Exhaust

The exhaust is clearly not a standard part of the car. It is a twin unlinked system, custom made. When I bought the car, it made an incredible noise. The tail ends are 80 mm diameter each, and there was not a lot of insulation in the silencers. To cut down on the noise I fitted straight-through silencer in the middle.

There has been a problem with the exhausts: the right hand exhaust fell off. This provided a good opportunity to have a look at the mounting rubbers and the fixation of the exhausts. It turned out the right hand side mounting rubbers were rotten. So I replaced them.

Another thing is that I thought a new mounting point for the exhaust was appropriate. In the pictures you can see what was done to alleviate the stress on the manifolds. Basically there were no mounting points between manifold and rear of the silencers. In my vision this created quite some stress on the manifolds, maybe resulting in leaks and certainly creating a real chance of the exhaust sliding of the manifold. The exhaust and the manifold are only connected by an exhaust clamp. So here's what I did:

Here are some pictures. Picture 1 shows that it is a "normal" B V8 system, but then two of them instead of one. You can also see that the rear silencers are custom made. The last addition to the car is the replacement of both back boxes by full stainless steel ones. The silencing material was blown out, and the inner tubes were rotted. The diameter is slightly smaller, the tails are rolled in, the perforated tube runs all the way to the tail end and so does the silencing material. The silencing material has a lifetime warranty. I intend to keep the car long enough to find out if this warranty is for real!

From the side you can see the silencers I fitted to cut down the noise. Without them the you could physically feel the pressure of the sound if the engine revved between 1500 and 2000 rpm. It would trigger car alarms just by driving by. All very well, but on long stretches it became tiring. Now there is a heavy sound between 1500 and 1700 rpm, but outside of that range it becomes far more subdued. More mellow. Far more bearable.

These silencers come from Borla. Picture 4 is a close up. To prevent the exhaust from falling of, I made some extra mounting points. If you look good, you can see a strap of metal running up to a bolt of the gearbox (also moving with the engine, so no stress) on the left hand exhaust clamp.

Which brings us to the front of the exhaust. The clearance between gearbox crossmember and exhaust was something to watch, because the extra pipe did not have the cut out in the crossmember. But on the other hand you don't want the exhaust to dangle a mile under the car! Also notice the marking on the left hand "elbow". This occurs when the exhaust falls of when you're driving. Well...finally a good reason to fit silencers, new rubber mountings and the like.

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