What have you done to your DeLorean today?

[Farrar]

Ordered MOST of the parts needed for new exhaust. Resonators, straight & bent pipes, & mufflers are all still on hold until I get the rest in place and can make precise measurements. All told, should cost about $600 and will be stainless steel except for exhaust manifolds (stock).

[krs09]

Ordered MOST of the parts needed for new exhaust. Resonators, straight & bent pipes, & mufflers are all still on hold until I get the rest in place and can make precise measurements. All told, should cost about $600 and will be stainless steel except for exhaust manifolds (stock).

Ooooo. Can we have pics and sound when done .. pretty please.

[Farrar]

Ooooo. Can we have pics and sound when done .. pretty please.

Pics would be easy, sound much more difficult. But yes, I will probably make a thread for it once I start building it.

[Jonathan]

Out of curiosity, looked over the math of selling my car. Holy crap is the exchange rate right now ever bad!

A Canadian buying, say, $1,000 USD worth of DMC parts in time for Spring, if you don't even count yet the regular taxes or shipping costs, is looking at about $1,280 CAD from JUST the exchange rate.

Same goes for going on vacation to the US with Canadian dollars in your pocket. Buying $100 of US cash costs $128 Canadian right now.

However, if a Canadian might want to sell their car though to a buyer in the US with those US dollars, now that $20k USD car price gets the seller $25,600 of the Canadian dollars he's spending at home anyway. And a $30k USD car sold by a Canadian equals $38,400 CAD. Not very nice for a Canadian right now wanting to buy a US based car, but boy is that math ever good if a Canadian wants to sell to the US. And the guy in the US is still paying what he intended to in the first place because it's still the same dollars to him when he spends it.

Yea, there are higher costs for customs and duty or taxes or extra shipping costs potentially, but that's quite a bit of extra fat in the budget to meet somewhere in the middle where both sides are happy with what they got.

[Farrar]

All of the electrical stuff that I ordered online finally arrived today. I was all ready to replace the battery clamps on my daily driver ... but I couldn't find my cable cutters!

Well, I didn't have the right size of heat-shrink, anyway, so I went to Home Depot and bought cable cutters & big heat-shrink. I also bought a calliper - the old fashioned kind that doesn't need batteries - because I am tired of looking at stuff like hoses and fasteners and trying to guess how big they are. I also bought a 1/4"-drive 9mm socket, since mine went AWOL.

I cooked an early supper (Ally wasn't feeling well) and went outside to the garage to put the new tools in their places. It was a freakishly gorgeous day today. I couldn't resist the call of the DeLorean. So I sent Ally a text message to let her know that I was going to work on the car while she got some rest.

And so I went to work on removing the headers. What a nightmare. I cut the tops of both hands and ripped calluses on both thumbs and most of my fingers. On cylinder 5, I could barely get a small flat wrench in between the pipe and the stud. The only 11mm flat wrench I have is an el-cheapo Harbor Freight combo wrench that came as part of the SpecialTAuto DeLorean Emergency Roadside Kit Or Whatever It's Called, and it certainly wasn't meant to take the kind of abuse I put it through. The fit is sloppy on the open end, but the other end is a 12-point so the open end was my only option. A few times I felt the wrench start to bend and thought "Oh boy, it's time to snap another Pittsburgh wrench." But each time, CLICK -- the nut came loose! Well, actually, in two cases, the stud came loose. Nonetheless, I managed to remove the driver-side header. After loosening the nuts and/or studs by ever-so-tiny increments, they all came off/out without incident. I un-fastened the clamp that holds the Otter Switch pipe to the frame and pushed it out of the way so that I could slide the header up and over the oil dipstick tube. I just cut the oxygen sensor's wire; that thing hasn't been used since 2008, anyway.

A good close-up look at the headers shows that it wasn't just the parts closest to the road that were rusting. They're rusting up top by the flanges, too. Makes me feel better about making my new exhaust from stainless steel (except for the stock manifolds, which will be re-used).

I had to put the car up on jack-stands in order to get to the studs by cylinder 4, which was the last one I did. I had a look at the passenger side header and decided against removing it tonight. In order to remove the header, I have to remove the alternator and the oil filter. Removing the alternator is easy, but I didn't feel like draining the oil tonight. It was already after 9pm by this time.

With that header out of the way I can see for miles compared to what I could see before. I can look at the engine mount, and see that the reason the left side of my engine is black and oily is because I have a torn CV boot. When the car was parked, the tear was facing the rear, so I couldn't see it. But now I can. Nice.

I think I may also need to remove the oil pressure sending unit to get a wrench on the header studs by cylinder 3. Maybe not. Nonetheless, I disconnected every wire I could reach and shoved it aside. The wires by the alternator are all so stiff, though, that they just kind of hang in the air, keeping their shape no matter what I do with them.

Now I have to figure out what to do about those two studs that came out. I have no doubt that I will end up removing some studs on the passenger side, too, when I get around to it. My local Ace Hardware sells metric studs, so I will just go there and buy however many of those I need, plus 12 stainless flange nuts to put the stock manifolds back on. (Headers were put on with nuts & washers.)

All in all, I'm thrilled that it went so well. And I wasn't even planning on working on the DeLorean today.

[Farrar]

Discovered a torn CV boot - explains why the left side of my engine is filthy. :P

[vwdmc16]

Finally installed my stage 1 exhaust today, I love the sound. Stay tuned for a thread talking about the horsepower gains of the exhaust, with dyno charts before and after!

[Farrar]

Finally installed my stage 1 exhaust today,

For every yin there's a yang... I'm getting rid of mine!

[Farrar]

Got these for re-installing the exhaust manifolds. Highly recommended.

[Trstno1]

For every yin there's a yang... I'm getting rid of mine!

Are you going to sell your old exhuast? how bad off rust-wise is the rest of it?