Exhaust Pipe

Been a very quiet time lately with the appalling weather, although I have managed a few short test runs.   Over the last few days I have been 'fixing' the exhaust.   A nightmare, and yet another example of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'.
 
You will recall that something (and I still have no idea what it was) had caused the whole exhaust to move backwards by about an inch, putting a huge strain on the rubber bobbin at the back and obviously opening up one of joints so she was blowing.   I assumed it would be a simple job, just whip off the exhaust, bend the rear mount back to vertical and then put it all back on again.
So first took the exhaust off.    

I could see the rear mount had twisted, as you can see from this picture with a long bolt put in.

So I put a 2 foot piece of copper pipe over the bolt and with a huge effort managed to get it back roughly vertical.  (And writing off the copper tube in the process :-))


 

Then the problems started.   I couldn't see any problems with any of the joints, but the mounting on the exhaust was now 1" behind the bobbin.   So I decided the best thing to do was to break the exhaust down into it's 3 component parts (The short length that holds the lambda sensor, the flexible joint and the cat/silencer) and redo all the joints.

Sounds easy, but I couldn't get the flexible joint back onto the other 2 parts anywhere close to where they had been.   Best I could manage was about an inch even hammering as hard as I could.    So that meant the whole system was now some 3" too long.   

 

So I treated myself to an exhaust expander (only £8 off E-Bay).   

 

This is a very good tool for flaring pipes that have slots cut in them, but is of marginal use in standard exhaust pipes.   But using it I managed to open up one end of the flexible pipe so it would go all the way onto the cat/silencer.   But whatever I tried I could not get the other end to go all the way onto the lambda sensor 'T' piece.  So I had to resort to using the angle grinder to cut about 1/2" off the pipe.  

So all reassembled and back on the car yesterday.  Started her up and she sounded better, but only time will tell.   Luckily I still have my MOT exhaust in the attic, so if necessary I can switch to that.
 

So today I started putting the heat shields back on.  The front one went on OK, and the back one was still attached to the silencer, but with all the changes, the middle one would not go back on and kept hitting the rear one.   So I had to redrill 3 of the 4 mounting bolts to move it forward.   Luckily 2 of the old holes are underneath the car and cannot be seen and the one on the side of the car is hidden by the shield.

But what a pain that was, a 20 Min job that eventually took hours.