the book says i need to drop the exhaust. is this true? or can it be done without taking it off?

 

No. It's not hard to do, but you do need to pull the exhaust. At least the bottm half (if you have stock/2 piece manifold).

 

Your head and engine block are aluminum and you must use a torque wrench, to re-install your bolts/nuts.

You can re-use the brass header gasket, but buy a new oil pan gasket.

The header will drop down enough, to allow you to squeeze the new oil pan into position. However, if you want to give yourself more drop-down clearance, you can:
1. unplug the primary 02 sensor's connector
2. remove the 2 bolts that hold on the header bracket (located near the catalytic converter)

There is a sequence to re-installing the header bolts...start with the center most bolts first and work your way outward one bolt/nut to the left, then one nut to the right, then repeat, until they are all in.

Then use the same sequence, when you torque them.

The OEM header bolts/nuts are torqued to 23 ft/lbs.
If you have a DC header, torque spec is 27ft/lbs.

The oil pan torque spec is 8.7 ft/lbs and you do them in a criss-cross pattern. The first few times that you change the oil, you should re-torque you oil pan bolts/nuts.

The oil pan's drain plug uses an aluminum crush washer (size M14 at the parts store and 14mm at Acura) and is torqued to 33ft/lbs.

 

How strict are those torque specs? What about using German torque specs on the oil pan... 'güd'n tight'?

 

More important than the torque specs is the sequence in which you tighten the bolt. If don't follow sequence then you will most definitely have an oil leak. The torque specs are important as well. It doesn't take much to break the head off of one of the oil pan bolts. At the most you use no more than 10ft-lbs.
I recommend hand tightening them in sequence first. Then snugging them with a wrench/ratchet in sequence. And then torque them in sequence. This will properly seat the oil pan to the block.
Here is the sequence...