Exhaust part 2

 After talking about it in my last post, the weather was good enough on the weekend to roll the car out of the garage and get started on the exhaust. Of course, the day started with the now mandatory bit of drama...

You see, in my attempt to cut down on the number of joins on the exhaust (and therefore the number of potential leak points) I welded the cat to the exhaust silencer. No biggie, until I tried to remove it!! Thankfully with only a few crushed fingers the whole thing comes out through the wheel arch.

So the first step was to tape everything off, mark the relevant positions and start cutting. Once I'd tacked the pipe in place I got it in position here;

So far so good, it's a bit tight because of the length of the pipe and the size of the hole. But I wanted to keep the hole as small as possible, and the pipe is to be trimmed anyway. Once thing I did figure out is while the bracket was set up to receive this piece of pipe, it's too low by about 10mm. No problem though, I'll add a nut and washer to lift it up to meet the exhaust. There's plenty of thread visible here;

The exhaust got trimmed to close to it's final length;

And with the hole really tight I got to work on the trim. The aluminium rings worked really well on the roll bar;

So the plan was to do the same here. First a piece of aluminium was cut and polished to an inch of it's life;

Then after much fettling and a bit of double sided sticky tape, I have a trimmed exhaust;

You can see a gap top and bottom because the ring is flat but the bodywork isn't. A bit of encouragement round a surface will hopefully get me what I want. The last thing is fixings. I was thinking of gluing it in place, but I'm actually tempted to drill and fix it with the black allen bolts I've used everywhere else. Glue is fine for the roll bar but I'm worried the exhaust heat, the angle, the curve will all conspire to make sure that ring doesn't survive my first drive to the kit car show.

I'll get the exhaust fit finalised front to back then get this bolted in the final position. 

That was a very busy weekend (well, I lost a quarter of it to a visit to the vet for the cat). In other news, all the light fittings have now been replaced so hopefully the bulbs will stay in place. Turns out that it wasn't just the fittings, the bulbs themselves were cheap and nasty. Buying a new pair of brake/tail light bulbs sorted it permanently, so that's another tick in the box. 

I also got some primer on the wheel arches, despite using an entire tin of primer I think they came out really nicely. Of course it looks like I didn't take any photos of them, that's a bit annoying. I did also try and cut down the wheel studs for the spacers, not realising that the hubs are now quite firmly in place so I will need to do a bit more than simply unbolting the wheel. It was getting quite late yesterday so rather than disabling the car while it was hanging outside the garage, I thought it was best to postpone that job. 

One last thing as well, the screw bung for the radiator arrived so now the coolant system is very nearly finished. I've got to tee in the overflow pipe and route it somewhere 'pretty', but then it should fill up. 

So yes, once again a whole load of work on the car that wasn't wiring...