There are twisted individuals out there who don't want to put a Chevy in a Chevy and others who think the factory engine location doesn't always cut it when striving for improved engine fitment and the ideal front-to-rear weight bias. Either scenario leads to a place many of us never want to go when working with an oddball engine and chassis combination-the realm of the custom header build. Time-consuming, frustrating, and ultimately very expensive, custom pipes are the bane of every hot rodder's existence, unless he owns a tube bender and has a knack for geometry. Even then, every header-building artist still has a scrap pile of tube sections that didn't quite fit the project they were intended for. Wasteful. That nonsense ends today. Go ahead, stuff a BMW V12 into a Nash Metropolitan or slide your Hemi backwards in the chassis a few inches. With Icengineworks' precision header modeling system, even the novice fabricator can design and build his own pipes correctly the first time.
The kit is composed of rubber connectors that fit into a header flange to give a starting point for your primary pipe build. Interlocking plastic tubing sections of varying angles are marked to indicate the direction and orientation of one section to the next. You can literally twist together the primary pipes, snaking them around your project car's steering shaft, gearbox, firewall, control arms-whatever gets in the way. Once you settle on a header design, you can measure exactly how long the primary tubes are (the centerline length of each tube) and where to make the bends on a tubing bender. Or if you're on a budget and don't have a bender, you can simply buy tubing donuts or mandrel-bent, U-shaped lengths of tubing, and the modeling kit will show you exactly where to cut each tube so you can weld all the individual sections together to make your custom header. An included jig makes cutting the tubing on a vertical bandsaw easy enough for almost anyone to build his own pipes without making an expensive pile of scrap. The kit is as pricey as a set of coated headers but pays for itself the second time you use it.
