I was told that you have do alot of research on exhaust for Ford f150's. I'm looking for an all-around exhaust. I drive 50% highway, 50% city. I want to keep running 82 octane.

Lordco has FlowTech Headers, for $186. Are they any good.


Right now I'm just running a K&N. Will I get any more power running a cold air intake. I wasn't sure cause most of the time we run winter fronts in the winter. I was looking at getting one of those $45 cold air intakes off of ebay, are they any good?

Also I was looking at a chip, but don't see me coming up with $325us any time soon for a chip. Unless the cdn dollar jumps really high.

 

2002S-crew,
you get what you pay for....I've never heard of $186 headers for our trucks. You probably will develop exhaust leaks around the headers like crazy. Thats just my opinion. I've been there in the past with the cheap header thing and it is not pretty.

 

Wasn't sure if they where any good or not, cause they where ony $185 for standard, but $430 for Ceramic.

 

Hi 2002-Screw,

You made a wise choice in dropping by here to ask questions before plunking down your hard-earned cash, as the parts you listed would never find their way into our inventory for sale to anyone, or on any of our vehicles.

First, the single best bit of advice we can give you in general is to FORGET shopping for performance parts based on price, as that is literally the single worst mistake you can make, trying to find the cheapest brands. Forget the EBay crap, forget $200 headers, forget $45 intakes, forget $200 exhausts, etc., as none of that will get the kinds of results that are available and that you should get if you're going to spend money modifying that vehicle for improved performance. In aftermarket performance parts, AT BEST, you get what you pay for.

OK, to answer your question about intake modification..............

A drop-in K&N air filter will get you 3-5 more HP on a 5.4 motor, where the best intake, the Air Force One, will get a 17.9 HP gain so yes, there is a *much* larger power gain from a proper intake kit versus just doing a drop-in air filter in the restrictive factory intake, because the restriction isn't just in the air filter element itself.

You've got a beautiful and very expensive new vehicle there, so forget trying to find the cheapest possible parts. Instead, you need to do the exact *opposite*, and use only the BEST parts, as those are the only ones that will make the real power gains and that will last and not look like junk on your vehicle, especially over time. To say nothing of ease of installation, Tech Support, raw materials quality, etc.

If a $45 or even a $100 intake kit was worth doing, we'd be selling them ourselves. They aren't, so we don't. And you'll notice you don't see our customers here complaining in their posts because the parts they got from us broke, wore out, or didn't improve performance, or were a bear to install, or didn't have documentation, a great warranty, etc.

Wait until you can afford to do each area of modification *right*, you're going to have that vehicle for a long time, so treat it right. Whatever you do, don't use cheap parts, that *never* pays. The thought of sticking a $186 header or a $300 header on a $35K truck makes me shudder to think of the exhaust leaks, warped flanges, & cracked tubing that will occur over time, assuming that they'll install properly at all.

For example, in a shorty-style header, the only brand we recommend is JBA. And you can get a stainless steel set of JBA headers for your truck for only a little bit more than the number you mentioned for those other headers cost with the coating. Sometimes it really doesn't cost much more to use the best stuff!

The first thing you need to learn about is the basic order of best bang for the buck, which modification (and which specific brand of part) yields the best result, as without that knowledge you're going to waste a lot of time and money on parts that don't get much of a performance gain. Headers would be much further down on the list of mods, for example.

Do the Top 3 first: optimize the powertrain programming, get the restriction out of the air intake tract, and then get the restriciton our of the exhaust system. Even among the Top 3 mods, you have to be *extremely* careful as brand selection is absolutely CRITICAL to the results. There are $2000 exhaust systems that can't compare to a certain $400 system, for example, you can very easily end up with a large loss of torque with most exhaust systems.

You'll want to call us to go over this in proper detail as to which parts are actually going to give you the best bang for the buck, that's far too much to cover here of course.

The best thing you did was to start doing your homework and then drop by here to ask *before* spending any money, that was a very smart move.

By the way, the rules here on F-150 Online prohibit the posting of any specific parts pricing by anyone, that's part of the rules we all had to agree to in registering to post here on these message boards. The Webmaster prohibits that so that these boards don't turn into another EBay and get clogged with what is considered to be "blatant commercial content." Just letting you know for future reference..............

Give us a call when you get a chance, & we'll be happy to go over some of the basics with you regarding what parts are really doing the best job, what kind of costs are involved, when what part should be used, etc. You can still run on 87 octane and get performance gains, and we even offer a Superchip for use on 87 octane, if yoiu like. The power gain is of course smaller, but it will help all the other areas like shifting, top speed limiter, delays, retards, etc. along with a smaller power gain. We have all kinds of ways to get the performance of these vehicles up, that's what we specialize in, F-150 platform vehicle performance.

Merry Christmas!

 

Mike,

Not that you need someone like myself to concur with you but once again I readily agree with what you are saying. Over the years I have had a number of 11 second, and 1 10 second Mach 1's. I tried to adopt a motto and it was simple: Buy the best parts money can buy. Know what you are doing or have someone that knows what they are doing install them. Lastly, race cars break but you have the peace of mind knowing that you've done all you can do.