EXHAUST (Part 4 of 6)
I found some beam clamps at Home Depot that looked like they would stay secure. I changed the bolts from square head to hex head and added a jam nut. I used Loctite on all the screw threads when I installed them.
The passenger side tailpipe gave me some grief. Turns out that when the tailpipes are level, the drop from the muffler to the outlet on the passenger side is two inches less than the driver side. Since the muffler outlets have to be at about the same height when using the Hooker mufflers, the passenger side tailpipe had to droop a little to clear the frame and also to have the outlet at the same height as the other side. I needed to cut a little bit of pipe off at the muffler end too, about one inch. Viewed from the rear, you can see the difference but it probably wouldn’t be obvious once the bed goes back on. What kind of fun is this ?? (I should have bought a shop quality hydraulic bender, a welder, and some fat pipe sticks and fabbed up my own system, huh).
Pipes with Hooker mufflers installed showing droopy PS tail
So anyway, after a lot of you-know-whatting around, I finally got it all hooked up so the pipe had good clearance and it was all secure (quite secure IMHO). I sealed all the pipe joints with Permatex Ultracopper, letting each joint cure overnight before snugging up the clamps. Time for a drive. Well, it sounded better for sure, I didn’t get that Model T sound from the broken muffler anymore, and it was definitely quieter. It was a lot quieter under the hood, all the leaks up there had been eliminated. The sound at the rear had evened out from side-to-side. I could hear valve train noise from the engine rattling around inside the mufflers. All in all, better than before, but way too loud for my tastes.
So I did some more research and ended up choosing a different muffler, Walker Quiet Flows. Smooth and quiet, that’s where I wanted to go.
http://www.summitracing.com/parts/WLK-21200/
After I told Summit that I had to bend the headpipe and cut the tailpipe on the Hooker kit, they sent me a gift certificate for $25, what a bunch of swell guys huh ?. Less the eight bucks to bend the pipe, that will offset the cost of the Walkers by 17 dollars.