Almost final mock-up of Justin's header

Justin was looking at the pics of the header and requested that I tuck it to the pan more for ground clearance. His wish is my command . . . 

I took off the top two pie cuts, and started playing around with fitment, coming up with something about like this: 

Then I have to figure out how to fill the gap. I took some measurements . . . and got some ugly results. heh. I booger things up. I am, occasionally human, too, ya know. 

Even with it being ugly, the fit up is much more to Justin's requirements:

I don't have pics of it, but the first pie cut you see there is actually apiece from the original, largest cut in I made. It was very much larger than what was needed, so I simply cut a vertical slice out of the short side, and it fit very nicely with the rest of the downpipe and much better:

All together, it fits closer and is mostly acceptable to what I think it should do:

The one remaining serious issue to deal with is the gap on the back side:

I could, technically, just put a patch over that, but, I don't like the inherent volume increase, even on the backside. Even with the exhaust flow mostly pointed towards the outer wall, the increase in volume and  the shape of it won't be ideal for flow. I'm trying to improve the situation, not regress. heh I will stare it is some more today before making the final adjustment cuts to the header.

The last issue is covering up this gap from a wonky cut and using pieces that didn't originally match up:

That is really easy with using some scrap from previous cuts! 

ALMOST THERE!

Justin's head, almost ready for welding!

Here we have the new downpipe almost ready. It just needs one more cut. I think. heh

In this pic, I am eyeballing the 90* and then started thinking about how the heck I am going to know it is an actual 90* bend. 

Piece of the puzzle #1:

That wasn't exactly enough, so I busted out the framer's square that is older than I am:

Now that I have a good frame (puns are awesome!) of reference, I can measure up the next cut I should make.  

Now lookey here . . . I'm not perfect. I didn't clamp the piece on the bottom of the next photo tight enough, and the blade of the band saw dug in for a spit second, the cone spun, and the blade walked off line in a surprisingly fast manner, leading to this gap:

Not to fret, I can fill that in. It's not that bad at all. =) 

And now we have a view through everything except for the "tail" of the down pipe. 

You can even see out the end! This is GOOD! Excellent, high flowing large radius bends like this are what you want when dealing with high velocity exhaust gases. All the slight ridges you see in this  pic are going to be taken care of in the final fitup before full welding happens. The remaining inconsistencies will be worked out by a combination of minor shaping with a hammer and dolly and/or clamping in the right spot to shape everything as perfectly as possible. 

Here is the result! It looks good, if I do say so myself, and I do. 

After playing with whole shebang, I took off the largest section of the down pipe and, viola! It fits better. Here are some pics of how it sits now. I will likely tweak it a bit more to get it tucked better, but, I like how it is sitting now. Justin also approves. His car isn't slammed. 

Hurray for progress! Next up will be some final adjustments to this, then set up for another projects, so I can get a whole bunch of welding done at once, likely finishing off my big 330CF bottle of argon, so I can go exchange it before I need to backpurge the stainless I'll be welding. OH YEAH!

Some previous projects.

I figure I would post up some of the more interesting things I've done whilst in the Army. I had some fun projects, for sure. Some where just difficult. Many I can't even talk about. Oh well. LOL!

Project #1: Custom deepwell crow's foot.

When you are stuck in Iraq, you can't just run down to the local tool store or call the SnapOn truck to come and bail you out. When someone comes to you with a problem, you make your own solution. 

Problem: A deep socket needed to get into a really tight space between a newly installed additional armor plate and the body of a vehicle. 

Solution: Make your own dang tool!

First, we cut a deepwell impact socket, since it was a spare. This took a while since it is hardened, impact resistant steel, and not made in China. 

While I was dorking around with the socket, one of the machinists whipped up a proper base to weld the socket onto:

If you look closely, you will see a crack in the weld. This is because of the stress induced from not being able to weld the assembly correctly, stress relieve it and not having the correct filler metal.

The issue stems from the fact that I was welding high carbon tool steel to plain jane mild steel. The differing amounts of carbon and alloying elements in the two steels mix when you weld (properly). If the filler metal doesn't have enough of the correct alloying elements, the differing expansion and contraction rates of the materials will cause the weld to crack. I used a standard stainless filler, since the stainless filler would provide some of the proper alloying elements to buffer the welded area. Ideally, I would have used a 309 or maybe even 312 series filler. Oh well. The socket worked and I never heard of it breaking the rest of the deployment, so it did it's job despite the obvious flaws.