The general consensus is that these headers are the best value, and they were confirmed to be the AA design from the same factory. That said, anybody looking should be aware of this post from AA (take it with a grain of salt because of the obvious bias, but best to be fully informed).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Activ3
Hi everyone, David from Active Autowerke here.
I just wanted to clarify some things that I've found in this thread. A customer purchased some Megan racing headers today and brought them in to be installed. On first glance we thought they were ours. After seeing the Megan logo I searched them and found this thread.
We designed the triangle head flanges with the recessed bolt holes and paid to have the mold made and casted. We also designed the lower 2-bolt flange and had those casted as well. This was long before the newer brushed headers, back when we were making them here with their $1999 price tag. We moved production on this product overseas as the cars got older since we couldn't compete pricewise with the competition.
That said, there are varying grades of products manufactured overseas. This is evident if you've ever compared an iPad to a $30 eBay tablet. We have a very strict QC and actually test fit and modify every set of S54 headers in house before they're shipped. When we got this set of Megan headers in today we put them in our jig and of course they are not spot on. On top of that we did find a small crack in the weld at one the flanges as pictured below.
Our headers also ship with OEM flange to head gaskets, and OEM fiber gaskets where they connect to the mid pipes. When you purchase from us you also receive an OEM secondary air pump gasket. I don't intend on making this a sales pitch, but when you purchase from us you also receive stateside support from a company that has been in business since 1981. You can call us during business hours and speak with someone for live help during your install, or if you have any other issues.
We still manufacture quite a few products in house (and only sell original designs), including our entire F8X M2/3/4 exhaust line as well as our supercharger kits. However, we would never compete with the current S54 header market if we were still making them here.
I mainly just wanted to clarify that we did in fact design this piece from scratch. We'll take it as a compliment that Megan chose ours out of the many on the market to copy. |
All this said, I do still sort of regret spending so much on my Fabspeed headers which are the same basic design. I wish I went straight to SS stepped headers instead, or this option to save some coin.