Exhaust progress

On Thursday I ventured up North to pick up my shiny new exhaust manifold, and also meet Jason and see how he's been getting on. After meeting Jason's (very cute) dogs, we had a browse around his car - it's making good progress. It's interesting to see the different choices he's made with the car - partly in spec, e.g. the roll cage, flash wheels, etc, but also in how it's put together. The oil cooler setup in particular looks very nice; I don't think it'll have any overheating issues.

The exhaust was sadly only half ready, but at least it was the manifold half - if it had been the silencer half I wouldn't have been able to do anything with it. It came like this:

Exhaust manifold.

After some fairly straightforward fitting, I ended up with this:

Manifold attached.

It sounds great:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEUjuoWMEXU

Lots of smoke - this is just from the new pipes. It's gone now.

What was less great was getting the steering column to run through the limited space available. It's suppose to run between primaries one and two, but in my case, it was touching primary one. After a full day of faffing, moving the steering column support bracket and the steering rack, I finally managed to find positions where it clears the primary by a full 5 mm, and the chassis rail on the other side by about 1 mm. That will have to do. I also rerouted the clutch hose, as it was running right past one of the primaries and would have got rather toasty.