Good timing, I just wrote one for tonight.
Well, I’m not sure where I left off, but I’ve been working right along on the car but not getting many photos. This weekend was set aside to do the exhaust and I finally brought my camera along. The car is in great running condition and is fast as hell. I still have tons left to do to be finished though…
So, on to the progress. Powered by 10+ people’s worth of Chinese food.
I’ve been avoiding doing this for a while, but it’s gotten to be time to mount the PCM. This means I needed to cut the fins off of it. Since the PCM was designed to live in the engine bay and it will be in the passenger compartment for this car, it shouldn’t be an issue.
Each piece of the exhaust needed to be deburred and the aluminized coating ground off where it was going to be welded.
While John worked on lining up and making the cuts and tack welding stuff into place, Mark and I worked on my shifter plate. I saw a few FD guys make these to help patch up the shifter hole and insulate from noise and heat.
After cutting it up a bit and making it fit, we sprayed it down with some high heat black paint to keep it nice and will be running a bit of weatherstripping under it to really seal things up.
Here’s John working.
Starting the cuts for the x-pipe.
We’ve barely dented the 10lbs of food.
Compared to the storage space here, working conditions are AWESOME at John’s.
We spent a LOT of time and effort working the bends on the driver’s side to clear everything and still leave as much ground clearance as possible. Looks like we’ve accomplished that. As things stand right now, the exhaust definitely isn’t the lowest point on the car, so I guess we win that battle.
And here’s the finished product, just tacked together for now. Not sure if it’s the perspective or what, but the pipes look uneven in the photo. The end towards the bottom of the frame connects to the headers. As you can see, the driver’s side was a total whore compared to the passenger’s side. We had to go through the transmission mount and between the body and transmission and then bend around to go into the x-pipe. Lots and lots of mild bends, but it should still flow great. The other end of the x-pipe still needs to be cut down and we need to build the exhaust back from there, but this is great progress.
This is all 3" pipe, immediately after the x, we’re stepping down to 2.5" and shouldn’t have any major issues with fitment (at least not compared to the headache of the driver’s side).
