Aww man you were in my neck of the woods. Shoulda stopped by, could of helped me change my exhaust

 

I was far too intoxicated majority of the trip to be of use. We ended up visiting about 18 wineries by the end of the trip. Went with several friends and debauchery ensued. You know the saying, "It is all fun and games until one drunk guy turns the gas fire pit to max and burns his own eyebrows off with a 8 foot flame"

 

Lol "burning down the brows"

 

A combination of the Z1 Motorsports headers with the balance of the system provided by ART Automotive. This system will include the high flow cats. The G will get a complete system too but will make use of test pipes.

 

Finished it today, the system sounds really good and the engine seems to rev a bit more freely. Didn't have to lift any engine up, drain coolant or take cooling system pipes off. There was no lift involved, just put the car up on jackstands all around. Decent set of tools, some extra help doesn't hurt and you can knock this out in your garage at home.

 

Feel free to link to your blog for the step by step. Though posting it directly to this forum is preferred in case your website goes down 5 years from now. Ignore that one cornball. Yes this is a fairly simple task, but how to's certainly help with seeing how involved some mods are. We can say "it's easy" all day long, until some newb gets 80% of his exhaust unbolted only to realize he should've picked up a 2 foot extension to remove the top CAT bolt before taking his car apart.

Plus I'm curious about the header/exhaust manifold removal. So many times people on this forum just parrot "it's too hard / not worth it" with out a real understanding of just how hard it is.

 

Here you go. I posted several DIY earlier since you wanted to know.

 

Yes, I will do that but I did not mean to make it sound like its a piece of cake. I understand why some people are taking everything that remotely looks to be in the way off of the engine as it has to make it a bit easier. And I can imagine that depending on previous mods, certain things could well be in the way that I did not have to contend with on this vehicle. My major point was simply that it can be done without a lot of the extra work that I was reading about and that in itself might hold some people back from attempting it. Experience has a lot of play in this too, I have been wrenching for 48+ years now so I am less inclined to remove something if I don't really have too.

As to the "funny guy", he's the kind we used to drop into the tall skinny trash cans at work head first.

 

Here is the link to my write up. I did not spend a lot of time taking pictures although I will add a few of the finished installation to the post.

http://rutherfordms.com/?p=414

Again I want to state that this is not a "fun - have the guys over for a beer project". It takes a lot of time, good variety of tools and a ton of patience. When I do this on the G35 I am going to take a few shortcuts. I am not going to worry about saving any of the exhaust system as I did this time - we sold this one to recover a little of the money spent on the new system. I will be using a sawzall to remove troublesome areas. Except for the header to head bolts, snapping bolts off is the better method. As I stated in my write up I will construct a purpose built tool to break the header bolts loose. This was the most time consuming part of the entire job and looking at it afterwards, I am sure I can get to almost every bolt save for the front two on each side from underneath the car. I will wear a long sleeve shirt the next time and I don't care how hot the weather is. It took several weeks for my arms to heal up from the wounds that were inflicted. I did this entire job with the car up on 4 jack-stands, no coolant drained, no engine lifted and no battery disconnected.

There is a performance improvement and I believe that the headers and high flow cats are the reason. If you are not replacing these pieces, other than obtaining some kind of "look" I am not sure why you would bother with it. BUT then again, removing the old system up to the cats and just replacing that part of it is a Saturday afternoon job. After getting the car in the air, you could probably have it done in less than 90 minutes.

Have fun - any questions that I can clear up please let me know.