ZHPizza's red car

[ZHPizza]

Had the windshield on the wife's touring replaced the other day. I was out there chatting with the installer and talking about the old racer's trick of using window weld to fill gaps in rubber mounts to add stiffness.

Realized that I already had the passenger engine mount off to install the headers, so I popped into the garage and pulled the driver's side too.

Dude let me borrow his goop gun and 5 minutes later I had basically turned my relatively new non-m mounts (fluid filled rubber w air gap) into m3 mounts (fluid filled solid rubber). Gave them a few days to cure before reinstalling. Free upgrade!

[ZHPizza]

Never updated y'all on my exhaust adventure from a year ago so here we go:

The plan was to make the Schmiedmann equal length headers mate up to the Borla catback exhaust system. I knew it would as going to be a headache with Schmiedmann doing their own proprietary flange and mating point to their exhaust system (which in hindsight I should have just bought that too and been done).

Anyway, first steps first, let's get these beautiful headers on the engine...

Flange is flat and clean. That's nice. I had to put a lot of work into the eBay headers to get a flat mating surface. This should be easy!



First problem: the headers are contacting that little square protrusion on the bell housing.




Welp...



See ya...



Fit em up again and I'm still getting contact



Changed over to the flap wheel and ground down the side the bell housing some more whatever



STILL RUBBING DAMN



At this point I'm out of material to remove on the bell housing, so it's time to focus on modifying the headers themselves.

I fit them up several times trying to locate the exact point of contact and finally got smart:



Covered the whole area in question with marker, set it in place, and rubbed it around on the bell housing. The marker was scratched off right where I needed to focus:



I started out thinking I could get a precise shape with it cold, but that didn't do much



TORCH TIME



MOAR FIE-YUH



My inner city garage was like a blacksmith shop with all the flames and hammering coming out of there but by god I made a fricken dent in that collector





LOOK AT THAT CLEARANCE





Thank you Schmiedmann for making some beautiful, heavy walled headers that don't really fit a 6spd.

[Galapolis]

Wow, that's some commitment. Can't wait to experience them in person.

[ZHPizza]

Next up was to figure out how I was going to mate the headers to the rest of the exhaust. Here is what I was looking at:




Large gap
Different spacing
Different flanges
Flanges also off by 90deg


The first thing I did, which was dumb, was cut the flanges off the headers.





I couldn't find a good adapter to mate to the cone seal that Schmiedmann used, so I cut it off and sanded the flange flat so I could use OE gaskets.

[ZHPizza]

Side quest!

When I get stuck for while on a frustrating project like the exhaust, I tend to find a smaller side project to dive into. It gets me back into the flow of working in the garage and reminds me that I am a strong and capable man.

So this one was swapping out the OE washer fluid tank (which is large and mounted towards the front of the car) with a small tank that I could mount back near the firewall.

This one actually: https://a.co/d/9mwDYCf

I took almost no pictures of the process, but I have this one with my original plan: use rivnuts in the firewall to mount the bracket for the tank (green marks where I was thinking about drilling)



I didn't feel great about drilling into that area as I wasn't sure what was behind it. I also didn't love the fitment of the tank there since it's kind of an angled wall, so I went with mounting it on the side of the bin with some through bolts.



I don't remember a ton of the details but the hose routing was pretty easy (it runs down from the hood right along the fender - you can see where I diverted it in the bottom of the pic). The wiring wasn't a problem either and I think I knocked out the whole project in one evening.

Weight savings is idk but it opened up the engine bay to give you a good view of the headers and that's what matters kids.

[ZHPizza]

After a several month hiatus, we're back on the exhaust project. What was I doing in the meantime?
- travelling all over the US
- wrecking work vehicles/getting a new work vehicle
- buying a house and preparing to move
- teaching myself how to weld (stick weld of course, because I'm a psychopath)

Looks like I took ZERO pictures of the whole welding/fabricating process, but hey just pretend you skipped ahead in the video to see the results because it was a TON of fitting, trial, error, welding, leak testing, re-welding holes, grinding, more re-welding, cussing, etc. It was honestly an insane amount of work. I'll never do it again.

Anyway, headers are back in the car!





So the original plan was to modify the headers so that they would mate up to any standard e46 exhaust. If you look close in that last pic you'll see that the flanges are welded back in their original location after I realized that the pipe that Schmiedmann used was (1) slightly larger diameter than your standard 2in stainless pipe and (2) made up of some very complicated bends that I couldn't replicate by piecemealing angled cuts of pipe together.

So I abandoned the idea of keeping the Borla exhaust as-is, put the Schmiedmann flanges back to where they started, and went full bore into a completely custom exhaust. Great.

(Here's where we skip through the insane amount of work and jump right to the results)

LOOK AT THAT BEAUTIFUL PIPING






I literally finished this up the morning that we had to move and rolled the car out of the garage (for the first time in 6 months) to make way for loading the truck. Very typical of me. Very stressful for my marriage. Don't be like Pizza.

[sillieidiot]

lol nice work and commentary. I'm reading it like it was me that did the work since it's like how I would describe shit

[BADCLOWN]

Purdy headers ya got there

[cakM3]

That's some seriously awesome work on your headers and exhaust. Looks amazing!

[squashman702]

Looks good! I'm sure the performance gain is worth the struggle. I went through numerous similar issues when I was trying to fit up CX racing headers to my LS1 in my E36. Lots of missing parts of the T56 and dents in the headers by the time I was done.

Props on teaching yourself stick welding first- makes it easier to learn TIG for sure. I learned MIG first, then did a tiny bit of stick, then back to a lot of MIG, then learned TIG last year at a class at a vocational school.

Any pictures of the bay? Would like to see what it looks like with the SAP delete and washer fluid tank moved. I think I bought the same tank for my LS1 E36 and mounted it in the trunk above the battery. Never had any issues with the pump.