Well the exhaust is in and it only knocks a tiny bit. Every now and then when pulling away in first gear, sounds like the hanger bracket at the front hitting the subrame . It is fairly close. I am glad I changed the dogbone, there is no way you could fit one of these with the amount of movement that it would have had on the 15yr old original item.
I have Elsa Win and looking at that I did everything that it said to remove the exhaust front pipe. And it still wouldn't come out. I probably could of got it out in one piece by disconnecting the steering rack from the column and dropping that end of the rack down. But then I would have had all the hassle of sorting the steering out.
So it came out in a few pieces. good job it wasn't going back on the car. Finest Chinese engineered exhaust from Ebay. £145 I think from Turborevs.
Didn't come with a gasket for the turbo and from what I have read the ones supplied with these are not very good anyway. Thus ordered an OE multi plate steel item.
Got the car jacked up nice and high, so high I had to go and get the steps so I could climb onto the top of the engine to get down the back of it.
This was the kind of thing I had to get around, No way of undoing these bolts, some had disintegrated.
Dropped the subframe after marking the position of the bolts. God they were tight especially the front ones.
Fortunately not to difficult to undo the nuts on the turbo they came off quite easily really. What didn't help was the braiding on the flexi section had split and this kept getting caught.
Had a look at the exhaust end of the turbo whilst I was there.
Looks OK no obvious cracks or other issues and no turbine movement is what I would expect.
A pile of bits. Took the heatshield off the firewall at the back of the engine and removed the rest of the pipes from the AC system .
The removal of the heatshield made it a lot easier refitting the Lambda sensor at the front and doing up the turbo bolts. Gives you a lot more room to swing a spanner.
Weighed the original and new exhaust with all the pipes I removed about 9Kg less weight.
One of the cats may be going back on the car come MOT time. I have a plan to recycle one.
Had an issue where the new exhaust joins the old one. The OE system is 65mm outside diameter. The tube on the new exhaust was 63.5mm . The OE clamp would not clamp down to 63.5mm. with the clamp as tight as it would go you could still spin it on the pipe.Even after I modified it a little it still didn't clamp. I found a solution with a piece of 63mm pipe I had that only had a 1mm wall. Cut a short piece and used it as a sleeve to wrap around the new pipe. Now upto 65.5mm diameter with a little exhaust putty it fits OK.
Going forward I will probably have a custom exhaust made 3 inch all the way through with a single silencer to reduce the weight. So this is a temporary measure.
I had to remove the exhaust after initially fitting it as the flex was rubbing on the prop. You can see the balance weights at the front of the prop are just in the wrong place. Fortunately removal of this pipe is reasonably simple compared to the OE one. I modified the exhaust a little and there is a little more clearance. This is how it looks now. Doesn't appear to rub although I think the hanger bracket is touching the top of the bolt as it's quite close.
Bought an extender for the rear lambda to avoid any errors and this seems to work. Although it's going to be mapped this week so will ask Rick to remove the fault codes relevant to this.
Car pulls better at the top end . The butt dyno has definitely detected an increase up there. will do some logging and see how it compares to previous mods. A little more noisy as well, didn't think there would be that much difference especially at idle
. The tube and fin intercoolers that don't cool have very poor design and probably very low pressure drop but the Air just passes straight through without actually being cooled. This is one of the delta fin cores off Fleabay. Very poor design.
