Just a little more work on the exhaust

but thank God that it isn’t the headers.

I debated taking the car to a muffler shop to have them build me an exhaust system from the headers back. I ended up with a kit from Magna Flow.

Magnaflow 15819

I bought this kit when the plan was to make a typical 4 into 1 header. This should have worked great for that type of system. When the design changed to Tri-Y’s, I did a little reading and it appears that Tri-Y’s do better with a simple H pipe as opposed to this X. Screw it, I’m not getting another kit.

I went to the shop today with the intention of cleaning up before starting on the next project for the Mustang. As soon as I walked in, my plans changed.

I was still flying pretty high from completing the headers and I walked over to the car to admire my handy work and that’s when I remembered that I still have to put the transmission cross member back in. I dug that out of the interior of the car that has become storage for some of the parts destined to go onto the car.

The cross member is one I built myself. I couldn’t figure out how I was going to make the OG one work. The Tremec T-56 is a lot longer than the stock top loader. I had to modify the transmission tunnel to accommodate the transmission, after that ordeal, I felt it was easier to make my own cross member. I still gotta make a post about that build.

The arches I built into the cross member were pure guess work. Once the cross member was bolted back in, I was really surprised that the headers were lining up with the arches pretty well. The right one hit dead exact where it was hoped it would.

Once I saw how well the headers were aligned with the notches in the cross member, I got to wondering if I had sufficient clearance for the other half of the Flow Master ball coupler so I grabbed those bad boys and bolted them to the header. My luck was still holding.

Welllll, since I had the couplers in place, I may as well grab the X pipe and see how it lines up.

Grabbed some jack stands and the X pipe and crawled back under the car. Using the jack stands, I levitated the X pipe to a close approximation of its installed height.

I don’t think I can get there from here.

The Magnaflow kit comes with a couple of pieces that are 30+ degree bends to connect the header to the X pipe. These pipes have to be cut to fit.

A little more than a trim to get these intermediate pipes to tie the headers to the X-pipe.

It took a lot of measuring and even more head scratching but after a few hours of cutting and checking, I was able to bolt the front of the exhaust system to the headers.

I was feeling pretty good about myself and then I went to see where the mufflers were going to line up. Oooof, the mufflers are sticking too far to the back. Some rough guesstimating shows that the exhaust is long by about 4 to 5 inches. The mufflers just might get hit by the rear axle housing.

After laying under the car for quite a while, I finally decided that the only fix is to take a 5 inch section out of each side of the straight pipe coming out of the X pipe. It sounds simple enough except I’ve never welded stainless steel before.

I have a little practice ahead of me before cutting the exhaust down. I also just realized that there was a bag of parts that came with the exhaust kit. I don’t remember where I put that.