OEM Exhaust port vs Ebay header and accordian design

[optmaxx]

I've been swapping out my cracked rebuilt head that I bought from ebay that I suspected was defective from the start...alway get ebay heads magnifluxed before install I guess. That company has since closed down though.

Now I have three exhaust manifolds that I can use (OEM, cheap ebay header and the accordion design), but I found something interesting between the three of them, and that is that the exhaust post all line up differently when you put the gasket over it, and the exhaust burn mark all align different too.

The OEM seems to be more centered to the exhaust ports out of all of them, the ebay header seems to get misaligned on the last three exhaust ports and the accordion one is just misaligned throughout. I'm not sure how much that matters, but it seemed to matter to the OEM version.

[optmaxx]

Ebay header:

[optmaxx]

Accordian:

[optmaxx]

Mid ports of the Accordion design.

[optmaxx]

I just found how much the holes offset compared to one another interesting, and the cheap Ebay header seems to be a bit better aligned than the accordion one, but the OEM beats them both. I'm not sure how much it matters but I'm going to stick with the OEM manifold that I have that has no cracks instead of trying to repair the Ebay header that has a crack.

My other question is, would it be worth repairing the Ebay header?

[IH 392]

Unless you're trying to get every last HP out of it?, I wouldn't sweat it.
My opinion is that if a jeep doesn't have cracked header it's already been replaced!, my TJ is on it's third one and I picked up a fourth to have on hand from a parts house that was going out of business.