"Tech General" is a little slow lately, so.....

Good on ya for digging that out, Gordo. Personally I'd have brought that to Mike my muffler guy. His boys would have sleeved and welded the joint in a couple hours for way less that $800. They'd have left off a couple heat shield screws, probably, but I could live with that....

As I think you may know, Ed, the Subaru exhaust header has a pair of bellows between the left and right sides to allow for expansion and contraction of the engine.  It looks like, in our case, those bellows didn't work worth a darn (way too stiff) and, instead, ruptured the collector at its weakest point - that might explain why one of the manifold gaskets leaked, too.  Or maybe it's a weak point on all of the 2.5 non-turbo engines (the turbo system is completely different and looks stronger, too).

So we suck it up and shell out 8 Benjamins (just in parts - good thing I'm doing the labor or the end price would double) because someone we don't know did a piss-poor design job and still got his paycheck.  Damn good thing he never worked for ME!

Glad you found that, I had a leak up by the head flange on my 98 Legacy GT. It was under the heat shield of course. Mig-welded it and threw the shield away.

You could just put a flex joint in there and be done with it for less than $100 including labor for someone to weld it. No way in he11 would I shell out $800 for something that is repairable.

My Audi allroad has 4 catalytic converters. Two for each bank of the V8. There is a flex joint in between the Cats, which goes bad. $1100 A SIDE!!!!!! No thanks. I replaced it myself for $20 flex-joints and time. The job really stinks to do, but I've still got that $2200.

Yes, that bellows thing is a known weakness. Fixable, I think, and that should keep it from cracking again.

Bridget's current exhaust eliminates it. I asked Mike (the guy who made it) about that and he said "see what happens." I took that to mean, if it breaks in any unreasonable span of time, he'll fix it for nothing. Three seasons later it's not a problem. Mike and his minions made and installed Bridget's exhaust and bent the hard cooling pipes for me for significantly less than the cost of that one part you're buying. He's good people and I was lucky to find him.

Doing it all the factory way is usually the best option. I just balk sometimes because, well, $800 is actually a lot of money to me, and if I've done enough poking around to analyze the failure, I can often (not always! but often) devise a pretty credible solution to the root problem for less outlay than the dealership would command. 

We all roll the dice in life sometimes, and that just happens to be my game. 

Having admired your fabrication work, I assumed it was yours too. But I guess the rules on a DD are different than for a fiberglass clown car.

OK, so I went to the Subaru place to order a new header and the parts guy (he has an old MG-B and has seen my Speedster at the local shows) says, "You aught to check with Service to see if they'll cover that under the emissions warranty."

Sonofagun,  After showing them photos of it with that humongous crack in it.....

They're gonna cover it!!

Now for the weird part - THEY have to remove it and put the new one on (which is in parts stock) which means I have to re-assemble it (they told me to leave the heat shields off....Thank You!) and set up a service appointment around all the other stuff going on this week, but it'll be one hell of a lot cheaper than $800 Bucks!!!  Good time to have them do a Spring Service Check on it, after this!

Score!

That emissions warranty is VERY cool. I assumed you'd gone over the 100K mark LOL