I’ve been hard at work for the past several weeks building headers and exhaust for our Unfair Camaro Project. I worked with Rich Craig over at Cone Engineering to get all the materials except for the oval stainless tube. The oval tube came from Burns Stainless. This is the fifth set of headers I’ve built from scratch, and I learn something new every time. These are my best effort yet. It is such a pleasure working with high quality materials. Anyway the header fabrication will be a full-fledged Super Chevy in the Project Unfair series. Look for it soon on a newsstand near you.
The oval tube is another matter.
Unfair is so low, that the only way to get enough exhaust for 800-1400 hp (depending on mode) under the car is to use oval tube. It’s high quality stuff, but there is a lot of stress in the material from all the machine work done on it. When you cut into the middle of a mandrel-bent oval tube, the tube tries to become round again. It takes a *lot* of work to get it ovalized again to weld it. The end result looks good, but the squeezing, clamping, and tack-welding to weld it to another oval tube is a lot more effort than ordinary round tube.
After this, I’ll be making custom mufflers using one of Cone’s kits.
John, if you had shot blasted the Oval 90 before you cut it maybe it would have relieved some of the metal stress and allowed them to retain more of their oval shape.
Doug, I never even thought of that. I’ll definitely give it a try next time.