2016.09.26 - UPDATE! - WELCOME TO A NEW SPONSOR - BORLA !!!
Yee-Haa!!! :
After going through a bunch of discussion and analysis of various muffler and exhaust options, I had pretty much decided that Borla was going to be the best option to preserve power while still keeping the noise levels as low as possible. I gave their Tech Line a call and went over a few final details and ended up getting their final recommendations for mufflers and resonators and the best way to package them for sound and power.
For the mufflers, we went with two of the Borla RaceLine XR-1 Multi-Core Oval (p/n/: #40575).... This is a reasonably small muffler size, with a straight-through internal design to insure high-flow. It also has 3 perforated "cores" to help absorb sound and get rid of a lot of the crackling and high-frequency noise... After that, we added a pair of the RaceLine XR-1 Sportsman Oval (p/n: #40944) which will be used as "resonators" further downstream in the exhaust. These are all full-stainless construction, so they will look great with all the other exhaust work I've been building... The icing on the cake, was that Borla was so excited about the project and the build photos that they offered to send it all to me at a hefty discount!
The first few items arrived over the weekend... the resonators are currently on backorder, so those will be coming in a couple of weeks.
The multicore mufflers look really cool and they are a LOT smaller than the FlowMaster that I was using for mock-up work. Here's the location where I intend to hide them (in the hollow torsion box area):
The 3" stainless showed up a while ago, and I got a new angle marking / cutting fixture for the 6" CLR Tubing. It was finally time to start cutting up expensive material and building the exhaust puzzle!
The biggest challenge was getting the exhaust out of the torsion box area and then back INSIDE the framerails again so that it could run to the rear quarterpanels using the more conventional path. There were some difficult angles and a bit of "threading the needle" clearance challenges, but this is how it all started to look.....once the remainder of the passenger floor was cut away:
From a slightly different angle to show the routing:
At this same time, it was important to think about the floor (which had just been cut out for the muffler fitment) and the fact that it held all the mounting points for the factory seat brackets. A new floor will be fitted, but the shape will be slightly different (more flat and simple) and there wouldn't be a way to attach the seat, so a new seat tube was bent/notched for the front seat brackets instead.
Everything on the passenger side exhaust was looking pretty good, and the angles and tubing lengths took a long time to get just right so it made sense to build a mirror-image set of parts for the driver's side while the parts were still easy to measure and steal dimensions from....
Fitment with stainless (and for TIG) is critical, but when you get it right and the joints are tight with no gaps... it's very satisfying to tack the stuff together and admire the final results!!!
It's been several weeks since I really had time to dedicate to the build.... and with only about 700 days remaining until Moab 2018, I'm going to need to stay focused and start logging some serious hours to keep this project on schedule.
-G