Exhaust....ing. Installing headers and exhaust system.

I wasn't ready and it's not time, but my son Jason and I had access to a shop with a lift and a pipe bender for the week-end so, we took advantage of it and installed an exhaust system.

Unbelievably difficult because of all the unforeseen problems.  We started Friday morning and thought we would have been finished by late afternoon at the latest.  Wrong!  We ended up putting in 2, 10 hour days or so.

Here's what we started with...

Pay no attention to all the oil, tranny fluid, anti-freeze, power steering fluid, etc.  My plan was to have all the old dried out seals and gaskets replaced before I ever started this phase, but couldn't pass up the opportunity.

So, the first of the problems.  On the left side.  Sorry for the fuzzy picture it was hard to focus on everything.  On this side, after removing the old exhaust we couldn't get the new header past the starter and the brake lines.  I ended up removing the starter and  detaching the brake line bracket.  That gave us enough room to wiggle in.  I will have to reroute the brake lines before the car hits the road.  Right now, they are wedged against the header.  We also had to reroute the wires to the starter.  The old lines ran down a pipe along side the exhaust manifold.  There's no way they could have withstood the heat of running through the header pipes so we added wire and ran then down the firewall and back up over the top of the starter.  The old wires were nearly burned through anyway.

There was no wiggling in on the right hand side.  We first tried to get in by removing the oil filter.  It wasn't even close so we had to remove the oil filter adapter.  We were closer, but no dice.  We ended up detaching the motor mounts and raising the motor as far as we could.

The only way we could get the motor jacked up far enough was to tie the front of the car down to the lift with wire, then jack the motor off the mounts.

After raising the motor off the mounts about 3 inches, we were able to get the header in.  That's when I found we had to reroute the transmission cooling lines.  After installing the header and lowering the motor we found that the header would be resting on the cross member.  So, back up went the engine and we shimmed the right motor mount about 1/2 inch.

Left Side

 

Right Side

With the headers installed and the motor back on the mounts, even with the shims you can see that the right hand side of the motor is lower.  Anyway,  there they are, Flow-Tech ceramic headers from Summit Racing in all their glory.

Then came the pipe and Magna-Flow mufflers.  We had to do some jockeying around trying to get the pipe as high as possible.

 

The lowest part of the system is still the headers.  They might raise a little when I pull the engine and do some work on it and install new mounts.  That might be a problem too because too much rise and they will be touching the wheel control arm. They aren't as low as this picture shows because you are looking up at them on the hoist.

 

 

The tips were another problem.  The old pipe fit up a little tighter between the fender and the gas tank.  The 3 inch pipe had to run a little lower.  These pics are looking up at the tips while on the hoist so, they don't really hand as low as it looks.

 

Broomba - The Movie