I've had my 05 v8 for two years now, and it's always smelled of exhaust when on and parked. I can hear the ticks from the cracked manifolds, so I'm guessing that's where most of it comes from. sitting parked, you can smell it really bad. bad enough that my wife doesn't want to be in the truck.

what are my options for fixing this? DT headers sound awesome, but I'm also not sure how much money I want to dump into a $7500 truck, and it seems like I would have to replace almost the whole exhaust system.

is there any other viable options?

J.

if you're planning on keeping it a while I don't really see many options for header replacement.. I mean there are obviously aftermarket replacement headers that are not DT's.. but how much money are you ultimately saving?

Do you have any welding experience/have a friend that could help? If so, building out the rest of the exhaust once you have the headers replaced is really not expensive or hard.. If you're looking to keep the rig, $1000 bucks doesn't seem too bad of an investment.

I highly doubt your headers are leaking enough for you to smell it outside the truck.

My first suspicion is that your catalytic converters have gone bad, and that's why it stinks.

Do you have any codes related to catalytic efficiency currently being thrown?

But, yeah - I would definitely spend the coin on going to DT headers. I have a few posts on what I've done in my post history. Take a look and see what you think.

IMO, it was absolutely worth the money.

no codes, cats seem ok. I get the typical rotten egg smell when I hound on it with the rear window down, but otherwise it's only a regular exhaust smell.

it's not terrible, per say, but you can smell it. like, I would think that sitting in the truck with it running with the windows up for a few hours would be bad/deadly for you. but once you start moving, you don't smell it.

J.

Ah. Understood.

I'll strongly recommend spending the money on some high-end cats like in my signature. Buy once, cry once. And with the price of recycling these days, likely can offset a lot of the cost by selling your oem cats to someone like rrcats.com

I have the same issue on my 2007. Smells pretty bad at idle. Also ticks pretty loud from the driver's side. I just picked up some DT shorty headers. The rest of my exhaust is in pretty bad shape so I am going to build a new one myself. I sourced 304 stainless tubing from ebay (has some straight tubes plus some 45, 90 and 180 degree bends). I bought both 2.5" and 3". Stainless tubing was probably $300 total for both. I also decided to use V-band clamps to hold it all together (I fell in love with v-band clamps back in the day racing turbo DSMs). They make it super easy to install and remove an exhaust. I picked up a magnaflow stainless muffler from ebay as well. I am not super experienced with my MIG welder, but the stainless tubing welds pretty good with the stainless wire (308 wire) using 75/25 argon/CO2 (stainless is pretty sluggish to MIG weld, so my welds are not so purdy). Not as pretty as a TIG, but structurally will be solid. When I am done I will have a totally new exhaust from the engine back. This is the cheapest way to go, and probably will end up matching any aftermarket system on performance.

Edit: it would be even cheaper if I built my own headers, but I wouldn't try that without a TIG machine.

do you have any vids of what your setup sounds like?

J.