ICQ>

I recently botched an attempt to replace the exhaust system on my 87 245 with 225K and I wanted to tell you all not to make the same mistakes I did. A few years back, I had it done at one of the muffler shops and as expected, the pipes corroded before the mufflers, so my lifetime muffler guarantee wasn't worth much. I ordered the hi-flo replacement system from IPD and set to the task of pulling the old system off. Not too bad. I followed IPD's instructions and soaked everything in WD40 before attempting to pull things apart. That worked fine. I ran into problems at the catalytic converter though, mostly because the pipe from the cat back to the old resonator was welded to the cat, bent at an odd angle and corroded. Not knowing any better, I decided to cut that pipe

with a hacksaw at the cat, thinking it would be simple to connect the new IPD system to the cat with a new piece of pipe. It was far from simple.

After a lot of crawling around under the car with a measuring tape and a couple of trips to Pep Boys, I finally figured out that I needed to install a coupler

on the outside of the cat and another coupler at the end of the IPD

system. Couplers enable you to transition between two different sizes of

pipe. I bought a bunch of em and a 24" piece of pipe and went home to crawl around under the car for a few more hours. It took me a couple more hours to

to get the couplers installed with clamps and high temp silicone and the new pipe cut to fit between them. Without tightening everything down, I started her up to listen for leaks and discovered that I have several, mostly at the

couplers. This weekend, I'll get under there again and try to tighten thingss

down a little more.

Moral - don't cut the pipe off at the cat. Try to save as much of it as you can

to eliminate the need for couplers and patching in pipe.