With a title like that, I bet you pictured some weird animal secret society with cats dancing around in a circle and a horse tied up by the fire, right? Nope, just a boring chunk of exhaust pipe.
That being said, it had new tires, a new driveshaft, new wheel bearings, and a stack of new steering parts on the passenger seat. It ran and drove three days into the project, not well, but good enough. One curse disguised as a blessing was the dual exhaust. The front y-pipe rusted and broke on the previous owner, so he went to his local parts store to order a new one. I think he said it was seven hundred bucks or something like that, as it was equipped with a catalytic converter and O2 sensor bungs.
What’s a young guy to do? The same thing I would have done fifteen years ago. Cut and weld the best parts of the old pieces together, tweak bends with some heat and a long bar, tack weld the sensors back in, and make sure they can hear you coming when complete. He ended up with dual two-inch pipes that expanded into dual two-and-a-half-inch pipes, running through one big dual-in-dual-out chambered muffler, kicking the tailpipes out behind the passenger rear tire. The muffler was some kind of knock-off Flowmaster with nothing but “INLET” stamped on one end, but it rumbled okay. The sound inside was fairly obnoxious, thanks to a pair of flex joints that were completely destroyed right under the passenger footwell. I thought replacing those would be the only fix, but then I found out that I know nothing of modern electronics or emissions equipment.
If I were to ask you how many oxygen sensors your vehicle has, I bet you wouldn’t know. I’m typing this fifteen feet from my Chrysler, and I don’t have a clue how many are on it, as I’ve never needed to know. Apparently, my far-from-mighty 4.3 V6 has three of them. My truck, however, can’t have three with two exhaust pipes. Two were upstream of the catalytic converter, monitoring the air/fuel ratio and keeping things running. The third one was non-existent, an empty plug, an after-cat sensor only to make sure the catalytic converter is functioning correctly. As we all know, layoffs happen everywhere, and when you relieve the catalytic converter of its duty, you can safely terminate the supervisor as well.
I would have done the same thing in my younger years, but nowadays, the “check engine” light drives me nuts, the exhaust stinks, and the fuel pours through in a rich condition. For the first time in my life, I’m not cutting a catalytic converter off; I’m welding one in. It’s a universal high-flow unit from Magnaflow. Small, stainless, inexpensive, and designed to keep the engine light off. Honestly, I’m fully satisfied with my purchase and installation. The light is out, the exhaust smells better, and the truck actually feels stronger than before. I can look through the honeycomb material and see daylight, and the cross-section is fat enough that I don’t think it restricts anything whatsoever. I can’t run leaded race gas now but hadn’t planned on feeding the good stuff to my small herd of two-hundred horses anyways. Between this and planting a couple of trees a while ago, I think I’ve offset whatever pollutants come out of the tailpipes of my C10 once I get the engine in. Actually, looking at the cam card, I may have to plant a couple more trees just in case…
Have a question or comment for Kelly? Post it at lmtimes.ca/kirk
