Well, I think my motivation was broken today......... Along with a few studs.
Today was the worst day I've ever had working on a Mustang in 20 years. Something as stupid as changing out a mid-pipe that's only been on there a year turned into an entire day's project.
We were taking the catted X off, and ran into a bolt that didn't want to come off on the passenger's side. Of course, it's the biatch bolt. We sprayed and heated, and knew one of two things were going to happen. It was coming loose, or it was going to break. It broke..... So we tried for about 40 minutes to get the rest of the stud out without pulling the manifold, we even welded a nut to the stud, but it was too frozen in there. So we had to pull the passenger's side exhaust manifold off the car. If you've never had the joy of doing this to your car with the K-Member in the car, and have to for some reason, just shoot yourself, it's less painful. Actually it wasn't that horrible, but the top 2 bolts in the center are a big PITA to get to.
So, we get the manifold off, drill the stud out, get it all put back on, and start to put the H Pipe on, thinking the worst is over, and for the most part it was. We put the passenger's side half of the H Pipe on without much hassle, but it does sit down a lot lower than my catted X, so I'm kind of not happy about that.
Then we move to the driver's side, and low and behold, BBK put the wrong flange on the driver's side. It had the same flange as the back where it hooks into the catback. So we use the die grinder and elongate the holes so it will fit over the studs. Then the fat flange part will not clear the stud shoulders, so we break out the die grinder again, and cut the shoulders off the studs. Oops, we nicked the stud's threads. Doesn't look that bad, we should be able to get the nut past the nicked threads......WRONG... SNAP!!!!! and another stud broken. Luckily with some heat, we had enough room to get the stud out with vice grips and put a new one in, and we're back in business.......almost
We get everything loosely bolted together, and start to put the O2 sensors in, and besides the fact that they're in the dumbest place I've ever seen, one of the O2 bungs is not even fully welded. Way to go BBK quality control, you suck!!!!
So the midpipe comes back off the car so that we can weld up the O2 bung. Put it back on, got everything snugged up, and realized because of the gayest O2 sensor positioning ever on a midpipe, we have to have O2 extensions. Guess what we don't have.... So we have to build a set. Got them plugged in, everything tightened up, and finally it sounds great.
I hate BBK though, and will talk bad about them forever and never buy anything from them again.
So, a 2 hour job ended up taking 9 hours, and I'm still not happy with the way the stupid midpipe fits, it just hangs down too far in the back. I should have kept my UPR catted X on the car and saved myself all these headaches.
