exh.mani stud SS or OEM steel

[nation]

god its been a long time for me. 4 years ago OEM was the only bolt you would use.now im seeing people use SS studs and bolts.i need to know who is using what,and dont be shy.if SS sucked for you tell me.if its the only thing you will ever use so be it.i need turbo bolts,mani studs and o2 bolts.

 

[SleeperG]

i honestly think oem is the best by far.
many people have them break, mostly because they are the originals.
any metal is going to fatique after hundreds or thousands of heat cycles.

the stainless steel ones are softer. also stainless steel sets use stainless nuts and washers. i bought a set cause my old oem's kept breaking. i installed a sbr stainless set. torqued everythign to spec. heat cycled, then rechecked torque. i thought everything was fine and dandy, but had a few problems:
1: the nuts woudl come loose on their own. so of course this means if i didn't catch it, i'd lose the nut on the highway somewhere(and i did a couple times)
2: the stud itself would come loose. and i woudl lose a whole stud or have to retorque it
3: i assume since stainless expands at a different rate then nickel-cast iron, the manifold flange expands more or faster than the stainless stud does/can. and i snapped 5 studs....
before i went back to brand new oem's. haven't had a one problem since.

my take on it:
the oem have heat treated studs. mitsu engineers chose the metal these are made of because of their resistance to fatigue, and the way the respond to heat.
the copper locknuts do not back off, and even the washers are crushwashers on one side. this all adds up to them keeping the same torque at all temps, so you don't have anythign backing off. or snapping cause it didn't expand.

^all this is just from my expeirience with cast manifolds.
i imagine if you have a tubular stainless manifold....
since they run thinner flanges than the stockers run, not to mention the flange themselves are typicall made of stainless,
then i imagine stainless studs would yeild no problems with breakage, but i imagine the nuts could still back off.