Santa came to my house yesterday

Post by **Ozark Lee** » 12 Dec 2009, 12:33

My son has a big crack in his exhaust manifold on his '96 850 N/A. I tried to repair it with the muffler bandage junk from Advance Auto Parts but no joy, it still sounds like a tractor and he keeps throwing a CEL on fuel trim.

I wound up buying him a header from OBX Racing off of eBay. He should be home next week and I will try to do a writeup and see if he feels any difference in power on his 850 N/A.

The OBX Racing header was actually a fuzz cheaper than the aftermarket junk and they seem to have a good reputation with the ricers - the header was right at $200.00. Sadly they don't even list Volvo stuff on their website but it is listed on eBay. I got an email back and they can do even a bit better on price if you email them directly. I have seen other posts where the 850 turbo cat back exhausts have also had rave reviews for the money.

This goes into the "we shall see" department but I will update when my son gets home from college for Christmas break and we install it.

: 001.JPG (216.21 KiB) Viewed 2332 times

...Lee

Post by **matthew1** » 13 Dec 2009, 17:11

Lee,

Well, it looks pretty. It'll be interesting to know how it bolts up.

Post by **polskamafia mjl** » 13 Dec 2009, 17:16

Looking forward to the writeup.

salts850 · Post by **salts850** » 15 Dec 2009, 09:14

Lee, I'm also interested in how this will bolt up. In your write up, if you don't mind some pictures would be great. Thanks

9394volvo850s · Post by **9394volvo850s** » 16 Dec 2009, 17:05

I was considering for my 93 5speed. let me know how it works.

salts850 · Post by **salts850** » 17 Dec 2009, 23:53

I think i got too excited when reading this since i realized this is not for a turbo. It looks sweet though. I checked out the site and didn't find anything for the turbo except the full kit which is a great price. I'm just worried about how loud it will be. I like how quiet my car is. I'll still be checking out your write up. Great work you do lee. Thanks again.

Post by **Ozark Lee** » 22 Dec 2009, 16:35

I wound up not doing a full write up on this since you really can't see anything. It is mostly done by feel. This particular application was on my son's '96 NA with EGR. The EGR poses a huge problem. The stock exhaust manifold has the EGR port coming off of cylinder number 5 and it is parallel to the back of the block. With the OBX replacement the EGR port on the header is at a totally different angle.

The line to the EGR port is stainless steel and it is very difficult to bend and the angle must be spot on to get it to thread in. We burned up at least three hours screwing with trying to get it to fit and ultimately I wound up removing the other end from the EGR valve itself (which meant removing the air box, the IAC valve, and the intake air line to the throttle body) so that I could screw it into the manifold at a vertical angle and then bend it around until I could get it to fit up on both ends. The line wound up being fairly deformed and partially collapsed, I wasn't using any kind of pipe bender shoe, so that was more or less expected - at least by me. I blew through it and it seemed to flow just fine and it didn't break so I don't really expect any problems.

The heat shield is another problem area. They are ever so slightly off on the placement three upper bolts for the heat shield. If you loosely bolt things up and use a phillips screwdriver to pry things around you can get the upper bolts to go in. The OEM manifold has a lower mount for the bottom of the heat shield, the OBX version has no such mount and I am somewhat concerned about the shield rattling around. I may just buy a big hose clamp and try to affix the bottom of the heat shield to the header with that.

At the end of the day it is a very well made header, once I got the EGR to fit it worked just fine. My son noticed no appreciable increase in power but his old exhaust manifold was completely broken in half and thus there was no back pressure at all. It is definitely quieter! If you don't have EGR I can highly recommend it, if you do have EGR be prepared for a battle.

One other irritant was that two of the lower bolts (on #2 and #4 ) were not accessible with a socket wrench. I used a combination wrench and got them tightened down but I could not use the torque wrench to torque them to the prescribed 18 lb/ft.

...Lee

swede_speed · Post by **swede_speed** » 04 Sep 2010, 16:12

I just bought that header on ebay on Ozarks lead that it was a well built
Header