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3" Downpipe and 3" Exhaust System

The downpipe made a huge differnce in the car. Back in January I made the rest of the exhaust system in the same manner as the downpipe. Right now I'm not running any muffler and the car is sort of loud. Mainly the exhasut noise is not that bad at idle but, when the car is in full throttle theres no mistaking it's ready for action.

Basically it's all made by taking 3" sections of straight and manderal bent tubing and inventing a jigsaw puzzle as you go. A Saws-All helps out tremendously in cutting the tubing since it makes short work of the pipes. I used my small mig welder to tack it all together as I went. Using 3" 3 bolt flanges from JC Whitney I made the system into 4 seperate section of tubing so it could be installed and removed without having to cut it all apart or take out the rear end of the car. After fitting all the peices together I pulled everything apart and finished welding it together. It's so much easier to weld with the tubes clamped into the vise rather then laying on my back under the car. My vise is bolted to a portable stand that makes it easy to move around to a safe and convient place to weld.

Here is a good example of of what the bends look like as they arrive from the dealer. Some common bends are the u-bend, 90*, and 45*. Others can be found but, are not as common

Next time I'll have to come up with a better flange system atleast at the front of the car since the extreme heat and vibration make the bolts come loose after a few days or a night at the track. For now I tightened the bolts with the impact gun and then tacked the heads and nuts to the flange so they can't come loose. Obviously this defeats one of my objectives of easy installation and removal but, I haven't had time to redo the system with better flanges yet. In the future I'll be installing a V-Band type of flange so it will be very user friendly. I've found a source for these and at 29.00 each flange I'll get around to getting the parts and doing the work some day.

Almost Finished

As you can see I've got some more done to the car. I bought this muffler about 4 months ago and like a real car guy it's been sitting in the bedroom in "The Muffler Box" for awhile. When I originally built this section of the exhaust system I designed it so I could make another section to add a muffler to so it could be easily removed while at the track. My plan was to have two seperate sections. Well time and laziness got the best of me so I just cut this section up and made it into the new street section. I can still go back and make another Track Day section at any time so it's not really that big of a deal.

The muffler is a DynoMax 3" straight thru design that does a much better job of quieting down the car than I thought it would. Honestly after driving it with no muffler for the last 6 months it sounds to quite to me right now. I'm going to drive it like this for awhile to see I like it and if I can get used to the lack of sound.

I've included a couple of pictures to show some of the build process. As you can see it's like building your own jigsaw puzzle out of 3" pipe. The design is usally easy it's the time to fabricate all the pieces and make sure that they fit right that take up time. Also going thru and making sure that no burs are sticking out in the the exhaust flow and small details like that help with the fit and finish of the end product.

I also have a picture of some of the equipment that I use when doing this type of work. There's still more but, you get the idea that to do things right it takes variety of tools to make it happen.

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