It’s A Jeep Thing…

05 Jan It’s A Jeep Thing…

Yes, today’s post IS a Jeep thing. But even if you don’t own a Jeep, you’ll still understand it just fine.

Following in the footsteps of the TT Explorer, another SUV – this time, a Jeep Wrangler – has shown up looking for some custom work alongside some bolt-ons.

From the looks of it, though, it’s already seen the garage at least once. Last we checked, Wranglers don’t come with 30-plus-inch tires and a Bilstein-equipped lift kit…

…Or a fully metal front bumper with a grille guard…

…Or a heat exchanger that leads to a Vortech supercharger…

…Or this really sweet winch, which also doubles as an easy way to avoid a front-plate ticket (with a little help from the greatest automotive invention ever, zip-ties):

But enough of the one liners. Let’s get down to the real reason for the Jeep being here — some exhaust work. Some of it is bolt-on, and some of it will be fabricated. The owner of this Wrangler has decided to redo his entire exhaust system. The headers and midsection will be supplied by Borla, and Fluid MotorUnion will be doing the rear section’s replacement. Here are the Borla pipes; the headers are slip-on connections to the mid, which meets at a Y and runs a single pipe to the rear section. Thank goodness Borla labeled the headers with stickers; otherwise, we never would have known which side went on which bank of the V6:

First step was to remove the old system entirely. We dropped out the mid and rear sections first. Obviously there’s a bit of room for improvement:

Then we dropped the headers and popped in the replacements. Long tubes always look better than their log-shaped counterparts, even when they’re partially obscured by the rest of the engine bay.

We did encounter an issue when installing the midsection, though. Since the suspension of the Wrangler has changed so dramatically from the OEM configuration, and since the Borla was made for a stock Wrangler….well, you can see where this is going. So we’re going to have to cut into Borla’s handiwork and fashion a workaround for the massive driveshaft that’s chilling where the midpipe SHOULD be. It won’t take long, so this job should manage to be summed up in only two blog posts, so you’ll be seeing a conclusion to this story very soon!