It's so fun taking off old nasty parts and replacing them with shiny new parts. In the process of removing the engine and transmission, I had to remove the original exhaust. Some of the innards of the catalytic converter fell out when I removed the original muffler. This led me down the path of upgrading the exhaust.
Here is the exhaust before starting to take everything apart. Let the fun begin:
In the disassembly process. The rear fascia lower support has seen better days:
The stock exhaust has a lot of components to it, including the original exhaust hangers and heat shield:
Getting ready to remove the exhaust:
It came out without much of a fight, thankfully.
Here are some of the chunks from the catalytic converter that came tumbling out when I removed the muffler:
Muffler and heat shields removed:
From one side, the cat looked fine, but on the other end, I could just make out an area where pieces had come loose:
After the motor was pulled, it was much easier to access the exhaust manifold bolts, remove the crossover pipe, and the cat. To get the manifold bolts out without breaking any, I used an induction heater, covered in this post in great detail.
The new exhaust looked so good. I couldn't wait to put it on the car.
Getting the headers installed with all of the nuts torqued down was the hardest part of the install. I also had to re-route my positive battery cables differently and wrap them in a heat sleeve to try and prevent any melting. The new headers are a thing of beauty:
I ran into a couple of situations that delayed finalizing the install. First, I couldn't get the clamps on the polished tips to hold them securely in place. They still could move freely with the nut cranked as hard as I could get them. I wiggled off the polished tip below with the clamp as tight as it would allow before it ran out of threads on the bolt:
Josh at DeLorean Industries sent me a couple of new clamps and I was able to get one side tight, but the other side still had the same issue. I ended up taking out the spacer between the clamp, added some more washers to the nut side so it wouldn't bottom out the threads so soon, and I was able to get the clamp tight enough.
The other thing that confused me was that the new O2 sensor that came with the exhaust only had a short wire coming off of it, but the one on the stock exhaust had a long wire that reached all the way to the connector coming out of the rear pontoon. Josh informed me that I had to cut the original wire and reuse it by crimping it to the new sensor and using the heat shrink that came with it. That's exactly what I did and it seems to have worked fine.
Here's the new O2 sensor with the stubby wire before I hooked it up:
Here's the original O2 sensor with the long wire that I ended up cutting and reusing:
I'm still wrapping up getting everything put back together and I hope to have a better video of how it sounds at some point. For now, here's a short clip of it running:
