Building the Exhaust

Everything went smoothly with the remainder of the engine timing rebuild project. New seals and gaskets went in and the engine bay stuff was reassembled soon after my last post.

What's new is on the exhaust front.

The old muffler with some of the pipe that comes in from the cat. It was clamped together as you can see in the premortem pic in an earlier post.

I had a chance to shoot a short vid with the exhaust ending at the cat; straight pipes, oh yeah!

It was loud and loud V8's are always fun, but obviously, despite the grin on my face, it doesn't compare to a nice exhaust setup. The exhaust note with straight pipes is always very rough and edgy. Such a setup does not fit a daily driver. Thus the exhaust build went on:

Test fitting the Magnapacks.

Some of the catback pipe complete, test fitting the muffler. As you can see there's very little clearance between the muffler tips and the rear skirt; this 18" muffler (24" with pipes) is definitely the largest muffler you can fit on a C126. Any longer and you'd have the carve up the bumper to get the tips to fit. At this size it was still possible to fabricate corner pieces like the original muffler and have the tips protrude where they should, through an incision in the bumper.

Muffler goes exactly where it should and hangs no lower than the stock exhaust. Stuff like that is important to me personally; I should be able to use the car normally and go anywhere I please, despite the custom exhaust. The car should never run out of ground clearance on the road.

Getting the clearance issues near the driveshaft sorted required some gentle adjustments.

Closeup of the tightest space. When the car is sitting on the ground the axles sit higher, thus there is more room than you would expect looking at this picture.

Nearly finished shape.

New setup fabricated and installed.

Tips. They're a bit larger and obviously different shape than on my old C124 but the configuration and feel is pretty much the same.

First impressions on the new exhaust: it was much quieter than I expected, which is nice, considering the extra expense of adding the resonators. I'm glad they worked. Haven't heard them in real use yet, which is always a killer. I know from experience Magnas get a lot louder when they get up to temperature. I hope there isn't too much drone.

Unlike on my C124, a 3.2 straight six, the sound is very very Magnaflow-like. Just like most Magnaflow setups on YouTube. This is a good thing as I'm very much a fan of the note. Here's a vid I shot at the garage, more will come when I get the car on the road.

Next up: interior switches and blower motor. In addition, correctness of the fuel mixture is still unclear and it's still idling 200 rpms too high. It's possible the garage can't fix it, in which case I'm planning on running another idle speed controller from a buddy who also owns a 560 SEC and seeing if that drops the idle speed. Also, there's the side panels, rustproofing etc. Still a lot to do.

I haven't received the BBS's yet either, which is not great, because of multiple reasons. First, I was stupid enough to pay in advance and they are now very very late. Getting worried. Also, the car's slowly but surely reaching completion at the garage, winter has arrived while the car's been there and it's still running summers. I won't drive a yard with summers in these conditions, it's full-blown winter outside. Also, time-wise, when/if I do receive the wheels, it's another week till I receive the GoodYear Ultra Grip Ice+ tires I'll be putting on them. At the moment, it's looking like the car will have to remain at the garage in a completed state for some time...