Don't you hate it when....... Options

[Fastbird]

You are doing work on a friends car while he's deployed (01 Golf TDI with the ALH motor) and it fights you tooth and nail. Weekend before last, I did a timing belt swap on it. Not so bad. Last week I spend fighting the rear brakes, which had a solidly frozen caliper slide pin on each side, and my friend being pretty well off accepted my advice to just do new brackets, rotors and pads. But screw you VW for using allen headed bolts on everything. Made me spend HOURS on the job just to get things apart. But.....I digress.

Friday night after I finished up with the brakes, I was moving my buddies car out of my garage so I could put the Celica back in. Given where cars were situated, and I've got another vehicle present waiting to be worked on, it was easiest for me to back the Celica into the garage. Or at least try. There's a pretty good step from the gravel on to the concrete for the garage. I have 2x6 leaders that I drive up so I don't scrape. But......going backwards......the resonator caught and brought the car to a VERY abrupt halt. And the exhaust got louder. Dang near ripped the downpipe in half. FML.

Just ordered a new one from that stupidly expensive if you're a seller auction site, but haven't been under the car yet to see if any of the rest of the custom exhaust got mangled in the process. I'm PRAYING not because that's going to SUCK to get repaired.

[lagos]

Mine ended up cracking like that too after many years of use. I just ended up buying another one for 60 bucks on ebay. If this one lasts 5 years, I'll be happy.

[Fastbird]

Mine ended up cracking like that too after many years of use. I just ended up buying another one for 60 bucks on ebay. If this one lasts 5 years, I'll be happy.

This one was actually fine until it met it's demise a couple weeks ago with the exhaust catching. I already have the new one in and mostly bolted up. Found a surprise, was missing a single nut for one of the turbo studs, and one of the studs for the oxygen sensor refused to come out of the old down pipe. So after I hit a job interview today I'm going to get some new stainless nuts for the turbo to downpipe studs and some new bolts for the oxygen sensor. She'll be all patched up tonight or tomorrow.

I will say the new downpipe I bought.......some of the welding is beautiful, and some of it is just hack jobish. And the construction......there's some really poor inner work going on, steps from pipe to pipe, unsmoothed, etc. I'm sure there's some quality made ones out there, but for the cheaper ebay ones, don't expect too much.