Well, I finally got the exhaust finished up. The new tailpipes sort of fit, well, not really. The end that attaches to the outlet of the muffler, extended too far forward, so I had to cut ~3 inchesoff and reswage the pipes. I had bought a tail pipe expander a while back and I used it to swage the right side pipe, and went a little too far, so I had to put some slits in it and use a heavy band clamp to squeeze it back down. Then the bend that takes it up over the rear axle wasn't sharp enough, so I made a couple of slice cuts to get that corrected. Then the pipe was pointing out away from the car so it wouldn't fit under the body, between the rear fender and the spring, so I cut the pipe, modified a band clamp and used it to hold the pipe pieces in the correct orientation so I could weld it up. That finally got the tailpipe exiting in the right place under the bumper. The welds were not pretty to I smoothed them up and used some Scotchbrite type pads for an angle grinder to polish up the dull finish on the pipe.
Then repeat the process on the driver's side pipe. Them, when I was swaging the second pipe, the bearing on the pipe expander went to hell. They used a tapered rolled bearing about the size of the outside bearing on the front wheels of the Nova, which was completely wrong for that application. It didn't have anywhere near the thrust capacity required and disintegrated when I was about a 1/16" from the pipe being swaged large enough. I was able to jury rig it and get the job done, but it's a piss poor design. Yesterday I got a regular thrust type roller bearing and modified the tool to use it. I haven't tried it yet, but it has to work better than the original bearing as it has about 10 times the thrust load capacity.
I needed to use some kind of mount to hold the pipes in position at the rear, so I bought a couple of mounts from Summit racing, welded them to the pipes, and fabbed a couple of brackets to bolt them the the trunk floor. Last thing to do was to slide the chrome, angle cut tips on, mark their positions, cut the tailpipes to the right length and clamp them in place.
I think I have had the tailpipes on and off at least six times during the process, but I got 'er done.
I fired it up, and it's still too loud for my taste, so I'm looking for some mufflers that will tame it down a bit. I don't want to be one of those guys with an obnoxiously loud car running down the road.
So now, my next item is to see if I can get the parking brakes hooked up and working. Because I installed a disc brake conversion on the rear axle, and it has staggered shocks, that is, one in front of the axle and one behinds it, one caliper sits in front of the axle and one sits behind. Due to that positioning, the cable to connect to the actuator on the driver's side caliper exits to the rear, making it a problem to hook it up without having a big long, loop of cable housing hanging back there. I've been studying that problem since I first did the conversion, and I think I finally came up with a workable solution, by using a different caliper that will let the cable exit over the top of the axle instead of under it, allowing the cable housing to bend under the axle and go forward to it's anchor bracket by the front spring mount. The only catch is that the bleeder on the caliper won't be on top, so I'll have to take the caliper loose and swing it up about 90° to bleed it, but I can live with that. I was working on that this afternoon, and I think it's all going to work, I just need to get it all finished up.
After that, I'm going to get the tires and wheels down from upstairs and assess what needs to be done to them to get them looking presentable. They may just need to ble cleaned up, or may need to be repainted, we'll see. Once they're done, it's time to mount them on the car and get it on the ground. At long last!
Only about 15 more items on the to do list.
