound way better.

;-)

(below has nothing to do with the technical question you asked, which I think was an excellent question; a _ton_ of good information in the direct responses)

Based on almost all of the Lemons Wrapup videos I've seen, my opinion is the True Lemons Experience° is not achieved unless you:

1. Go "all in" on an obscure theme, and/or

2. Perform an ill-advised engine swap to a low power, poor reliability history engine, and/or

3. Switch a drivetrain around, and/or

4. Put a turbo on an engine which has been 'running reliably, with no performance or driveability problems'.

... but I'm beginning to think the 'turbo' joke was a little too obscure

I'm just going to do the theme

Yea unless they're talking about like crazy gasser super long dump headers like in a Wycked Kar Kulture Ed Roth art piece or something, I don't really know what they mean by "Scrape on everything"

Real question for anyone who's run a car with and without headers: Do they add any power?

In my (very brief) experience doing PR for an exhaust company, it seemed like any gains you would actually make were (A) excruciatingly small and (B) usually near the top of the rev range. In other words, the power gains would be mostly theoretical for how most teams run their Lemons engines (Unless you have that one guy who always wrings the engine out to factory redline to make the pass at the end of the straight). The marketing people could still say "Adds up to 10 HP" because while a B18A1 will indeed breathe better at 6600 RPM, if your drivers are revving the aforementioned B18A1 to 6600 RPM every shift, it's not going to make 10 (or 3 or whatever) more ponies for very long.

I realize that isn't categorical and that some exhaust manifolds are SUPER restrictive, but it always seemed silly to think that it was the one thing that was holding you back. Mostly, they just seem to make the car sound a little better and much louder, which is extremely unfun if you're driving a race car for over an hour.

That is definitely true for the more modern cars. The exhausts flow well enough that headers won't make a big difference, especially w/o a re-tune.  Older car require some investigation. Changing headers alone would be pointless.Its usually a good starting point to change to a 4BBL carb, intake and to headers as a group. Headers are more of a supporting HP modification in my experience.

I picked up a set of :lemonssponsor: headers for our ETA e30 just cuz saying we had headers was cool.  Spent a ton of time getting them to fit with no noticeable difference in performance.  But we are 1% cooler!

Dude BMW's are tuned to the max from the factory. A set of headers on a big block mopar adds HP. Period. It also lightens the already heavy front end and gets heat out of the engine bay

  Stock Mopar Big Block Log exhaust manifolds look exactly like the ones in the picture and are VERY heavy and VERY restrictive. Replacing them and and the Very heavy cast iron intake would make a huge difference