We started our custom exhaust fabrication journey with boxes of 304 stainless steel tubing, mandrel bends, V-bands, and flex coupling bellows from Vibrant Performance.
Vibrant Performance was established in 1997 to design and produce exhaust and intake components for the Sport Compact performance market. Over the years they have grown to be an industry leader in this segment and have expanded their products to fluid delivery systems, heat exchangers, hoses and clamps, along with heat protection and titanium. They have become the go-to source for materials when building intakes and exhausts.
For our high RPM, 500hp+ bridge and semi-peripheral ported 13B engine, our engine builder Abel Ibarra recommended building a full 3.5” exhaust with a 4” downpipe. We decided on recirculating the wastegates back into the exhaust to improve the sound and refinement of the car.
We took 4”, 3.5”, and 1.75” Vibrant Performance 304 stainless steel exhaust tubing and mandrel bends with various Centerline Radius (CLR) to the band saw and created various angles and lengths for us to play with to build out our exhaust.
Unfortunately, our fabrication shop was an hour away from the parking lot where the RX-7 sat on jackstands. This meant that it would take an hour to a day or more between marking changes on the exhaust segments, to making the changes, to validating the changes and then working on the next segment. Needless to say, this was a highly inefficient process that we do not recommend. Before you comment, no, there was not any room at the fabrication shop to trailer the car to and we wanted this fabricator to do the final welding.
We started out back by mounting the SP Muffler’s 3.5” FD RX-7 Cat-back Dumpy Muffler on the factory hangers. From there, we made a cardboard template for a new rear muffler mount.
We transferred the template to a sheet of stainless and cut it out.
After welding our new bracket to the SP Muffler, we notched out the factory exhaust heat shield and bolted the rear muffler to a new frame rail-mounted bracket using an Exhaust Hanger Grommet (P/N: SUM-610320-4). The rear muffler was now securely mounted to the chassis of the FD.
3 comments
Billy, the exhaust looks fantastic. Every update gets us close to the full reveal of this monster!
Thank you! I’m a bit behind on articles so there will be more updates that will come out soon. The car is close to firing up!
I see you’re also a glutton for punishment wrenching on cars while laying on our backs, ha! Excited to see this up and running with all the extensive and detailed work on it.