COMING up to 50 years old, Pacemaker Headers is one of the oldest aftermarket performance product companies in the Australian hot rodding scene. The business started out making pipes for Holden grey motors in EJs and hot 202s in Toranas, but now churns out a wide variety of systems for newer applications too.

Over the years the manufacturing techniques have changed a lot too. For early stuff that is pretty rare these days, the guys use jigs that could be over 40 years old and have been used to make hundreds of headers over the years using the manual mandrel-bend process. For the newer mass-produced stuff for cars like new HSVs, Mustangs and Pacemaker’s 4×4 range, they use fully automated machines.

These days people aren’t so interested in pipes for 202s and Holden 308s, so a lot of what Pacemaker produces is for LS-powered Commodores or LS motors into other models like HQs and VLs. Their King Brown series has also been a big hit with the 4×4 market.

It’s interesting to see just how much of it is still done manually though, and looking at the quality of the finished products you’d swear it was all done by machine. In actual fact, all of the welding is done by hand and in such a way that it’s uniform across all of the products.

We made a trip out to Pacemaker’s headquarters in Adelaide to take a tour of the facility and see just what goes into making up a set of Pacemaker headers. Pacemaker is a proud supporter of Street Machine Drag Challenge as sponsors of the Radial Aspirated class and we can’t wait to have them on board again at this year’s event in November.