Cyber T: Magnaflow Exhaust Installation

Wow, it actually feels like we're getting somewhere with our bucket right about now. When we left off last month, Painless Performance's Dennis Overholser and our tech center guru Jason Scudellari had tied up the last little bit of the wiring. Now that we're wired for sound, however, we need to do something about the sound potential--remember that Smeding Performance 383-inch ground pounder? We expect a bit of mechanical cacophony, but we don't want to go deaf as a result of it.

It turns out we faced a bigger task than we first thought. In case you haven't noticed, a T-bucket is a really small creature and the compact size dictated a few compromises. If we routed the exhaust under the car, we would boil the battery and/or the brake system--not pretty pictures by any means. Merely moving the exhaust down would at best look awkward and at worst cause the pipes to hang perilously low.

A few enterprising hot rod builders that faced similar dilemmas responded with something that would work for our car. Our Oklahoma buddy and inveterate Sprint Car and midget racer Doc Parsons runs a glasspack-style system outside the body parallel with the frame on his T. Even before that, a few '50s hot rods, including Dave Urquhart's Model T, sported similar exhaust systems.

Even that raised some small issues; it seems that most of the manufacturers pretty much dropped the bullet-style muffler as demand grew for the chambered and turbo-style mufflers. For a while there, it seemed like we painted ourselves into a corner--either run a bargain-basement glasspack muffler or reinvent the trends by hanging a big rectangular muffler off the sides of our car. Things looked grim.

Fortunately, it turns out that one of the bigger names in the exhaust field, MagnaFlow, developed a bullet-style muffler that looks just like the glasspack of yore, yet performs like their tried-and-true performance mufflers. Things started looking up.

MagnaFlow manufactures these mufflers from a hefty seamless 16-gauge 400-series stainless steel body. In lieu of a glasspack's restrictive and turbulent louvered core, the Magnapack uses the same stainless perforated core that their other mufflers use. They then pack the muffler with a combination of stainless steel wool and long-strand stone wool in their in-house manufacturing facility.

This stone wool probably does the best job of setting the Magnapack apart from its glasspacked brethren. Anybody who's installed a set of glasspacked mufflers on a car can attest: they grow progressively louder. That's because glass melts at a relatively low temperature, glass fibers don't orient effectively, and glass fibers soak water--not good attributes for something that backs up to a vibrating engine that chugs hot, damp gasses at high velocity.

On the other hand, stone wool is literally spun from reheated lava and chemically treated for water resistance. It melts at nearly twice the temperature of glass, its fibers orient better than glass, and it repels muffler-corroding water in the process.

As it turns out, MagnaFlow Performance maintains an in-house R&D facility in which they fabricate, tune, and finally test all their specific-fit performance exhaust systems and their high-flow catalytic converters. To tend to such jobs, MagnaFlow's R&D shop boasts an incredible tool and machine collection--a collection that blows away anything we have in our STREET RODDER Tech Center. So we begged for a time slot for our Total Performance project car and, lo and behold, they gave us one! That's quite a big deal considering that MagnaFlow's R&D shop is a closed-door facility exclusive to in-house projects. They don't take on personal projects, so we considered it a real treat to be able to show off how MagnaFlow would fabricate a system for our particular needs.

MagnaFlow's Jose Gonzales, with some input from Rich Waitas, stitched a stainless system with their Magnapack mufflers. They really took some extra time out for the fabrication and we expect this system to last. While this isn't the end-all way for everybody's bucket project, it represents a durable and attractive alternative to oversized Fad-T pipes. We certainly dig it!

He trimmed the section to fit, held everything in place, and marked the pipes' orientation.	These pipes hang out for everybody to see, so Jose gave the bends that extra bit of attention by TIG welding them. When we originally planned the system we thought we'd grind the welds smooth. They're so nice now that we're leaving them as is.	Jose mocked the pipes up to the car, measured everything, and tacked all the pieces together. The welds between the elbow and flange don't show quite as much, so Jose stitched those pieces together with a MIG weld. He also used the MIG gun's fatter bead to take up the small gap between the elbow and the muffler itself.
Once Jose finished the exhaust to the muffler's end on the passenger's side, he and Richard transferred the dimensions to the driver's side.	We wanted something clean, so we tried the plainest thing possible: straight 2 1/4-inch outlets. We tried down-turned outlets and even cut another elbow for a custom downturn, but nothing looked as good as the straight outlets. Jose cut the tubes to match each side.	Somebody walked by just before Jose welded the pipes on and suggested that we flare the tips ever so gently to give them a belled look. We followed the advice and it looked better yet. It gives the tip a sort of finished look.
While MagnaFlow dealt with the curveballs we threw them, there was one obstacle they couldn't work around: the body. Since the body obscured the chassis, Jose and Richard couldn't fasten brackets to the chassis in the places that they wanted to use.	Instead, they had to use existing chassis fasteners--in this case they used the coilover brackets--not exactly ideal pickup points. We may need to revisit this in the future, but we're pretty confident that it will work for the time being.	Here's a parting shot from underneath the car. While it looks pretty sparse under the car, it isn't. This install is clean, tight, and should keep us from going deaf anytime soon.