Does anyone know if there is a major difference between the OBX stainless headers and the Pacesetter ceramic headers? Besides being a bit cheaper?

 

Things like headers and a tune will not hurt you motor but there is an old saying “the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long” anything you do to your motor to add more power will create more heat and more stress. Lets say we had a crystal ball and we knew that in 3500 miles you car is going to blow a head gasket or spin a rod. You do these upgrades and you drive the car hard enough to use them you might blow that head gaskets in 2000 miles. Now if you do these upgrades and don’t use them very often then the added stress and wear is very minimal. The 3800 is a very solid motor and they tend to only fail when something else goes wrong like a coolant fan fails to a thermostat sticks but we do get cases where people are just driving normal and have failures.

I cannot stress enough how you drive will be the main factor in wear. These mods may add 30 hp to your motor but that is at high RPM foot to the floor. In normal around town driving we are talking 15 HP. That is not going to hurt anything. Heck your motor probably adds 10HP on really cold mornings do to air density.

If money is not an issue go with the Pacsetters. Some of the guys that bough the OBX headers after me have issues with them fitting. I had not issue but my guess would be that either the headers themselves are varying too much from one to another or the design does not allow of all the possible factory variations. The Pasesetters have been around a lot longer the OBX headers.