Recently a customer brought his Civic in for dyno tuning. On the first dyno run, the motor hits VTEC and goes dead rich -- but makes no horsepower.

We pulled off the aftermarket header. Here's a pic:

We look inside the header -- a generic one from eBay -- and examined it more closely. What we found was shockingly poor construction yielding almost total blockage. See for yourself:

We replaced the header with a quality Skunk2 Alpha Series header. Ran it on the dyno again, and saw a *dramatic* power and torque increase.

Here's the comparison chart:

If you've read Mike's interview, you know our philosophy about buying from eBay is to use extreme caution. We're not saying every auto part on eBay is badly made or a knockoff (and eBay is trying to fight that image too), but there are still dreadful products out there that can cost you power, money and sometimes even your safety. Ebay sellers know they will probably never meet you, so their motivation to simply move product overshadows *doing the right thing for the customer*. And even if the seller does care, customer feedback doesn't always make its way back to the seller.

We do the right thing for our customers. If it won't help your build, we won't sell it to you.

And we have the dyno charts (and decades of experience) to back it up!

It really is true: "When you buy cheap, you buy twice."