Exhaust

It’s been a while since i did anything on the Opel as I have been busy with my new project, the restoration of a 1997 Fiat Cinquecento Sporting Abarth (www.abarthproject.co.uk). And it turns out its very hard to find parts for it! But I did get some time to do a little bit on the Opel as I have 3 or 4 things I want to do before spring and one of those is to turn the Rage backbox I have into a repackable one. I know how I want to do it so the first step was to cut…

After a trial fit, the manifold needed a couple of tweaks to get it just right. So it was back off to the welders for the adjustment and also i gave up on fitting a bracket so i could separate the two sections as it was just too tight to fit in properly and i wasn’t too sure if it would work loose, so i had it welded together. So here is the full A Series Custom Manifold all ready for the final fitting and then it’s just a couple of other bits to sort out and we will be…

Today i picked up the final piece of the Opel Jigsaw and its looking bloody good 🙂 Harvey the welder has done an amazing job welding up my mockup and it fits perfectly!! Now just a bit of cleaning up around the inlets and i think i might sand a few of the welds and give it a good polish and i can then get it fitted to the car. It looks like with a little bit of adjusting to the lower part that it will all match up perfectly. I should have done this a long time ago!  …

Today i started making up the new manifold. STEP 1 COMPLETED I have the outer outlets all mocked up and tacked together and on Tuesday i will start on the middle pipes. Then it will be off to the welders to have it all fully welded up properly!   STEP 2 COMPLETED Now i just need to add the collector and set it up so it meets the lower part, then its off to the welders.   And its back!  

The two big issues i have always had are: Trying to get a decent manifold for the right had drive is almost impossible! When you do try to use anything bigger than the standard down pipes you get lots of problems getting it past the steering coloumn. Over the years i have tried loads of different options for exhausts (a couple you will see in other posts) and i have looked at all sorts of steering option (again, quite a few versions in older posts) so after trying lots of options that are made for the left-hand drive cars and…

As the title suggest, this is not pretty but hopefully will get me to a point where i finally have a system and steering setup that works and that I’m happy with. Its very rough as my welding is shit and I’m not very patient with making exhausts, not something i could do for a living! But hopefully it will let me test out the fit and give it a bit of a shakedown and check that the clearance is all ok so i can then hopefully find a decent company to make me a pr oper one that does…

I have started to mockup the new exhaust header. After finding some pics of a company in the US who did a very nice system for an A series i have pinched a few ideas to see if it helps and one of those is to fit a bracket to the system and attach it to the gearbox, which will hopefully help to reduce and vibration on the system. Once i have it as i want i plan to give the car a couple of runs with my dodgy version on, with the view to having a proper one made…

So a quick update for anyone dropping by the site. Yes the car was on the road and i had 2 trips out in it, but the one thing that i have never managed to get sorted out properly was the exhaust and the manifold i spent so long adjusting and fitting just didn’t work and knocked too much. So as i knew it would drive me mad if i just carried on using the car i thought that it was best to take it off the road to fix it properly. I did a bit of googling and found…

The manifold is now back on the car and all i need to do now is connect up the system and that is the exhaust all done. I can now connect up the steering and fit the inlets and throttle bodies.