Offering your car for fitment of new headers?
 

Has anyone ever offered their new car to a company to allow them to craft headers for it? Overall the ones I have talked to said they would give me the first full production headers and not the Frankenstein ones they will make to get measurements etc...

I would be down for that, as long as the installed the first production ones for me. However I am ordering my car in Dec. and I am sure they would want one right away.

I'm sure they would also use it to beat the piss out of a new car to see what it has before and after their mods, not something I would do unless I was literally with the car the whole time.

when you say beat the piss out of it do you mean dyno time before and after?

Some of that, some of the shop crew doing donuts in the parking lot, as well as the younger guys taking it to their boys house to show off that weekend.

it sounds like you had a bad experience, i am sure sledgehammer can work something out that they are not allowed to do that

Why would they "beat the piss out of" it? All they need do is dyno it stock and then again with the headers. Sure, if they are "experimenting" with different configurations they may perform multiple dynos, but it won't be anything above the car's capability. It's not like they'll be testing at the local drag strip on Saturday night.

If it is Kooks go for it. Otherwise I would want to be there with the car!

I'd be hesitant to do this even if it were after the break-in period for the following reasons:

1. The engine bay is tight. They will need to remove / reinstall several components many times while doing the fit checks. Do you really want a shop disassembling/reassembling your brand new car without all of the factory failsafing? I'm sure you've probably seen these pictures to gauge what would need to come off to get to the manifolds: http://www.camaro6.com/forums/showpo...83&postcount=1

2. They would undoubtedly need to run some baseline dyno runs as well as dyno runs with the new headers installed to quantify the benefit. Would they keep the calibration stock or make changes to optimize it for the new hardware? If they make cal changes, how experienced is the tuner?

3. Downtime - how long would they need the car for?

On the flip side, you'd get a "free" set of headers, but you wouldn't know how sorted out the design is up front with respect to torque curve gains, clearance, and quality of the end product (unless you could infer this based on their current offerings). Like someone said above, it probably depends on the company, but I don't think I'd take the risk on my new car.