I am looking for suggestions for the best jest economically priced shorty header. I am keeping the cats, and just have a spintech welded in place. I really dont want to go over $300. Painted is fine. 5.3 2002 Z71

 

You might as well give me that $300 if your stuck on buying shorties.
You will not get any gains from them. Maybe 5HP.
You best bet would be to search e-bay for a set of Pacesetter longtubes.
You should find a used set pretty cheap. Then after they are installed, take your truck to a muffler shop and have them fab up a Y-pipe with your cats.
That will be your best bet. You can even check out the classified section here as well.

Jim

 

Jim is exactly right... If I had seen the inside shape of the stock manifolds before buying short headers I never would have done it, Basicly no gain. I can say I have headers- Thats about it... Get long tubes or nothing... just my 02. if you had everybodys 02 thats going to tell you the same thing you could afford some nice L/T's

 

Summit has some Eldebrock shorty headers ceramic coated for around $250 i think thats what I paid for them. But as you can see I got rid of them before even takin them out of the box and went with long tubes. But they looked like a good piece for the money. Did get my longtubes from a sponsor for about $20 more

 

you can get the pacesetter lt's painted for a good deal, like 285 shipped I believe. byunspeed is where I got mine, and Byun is great to deal with

 

Try and keep the non-sponsor distributors to a PM fashion.

Jim