Aaaaand hotter heads have prevailed...
On Cyber Monday, with the Volk photoshop freshly top of mind, I decided that for shits and giggles I'd just SEE if they even had a spec that would fit what I had in my head. After a few minutes of searching found Volk TE73 Ultra M-Spec 19x8.5 +36 and 19x10 +30 in Blast Bronze. Pit two retailers against eachother for best price and ended up with something that didn't make me want to absolutely throw up. And by 5pm that day, had the last setup in that size being shipped my way from Japan. What have I done!?
Anyways. Also dug a bit more into the exhaust situation this week. Was planning to go to a reputable shop in the area that many community members had suggested. Ended up making an appointment to get the work done, got to the shop only to realize I didn't have the exhaust rubber isolators and apparently he doesn't stock them, and the work ended up not getting done. Honestly I'm pretty happy about this, because from the moment I got there we didn't seem to get along. So as a result, I spend part of yesterday and today doing the install myself, despite swearing I wouldn't.
The passenger side has less room to work with so I decided to start there. I'd purchased 2.5" vbands as I was hoping to make the stock and aftermarket mufflers interchangeable, and figured it would help the transition from the 2.36" stock piping to the 2.67" muffler piping. Once again positioned the muffler in place and got it sitting how I wanted it.
Then slipped the vband between the piping and muffler, and tacked it all together.
The other nice feature of the vband, is that with everything tacked in place, I can now pull the muffler off and weld it outside of the car, and have much easier access to welding the exhaust side as well.
The muffler side was obviously straight forward and took all of a minute, but the exhaust side was a PITA. Space is super limited and getting the right angle, especially on top, was going to be damn near impossible. Until I realized I could just weld from the inside.
Now I would like to apologize for these welds, but lets get real. This was done kneeling in my driveway with the part sitting on the ground with a Eastwood 120v welder.
And by the time I "finished" the passenger side it was pretty dark, but still needed to get a picture.
