1985 Southwind P30 Header options

Biggest question when choosing to to invest money into the rig is if you have any delamination, which Fleetwood was notorious for back in the 80s. If there are any places where the wall is sagging away from flat, the don't spend a dime more. Run it into the ground till it quits.

yea. I am going to take some precautions, Building some heat shields, and I will wrap plug wires with longer heat tubes. I dont plan on any real long trips with this rig. It may go up to tahoe and I think the key is stopping every now an then to let the exhaust cool off a little.

I have a Saab 9-3 modified with 400HP and the turbo an the manifold get cherry red when you run it on the dyno. a 7.4L engine I am sure is making some crazy heat when under a near full load.

I only have $2500 in this rig and its hard to justify $1000 headers for it. I need to get some miles and trips in without a lot of issues before I invest a lot of money.

I had a 1985 Allego 23' RV with a 454. I went through 3 sets of manifolds /headers until I went to heavier stainless ones. This has been a 454 problem from day one. Motor homes usually don't have enough airflow coming in to dissipate the enormous heat that is generated. I also burned up spark wire cables and had endless vapor lock issues. It was a nightmare, especially when climbing grades in hot weather.

here was the link I found. these look like 4:1 http://www.summitracing.com/parts/sum-g9011/overview/

but the price is very nice. Noise is not a major issue for me. I was thinking of adding some heat shielding. I can just put a stock manifold on the other side for $70. So really more thinking of this long term. With any of these headers its going to cost me a $100 easy to have air injection bungs welded into the headers.

I used Freeze Off spray on the bolts on the other side. They all came out without breaking. It did take a lot of torque to break them loose. The trick with the freeze off is to shoot the bolt head for 1 min a couple of times. The idea being you drop the temp to -4F and it shrinks the bolt just enough to get the penetrating oil in the threads.

The other goo news is the passenger side I still have to do has way more room an should be more simple. I also used the earls performance gaskets that I hear are the best way to go on these.

As far as heat, with a proper muffler - meaning straight through, you should have considerably less heat than with manifolds. The engine does not work as hard to pump all that air out the exhaust, which translates into considerably less heat.
While I understand the motivation for cheap, the one issue that will be hurt with cheap headers is noise. Cheap means thin wall pipe, which then radiates more noise than manifolds or thicker headers. Even Banks are which are thicker than cheapo, but still thin, radiate more noise than manifolds. Thorleys are thicker pipe, so they have less noise, and by experience, make less noise than standard manifolds at cruise. H or X pipe will also reduce noise and of course help low end performance). Generally speaking, a Tri-Y has a broader power band, so it is more suitable for RV use than 4 into 1.

which way to go make sure you get Long run outputs. Short ones like for a car or truck will cut your torque on the engine.

I didn't find a cheap ones from Summit. Do you have a part number? I found these on Amazon.
Only thin is broken bolts. I have never had good luck removing exhaust bolts.
I would suggest installing some kind of heat shield between floor and headers. Oncoated headers can get hot under heavy loads.
Hedman headers