Quote:
Originally Posted by mongocanfly
looks good Vic...
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Thanks, Greg. With the dipsticks and dust shield finished, I got started on the exhaust. Spent more than a few minutes deciding where it would be best to locate the parts. In the end, it made the most sense to situate the mufflers about halfway back. The RS chassis has notches in it that allow you to tuck the components up out of the way.
The tube attached to the collector coming off the header needed a few more degrees of bend to line up the way I wanted. There are multiple ways to go about fixing it, one being to lop off the bend at the desired angle and weld a piece of straight pipe to it. Another is to slice the tubing in the middle of the bend leaving a small uncut strip at what will be the narrowest point. Then get everything situated the way you want and weld in a piece to fill the gap (which is what I did). Or you can get down and ugly with a rosebud which isn't my thing.
I've built some stainless headers and exhaust systems previously, so I have a nice little setup for purging the inside of the tubing with argon. This allows me to butt weld the tubing with little or no fill rod. But the main advantage is that it eliminates the "sugaring" that occurs on the backside of the weld that is normally exposed to the oxygen in the air. You can see from the photos below that on the inside of the tube there is intermittent 100% weld penetration (because I was moving a bit too fast) but none of the crust that forms when the molten metal oxidizes.
So the first leg is welded up back to the muffler. More later.