I would like to share my recent high dollar poorly made long tub header ordeal. I bought a set of headers and y-pipe for my Silverado. It took six weeks for the headers to show up. Now the first thing I should have done was put a strait edge on the manifold flange to check if it's flat. I didn't do this but I will from now on, at almost 9,000 miles I had to take headers off cause the pass. side was hitting the frame. I also notice the Percy gasket that came with the headers had started to leak. Sent the headers off to get fixed and the pass. Header flange was wavy and I could measure .025 warp between two ports! I went an measured drivers side and got .023 warp and they never even touched that header. GM spec for the manifold warpage is .010 all the way across. So I told them I wanted a replacement set these are not going to seal very long. They finally sent me another set but they both have pinholes in the welds on the collectors. I would strongly recommend that if you are running kooks headers you may want to get them checked out. I'm never gonna deal with them again.

 

Damnit man, that sucks. I could see issues like that with ebay headers but a high dollar set like Kooks, I'd be a little pissed. For the record, the ARH headers I had on my truck back in the day were great. Flanges were perfectly straight and welds were solid. A friend of mine recently bought ebay headers, even against all of my warnings, and sure enough had warpage and leaking at the flanges on both sides. He has since replaced them with a set from Speed Engineering and has had no problems with their headers.

 

After visually comparing kooks, ARH, Speed Eng headers, there is NO way I would ever buy anything buy Speed eng headers.

All three are Identical, other than aprox 700$ cost diff.

 

I'm looking into some different headers now but I'm still dealing with this return crap so I can get my money back. I even drove out to kooks so they could test fit a new set of headers and then they tried to straiten one of the headers with a 6" electric hand grinder! That's how they surface their headers apparently which is impossible to have a true flat surface.

 

that sucks, especially for those prices. i blew a primary tube off my stainless works headers. its an easy fix but for these prices they should be flawless.

 

Man, that is definitely unfortunate, especially with a high end brand like Kooks. I purchased ARH headers and did check everything prior to assembly. The one issue I had was the y-pipe halves sealing and tried everything and come to find out the male end was not perfectly round and sent them back to ARH and they swapped them out and everything has been great. I would be pissed. This has been the first issue I have heard about the major brands: ARH, Kooks, StainlessWorks, and am very surprised in the craftsmanship in the way things happened to you.

 

I had a set of kooks on my 2000 Z28, they were a pain in the *** to install compared to the pacesetters I took off. (Even with a tubular K member and manual rack)

I spoke to someone from the company at PRI a few years back, the guy was a rude *****. The crew from ARH was much more friendly and willing to answer questions.

 

Back in 2009 I had a really good experience with Kooks for my g8. Unfortunately, this last experience also has me not wanting to buy from them again. It took about two months to get product. They sent me the wrong connection pipe twice and on the third attempt the pipe didn't fit. I didn't want to screw with them anymore and I had to have it professionally fixed and eventually I had it cut and vbands welded onto it to get it all to work right.

 

Z28 with the prices they are charging you would think they would have better quality control and top of the line equipment. We shouldn't have to do anything with their exhaust except for install. I thought I was buying top of the line parts and everything should be perfect or at least close to it but to make repeated mistakes on the same customer with the same part?! that's poor customer support and they just don't listen.

 

I finally got around to milling the flanges on my headers, wow did kooks do a number on the passenger side header. I had to cut off .052 cause the back port was so uneven from them grinding on it with a hand grinder. So the first picture is the passenger side the side they fixed and reinstalled and said that won't leak now. The other pictures are after I milled them, I think I'll do this every time now when I get new headers that way I know they are flat and true.