My mean green hornet

Lathe is nearly ready, basically all primed ready for topcoat, which is something rather special..here's a clue- Hemi :D
Ok so I'm currently stripping the car in readiness for blasting. I found a local place to dot he whole shell for £600 so I'm extremely happy with that. Once it's back I'll be putting it on a rotator, doing a few repairs and modifications and then spraying in epoxy.
The ZF boxes have gone away to Andy to build me up a strong hybrid 22/24 box, and my 4.6 block is about to go to John Eales for flanged liners. Yes it's certainly a money splurge time but I worked very hard over the summer and recently received all my overtime pay in one lump sum so everything is getting done at once!
Jim
 
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This week I gave myself a mini project to convert my Hilmor manual bender to hydraulic.
After messing around with angles and ideas, I bought a £25 8 tonne engine crane ram and set to work.

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And after some tweaking here's the first results on tube I couldn't bend manually, 1.5" diameter 1.5mm wall steel. Not half bad for a budget conduit bender conversion, and I think there's plenty of room for improvement as there's play in the original bender design which I can eliminate.

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Jim
 
Thanks guys.
I do have these stainless toyosports ones which I've modified and smoothed internally, but I've been thinking about making a jig up and fabricating longer ones which collect further back. I'll probably use these as a baseline on the new engine setup and then see how much torque/power I can release with different lengths.
I'm still not a TIG welder yet, but my friend is and has promised to teach me and lend me his equipment very soon.
The plan is true dual stainless system with X pipe and two magnaflow mufflers.

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I'm making one or two driveshaft safety loops out of smaller diameter thick wall tubing which will be nicer to bend cold now with the hydraulics.
I also have a non-car reason to bend 1.5" tube in that I've been planning to build sets of stainless parallel bars/parallettes for calisthenics.

Jim
 
Yeah I don’t think I’ve seen theirs in photos before, do you know anyone with them? Didn’t Chris York have them?
For favouring torque I was thinking even longer, collecting after they start to sweep under the car..
I’d be interested in RPi’s fabrication and if they gas purge the tubes whilst welding them to avoid any flow interruptions with weld buildup. My toyosports ones needed a lot of internal cleanup as they were made fairly cheaply.
I’ll have access to not only a nice TIG setup soon but also a purging kit so that would all be in my control if I decided to make from scratch.
Jim
 
I heard a whisper that JP Exhausts made them for RPI. JP would do the job right if that is the case.
I would like to see more of a generous lead out of the front and rear ports before the bend if possible on those, having said that I am considering a set and cutting off the collector and putting it under the car. The set on my Cobra are long tube 4-1 with an X pipe, that certainly suits WOT use, but I am not sure if it promotes low down torque.
Don't make an X pipe by welding two bends back to back, I did and it killed the motor, I see these being offered a lot and I know they don't work, you lose a lot of area cutting the bends to fit together. An X pipe has to maintain two full bores across the X.
 
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My error there Mark, I was thinking of secondary length and torque gains. Vizard reckons primary length on dual plane v8s isn't critical, but secondary length is the one to worry about tuning.
Still like you say I'd like the collector underneath the car ideally.
Fear not, X pipe will be a full bore crossover job.
After exhaustive :D Vizard reading I really wanted to try a pressure wave termination box in the form of a large resonator directly after a tuned length secondary and before mufflers..but I can't see there being the real estate under the car for that, and probably overkill for the kind of horsepower I'm hitting for.
I'll be interested to see what you come up with if you do modify the rpi ones. How much ado they sell them for?
Jim
 
They are indeed from JP Exhausts, here they are fitted to Sparky.

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Two words of warning though.

1/. They do touch the O/S engine mount and the person who fitted them to Sparky (Previous owner) hacked some of the engine mount away so it collapsed and left the engine sitting at an angle.

2/. They give off a lot of heat.

I had to rebuild the engine mount (The metal welded bit on the base unit), then wrapped them, then after that looked awful, had them ceramic coated inside and out.

The invoices I had from the previous owner show them to be £575.00 per pair, but that was over ten years ago.

Richard
 
Those are lovely. Are they ceramic coated or just painted? (does this really control heat effectively?) - edit. yes you answered that one!

Are they noticeably noisier? Do they fit directly the standard down pipe? I know some people look for more sound but some of what I've heard on youtube isn't particularly pleasant in an executive car.
 
Well there’s the difference, I got the toyosports stainless pair for less than £200 new.
The JP ones are mild steel though right? Hence why your ceramic coating has stayed on properly..
It would annoy me to spend that much and have to modify either the car or headers to fit satisfactorily though, especially when they are sold for the P6
Jim
 
I'm sure they're no noisier, but then they were on the car when I got it, so have nothing to compare it to.

They are stainless Jim, but the coating stayed on very well. Must be 8 years or so now.

Richard
 
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That’s interesting Richard, do you remember what coating it was and where you had it done? Was it done internally too?
There’s so much disagreement about coating stainless headers that I ended up deciding on running them polished to begin with and go from there.
Jim
 
After an in depth phone call, I sent them to these peeps Camcoat Performance Coatings - Ceramic Coating and Ceramic Anodising and they coated the manifolds inside and out, and the front section with the Y piece just the outside. They weren't new when they got them, but had been on the car for several thousand miles. They assured me that even though they were used, the coating would bond and last well.

It certainly made a huge difference with under bonnet temperatures. These are the black ones btw :oops: never did quite to the bottom of why they are obviously brown?

Richard
 
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hi there,
this is a fascinating post, thank you all.
Regarding the hydraulic ram for bending..... how does it work on its side? I have several hydraulic jacks and they wont work on their sides, only vertically!
I wanted to use it under the house to push sideways , but did not work!
Peter
 
Peter, most hydraulic cylinders will work horizontally but only if the pump is the lowest point. Try rotating one of yours so the pump is on the underside. If it is at all nose down it won't work, so perfectly level or tilted 1 degree up for example should work fine.
My ultimate plan if the design proved effective was to upgrade it to air over hydraulic either driven by my compressor or an independent electric air pump. For now though it's more than capable and user friendly pumping it manually
Jim
 
Thanks Richard, I'll have a proper look at that tomorrow. I see they do a version of the chrome ceramic coating which is what I'd probably want if I went with the idea, although satin white headers always look rather good to me.
I'm going to be doing a few things to bring cool air into and hot air out of the engine compartment, plus my stainless headers are fairly thick walled, smoothed internally and mirror polished externally (now :D) so I'd really like to see how they fare naked.
I'm planning to use thermal socks on plug leads etc, but the hydroboost brake unit will sit close to the driver side header and short of a good heat shield which I'm planning, I may end up needing to get the headers coated to keep the pas fluid from getting too hot and affecting the brakes and steering..
Jim
 
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