: me and welded a support between the bottom of where it bolts to the head to the flange where the turbo bolts to.
: From what Greg said, they tend to crack between 2nd and 3rd cyls due to the weight of the turbo when the exhaust gets hot. Better to be safe then sorry. I have heard MANY people having this problem, I wasn't about to pull the motor to fix something that could be prevented from the start for a simple weld. :)That helps a lot but it will probably still eventualy crack. At least in a daily driver situation. According to SGP, you also need to reweld the entire header up to make the weld fillets bigger. I still think it will eventualy crack. Stainless has a pretty hig coefficent of expansion. Ever see stainless turbo headers on real race and rally cars? First they use 321 stainless or inconel instead of 304 which is a lot better, then they use slip flanges and flex bellows. Then the turbo is braced against the motor. The slip joints allow the stainless to expand and contract without streesing the whole pipe or assembly with every cycle. The trouble with this on a street car is that slip joints leak enough air to play havoc with o2 sensors. Thus my desision to run modifed stock manifolds on my car. If it was easy to acces the header for repairs on our cars, I would have gone tubular but since it is a nightmare to work on a cracked header in the car, I went cast. Mike
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22:57:33 10/24/01
