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In Japanese they call pie cuts “wagiri yousetsu,” which when translated into English roughly means “circle cut weld.” Though John Kuchta claims it really means, “no profit.” After seeing how labor intensive the whole process is, I’m inclined to agree with him.
The rest of the pipe was created using a combination of straight lengths of oval pipes and the wagiri yousetsu method, this tie along the oval’s major axis. Burn’s Stainless actually manufactures the oval pipes with a bend along the major axis. However, it turns out that Burn’s stainless isn’t open at 4 AM on a Saturday night. Funny, since the middle of the night seems to be when most racecars get built.
Using 3” oval piping versus a traditional 3” round pipe, frees up just shy of 1” of additional ground clearance for us.
With the main exhaust pipe tacked up, John’s attention turned towards fabbing up a new set of waste gate dump tubes. At the same time, he took the opportunity to play with a new toy, the Icengineworks block modeling system.
The Icengineworks header modeling kit eliminates time consuming trial and error that results from fabricating headers and manifolds on the fly. By linking together a series of small pieces which are the same diameter as the piping, the fabricator can plan out complex bends and create a physical prototype before cutting any steel.
