Exhausting All Possible Solutions

Exhaust work is often considered gravy work, right? It pays well, there’s decent markup in the parts, and usually there is a very noticeable difference for your customer, since the racket of a loud exhaust has finally abated.

There’s an exception, though, and that’s work involving the manifolds. Any mechanic who’s been in the game for a while has tussled with nightmare vehicles sporting problematic hardware. There are so many things to go wrong in this area. The parts undergo constant heat cycling. And the materials! Even today, cast iron and steel are still in widespread use, and most coatings that could stand up to the heat aren’t selected by the OEMs due to their cost. Even if they were, the hardware often takes a beating—in use, and perhaps even more so during removal!

These problems are not new, but our lack of access sure is. Gone are the days of nice open access to a header or manifold on the side of an overhead-valve vee engine. Exhausts sandwiched against firewalls and shock towers are the result of packaging more things under the hood without any increase in real estate in that area.

If you read Volume 4 of the OE FIX Guide, you may recall our announcement of our line of stainless exhaust hardware, designed to ward off future problems when replacing stubborn studs, bolts, and nuts that have failed due to corrosion. Those actually have a spiritual predecessor, though, from our HELP! line many moons ago: brass hardware. We offered replacement steel studs with lengthened brass nuts. Brass, of course, doesn’t rust. Being softer than steel, brass will also generally deform before the more-difficult-to-extract-and-replace steel stud upon which it rides. And the increased length ensured they could exert the clamping force necessary to hold the manifolds securely.

Our brass 03109 kits get sold a lot more frequently nowadays for Nissans than the air-cooled Volkswagens for which they were developed, and the $3.92 retail list price we charged in 1982 has certainly changed, but the harsh conditions in which exhaust systems operate have not. Beyond our stainless upgrade hardware, we have many other solutions to make exhaust work less painful. Here are some of our favorites that might become your favorites, too.

Have you seen our 917-107? This is an awesome helper for techs tasked with an exhaust job on an aging GMC or Chevy truck powered by an LS engine. If you’re replacing exhaust gaskets and snap the exhaust bolts at the rear of the driver’s side manifold, extraction is painful even on a vehicle in great shape. (These fit the passenger front too, but the driver rear is usually the offending position—and much more difficult to access.) But the GMT800 bodystyle these fit is an old one, and odds are the vehicle isn’t a collector’s item. It’s probable that the work and parts you damage could quickly outweigh the cost of the vehicle.

Our OE FIX exhaust clamp gives you a no-weld, no-fab way out of that jam. The clamps act as brackets that make use of unused threaded holes in the cylinder heads. Our brackets, made of beefy cast steel that’s over ½" thick in many areas, include a “pusher bolt” that is offset just slightly from the broken fastener.

917-108 and 917-142

Once the bracket is installed, that pusher bolt can apply pressure to the manifold to hold it in place, completely avoiding the offending fastener that has broken. And not for nothin’, but it doesn’t look bad when it’s installed. If you’re installing this for a customer who might be suspicious of such an affordable fix, it looks pretty good when the hood goes up.

They work so well we made them for a few different positions on the LS. Check out the 917-108 (center) and 917-142 (passenger rear and driver front, though the rear one is usually the one that gives trouble). We also have two for Fords: one for the ol’ 460 engine (917-499) and another for the 5.4L (917-504).

The 674-154 is a money-saver. It’s perfect for the less-expensive General Motors vehicles powered by the 1.4L turbocharged engine. That means you’ve got better chances of selling an exhaust job rather than watching your customer scrap a vehicle over a too-expensive repair.

In this instance, if you have a cracked manifold (a likely scenario for a forced-induction car with a cast exhaust manifold), The General will sell you a complete manifold with turbo. Obviously, that’s prohibitively costly, so we sell just the manifold, gaskets, and hardware needed to install it. The labor is about the same except for the time you need to unbolt the old turbo and put it on the new manifold. You can undercut the estimate from your competition who might not be aware of this repair. (Guess it pays to read this article

Catalytic converters with integral flex pipes are nothing new. The flex section often rots out, and the dealer solution is usually a complete assembly including the cat. Universal flex sections to repair these pipes are available; every mechanic has installed those from time to time to save the customer the eye-popping cost of buying a platinum-laden converter.

However, the flex section doesn’t sit between runs of pipe on many Chevy Cobalts, Saturn Ions, Pontiac G5s, and Chevy HHRs. On these vehicles the flex section butts against the pipe flange, so those universal sections can be a little trickier to install, since the OE flange would need to be salvaged. Our 926-816 flange repair is an easy choice. It’s also the bee’s knees for those cars that are so badly rotted that the flange isn’t salvageable.

This is just a small smattering of some of the problem-solvers we’ve developed for exhaust jobs that have turned mean and nasty. The next time you’re staring at a real chore, check and see if we’ve been on the same job before. It might save your customers some money, save the shop some time, and save you a shred of sanity.