It’s tough catching up with John, who’s doing the fab work on the exhaust, since he’s been basically working 3 jobs and I’m working hours that conflict with his, but we managed to get a bit done last night.
The 3" to 2.5" reducers I bought ended up being complete crap for flow, so John decided we could easily make our own reducers and make them much better flowing than what I bought. So, we took a quick measurement of the circumference of 2.5" pipe (no, I was NOT going to break out the Pi*2r calc :D) and then marked this measurement out on the 3" pipe. That gave us the section that we needed to notch out. After that, we just triangulated it in as far down the pipe as we could manage so that the transition was as smooth as possible.
Here’s the section notched out.
Then, John made a quick tack at the small end of the cut to keep it from overlapping and grabbed a hose clamp to draw in the reducer. The hose clamp was nice because it kept things more or less circular.
And here it is, fully drawn in. Another tack on the 2.5" end and it held the reduction perfectly.
From there, it was a simple job to weld down the seam and seal it up. The reducers I bought stepped from 3" to 2.5" within the span of about 1-2", these extend the reduction out over 5-6" or more and have no distinct lip in them like the other reducers. I’m extremely happy with how they came out.
Here’s one tacked on to the growing exhaust system. This also shows where we cut down the x-pipe to get the angle right for the rest of the exhaust.
Speaking of the x-pipe, this thing looks like a beast! It should flow great and hopefully make some significant power as well.
This is where we left off for the night. Both reducers are made and tacked on and we have a good plan to get us to the rear axle. Hopefully we’ll make it to there tonight.
