Shorties Or Long Tube?

A good set of shorty headers are a huge improvement over stock. Longtubes are a pain to install and make other jobs like clutch, starter swap etc. very difficult. On a street car I don't think longtubes are practical. They say friends don't let friends do longtubes......

mcowing said:

In Ontario, Canada where I live, the gov can be picky about cats on cars. Like my fox came stock with 4 cats total. The government wants it to stay that way, if I were ever caught with less. From what I understand using long tube headers would eliminate 1 cat on each side, with a big gain in performance compared to shorties. If I wanted to keep the current 4 cat setup would shorty headers make enough of a performance improvement to make it worth while?

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If the cats are in good working order, shorties all the way. I have ran both on the same setup and actually ran faster at the track with the shorties. Long tubes are not worth the hassle and you won't see or notice a huge gain. You will however cuss at them when you install them, scrap them on speed humps whether in Ontario or Toronto.

Toronto is a city in the province of Ontario.
With that out of the way... .
Long tubes are worth it if you are chasing every last 1/100th at the track. They have a different sound to them as well, a little deeper... not as "raspy"... any 5.0 is going to be raspy but the long tubes make them slightly more mellow... From everything I've seen, long tubes are most beneficial over shorties in the mid range... up top, from what I've seen, they are usually within single digit HP's of one another on typical street/strip builds. So, if you car is a standard and you like to roll through the rpms then you might notice the long tubes working better, if it's an auto and just going to grab a gear and run in the upper rpms anyways, probably not going to see much difference. At the track (only running on the top end) the 2 would likely be more dependent on what the cam wants.
I have long tubes, but the car is insured as "collector" so emissions do not apply. I like the way long tubes sound, I like the way they look and math says they work as good as shorties... possibly better if the cam is designed to take advantage, which, my custom is. I do not have lowering springs, but have the original 23 year old springs... I've yet to scrape mine on anything... and been running LT's for 17 years.
Prior the "collector" status, I had a custom catted mid pipe fabricated for the car. Visual inspection was simply to verify cats were installed, the sniffer took care of the rest. They never looked for 4.
Shorties make a lot of sense regarding $ and emissions, they look like a nasty bag-o-snakes, and sound mean as heck... and full throttle, neither will be the difference between having fun vs not.
Other wise, I concur with the gentlemen posting before me...