Monday, July 2, 2012

Fitting the exhaust for welding.

I was able to remove the exhaust of the baja and got it ready to install the motorcycle exhaust I got for it. I am hoping it will look good and that it will quiet down the engine. It's really obnoxious now and it also looks really bad. I used a cutoff wheel to cut off the old glasspacks.
 I was happy to find the tube inside the muffler matched perfectly with the motorcycle exhaust. I trimmed up the old bracket that I am going to use to hold up the new mufflers and I then fit the new muffler to the old pipe.
 Looking down the exhaust side shows the 2 pipes that combine into one. It's pretty rough in there but it will work just fine.
I decided to mock it up on the baja and was glad I did. You can see in the picture that the clearences between the muffler and the intake manifold is very close. I adjusted the mufflers and brackets around to get more clearence. It should work pretty good.
Here it is all mocked up and marked where I need to weld it. I think it looks a ton better then the old ones.
On my lunch break today I went to weld up the exhaust. It didn't work out because the welder was out of wire. I was totally bummed because I am excited to hear them on the bug. I also am back to having only 1 car running right now because both the bugs are down. Ed, the white bug has a bent front axle beam and needs a new beam. I was heading to work one morning and hit a steel plate that construction workers use to cover holes on 7200 west. It was a really hard hit and I knew something was wrong because my steering was all messed up. I limped it home and found out the front beam was bent. Anyways that's for another post in the future. I did get a beam from a friend in the volkswagen club and that will be my next project after I get the baja going again. When I get it done, I will try to get a video of it and try to figure out how to post it so you can hear it.

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