Feels like I never left

Okay, so first thing's first: that recipe from the last post?  Totally useless.  500°F is plenty hot to make you uncomfortable and to burn the hell out of your hands and forearms, but not hot enough to adequately heat this aluminum intake to allow you to braze a base plate on.  I have no reason to believe that you couldn't make it happen with a propane grill, but I don't have a grill or sufficient patience to go find and use one.

That said, I also owe a semi-apology to Dorman.  Turns out that they were only half to-blame for the fitment issues.  After getting the OEM intake in place, the header still didn't fit, but not quite as badly.  Rest assured, it was still a show stopper.

For the sake of time, I grabbed an old header from a '96 Jeep with the intent of chopping it up and modifying it to provide a  temporary solution for a proper dual exhaust.  This was taking too long to get completed, and the stop gaps and crack welding started to pile up quickly.  In the interest of time, once again, I got another
header that was well-reviewed and had no reports of fitment issues.  To make things better, it was even specifically described as being an exact replacement for the factory exhaust manifolds for '00-'06 4.0l Jeeps.

If you think it fit, you haven't been reading this log for very long.

As soon as I discovered that this header didn't fit, I started to think of what measure of cutting, grinding, and spitting on the intake would be needed to get it in place.  Once it occurred to me that this would cost who knows how much time (as well as the $200 for the falsely-advertised and poorly-made header) with no guarantee of success, I checked online to see if anyone might have a set of factory manifolds for sale.  I'd be lying if I said that my decision wasn't also made out of spite; I was determined to find another solution so I could return the damn header and keep my money out of the pockets of the jerks that sold it to me.

Against odds, I not only found the manifolds for sale, but the guy was available to sell them today.  Once we met, I gave him the rundown of my header trials, and he nodded as though it was something he was more than slightly familiar with.

"They don't fit," he said, "And if you did manage to get them on, they'd be starting to come off within a couple hundred miles."

This was a possibility I hadn't even considered.  While it's possible that the guy was trying to cement a sale, he already had my money and showed himself to be more trustworthy than whoever sold me the aftermarket crap.

So 2 hours later, I found myself manifolded and ready to get this long embarrassment over with.  I went straight back to the shop, wirebrushed the rust off the mating surfaces, and started to get my exhaust on.


They didn't fit.



I'm kidding.  They fit perfectly, as expected!

That's not to say that everyone lived happily ever after.  No sir, there's still plenty of pain to be shared, you can be sure of that.