An Exhausting Undertaking

Here's a project I've been working on for quite a while!!!

Back in the beginning of May is when I started in on it. The idea has been in my head for longer than that, but here's the culmination.

I've been displeased with the terrible job that was done attempting to duplicate the original 512 Labs tailpipe for Scruffy. As I've been working on this, I've discovered that the system had been doing quite a bit of making contact with the tunnel. Additionally, I wanted to attempt to pick up a bit more ground clearance and improve the look of the outlet.

I started off by getting some 1 3/8" tubing and steel flat stock. I used some chipboard to fabricate a template, then used a sawzall to split the tube and cut out the flat stock.

I also got some of the old system parts and tubing, and came up with a much better output pipe, which tucks up into the tunnel much more cleanly. After getting the tip into shape, I ground the welds down quite a bit.

You can see, the end result is quite a bit cleaner on the pipe shape. What doesn't show as well in the pictures is the end section, where it does a dip down, then back up, which nicely clears the end of the tunnel area and goes under the emergency brake cable. I'm not sure if that dip makes the clearance situation no better than it was.

Laying the one pipe over the other shows it to be much cleaner.

A shot of the tip in place, prior to the addition of some black high-temp paint, the same as the original.

Here's a marked improvement over the one it's replacing, a pair of rubberized mounts on either end of the tip, for a solid but not too solid mount!!!

Took quite a while for several reasons. I was using my dad's MIG welder, and first it ran out of shield gas. Had a spool of flux core wire, and I switched to it. Took me a while to dial in the settings, but it came out pretty good. Then, at the tail end of the project, the wire kept getting jammed, and it turns out the wire feed cable was screwed up. I had a friend finish off the final welds.

And, if you hadn't noticed in the earlier shots, I've seen to it that this one has a legitimate 512 Labs inscription!!!