I have recently done a PI head swap involving replaceing my heads, upper and lower intake, and replacing my exhaust manifolds with pacesetter short headers. After doing all this work I have this tapping noise that I only hear under a load. I am fairly shore that it is an exhaust leak but I cant seem to find it. Recently I pulled the headers off and replaced the paper gaskets with copper gaskets and used locking header bolts. This has not fixed my problem. I would like to know if any one else has this kind of problem with pacesetter headers or if any one has any ideas on how to find the leak.

 

My pacesetter shorties cracked 4 times...

 

was this right after installation or had you had them on for a while.

 

about 4 months was the first crack

 

I had a set of those POS shorty headers once. The only way i could find the leak in them was to pull them off and fill them up with water. Found the leak on both left and right sides at the spot where all the tubes converge into the collector and get welded together. Around all of those tubes is where they try to fill in the space between them with a small piece of badly cut fill metal welded in and the rest of the space around the tubes is weld filled, and again, badly. I tried re-engineering them with a new beefier metal piece, welding it in place and re-welded all the other spaces around the tubes. The material that the headers were made of was so thin that my welder would burn through at the lightest setting. So i had to build up the metal on them in some spots. I never could get the collectors to stay shut at the tube junction. They always broke after a few months due to the inferior material and motor twist if I drove the truck hard or towed with it. I finally threw them away and put back on my stock exhaust logs after a year and a half of struggling with them. You may be be able to keep your set tight if you have a welder or access to one. My set was just built so badly i gave up on them.