March 25th. It's time to start working on the
remainder of the exhaust system on the drivers side. Now that the
headers and collector fit and clear the new pedals, the exhaust pipe
coming out of the collector doesn't line up with the muffler anymore.
What you see below is what I took out of the car when I tore it down.
The funny looking thing clamped to the tubing is insulation. The
insulation was used to keep heat off of the wires going into the 4L80E
transmission which worked great but I won't be needing it anymore. If
there are some wires running close to my exhaust system in the future,
I'll be sure to use this stuff again because it's worked flawlessly for
six years now.
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I installed the entire drivers side exhaust system
(except for the piece above because it was to long) to see what needed
to be done. After looking at it for a minute, I have a mismatch of about
2" so what I need to do is cut out a section of tubing and add a couple
of angles to it so it lines back up with the muffler again.
What I've done here is cut the tubing and added in a short angled
section to it. By doing this in a couple of places, it should enable me
to use straight sections of tubing to align things back up again.
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After cutting the remaining piece of tubing and putting another angled
cut on the ends, here is what I came up with. The angles aren't to
extreme and should still flow pretty good. And I just happen to have
some tubing left over for this job too.
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The exhaust system is almost finished at this point but one small detail
still remains. Being that I added a small amount to the ends of the
header tubes, I'll need to do something about the u-tabs. U-tabs are
used with slip-on collectors to hold them together by using one on the
header tube and one on the collector with a bolt and nut holding them
together. They should be very close to each other once the collector has
been slipped on and mine are not anymore. What I need to do is remove this
one and then weld on another one. If you look close you can see two
marks to the right of the existing u-tab which is right where the new
one should go.
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I cut off the old one and then ground the surface smooth so it will look
like nothing was ever there. Here you can see a new u-tab lined up over
the marks and I'm getting ready to weld it on (I had a few of these
leftover too). And I finally took a shot of the blue tape that I like to
use. What I did was tack weld the opposite side first, then removed the
tape and tack welded the other. This is how I did all the joints on the
exhaust system.
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After tack welding I bolted the tube back on the engine and made sure
the collector still lined up. Everything was fine so I took it back over
to the welding bench and welded it on.
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