The World Is Not Enough

02 Apr The World Is Not Enough

On a good many occasion, we’ll go above and beyond the call of duty during fabrication. Let’s give you one example that’s currently going on.

You may remember Anthony’s C55 from the blog last week, where we chronicled its exterior upgrades in the way of yellow-painted calipers, tires and helmet. Along with that, he was receiving a new fiberglass rear bumper, which we’ve since painted and installed. While the bumper’s trim pieces are drying and waiting to be applied, we went about updating Anthony’s rear end with another unique touch — a custom rear section for his exhaust. A long, long time ago in a galaxy not too far away from ours, we did a custom midsection for Anthony that went from the headers to about the middle of the car, while retaining the stock AMG muffler setup. That all changes now, with the placement of the first piece, a pass-through resonator to cut down on some of the drone.

And as always, as the 309 stainless was being assembled to connect the resonator to, you know, something, we made sure to crank our shop Nikon’s zoom up to 55mm in an attempt to capture the properly thin beads from our TIG welding.

During what felt like a very quick lunch, we came back over to fabrication to find a nearly complete exhaust system. As always, the speed of fabrication can reach astounding levels when one is busy consuming a steak quesadilla. So in order to make up for that, we tried to capture some more lovely welds. You may notice that they’re a bit more technicolor than usual — we’re fiddling with the (albeit paltry) flash settings in order to change things up a bit. That way, we don’t need to rely on a steady hand and a high ISO in order to take pictures of the welds while the exhaust is still on the car.

If you noticed from earlier, we changed the number of outlets on the exhaust from the OEM two, to just one. We’ll show you what’s going to take the other half’s place in a different blog post, but for now let’s focus on what we decided to do with the single exhaust outlet that’s been constructed. As we’ve done in the past, and plan to do in the future, we went with a turndown tip. Not only is it a distinct feature (while not for everybody, we happen to enjoy them), but it also serves to help route the exiting exhaust gas down and away from the car, giving it less of a chance to pour the noxious fumes all over the new rear bumper.

And if you know us, when it comes to modifications, the world is not enough — we always want more, there’s always more to do. Such is the case with Anthony’s new rear bumper. The diffuser at the bottom of the bumper had a TON of area to suck up air and mess with downforce, so we added an aluminum piece that runs from just in front of the differential cooler and connects to the bumper’s diffuser. Now he won’t suffer as many ill effects from improper turbulence behind the bumper, and it adds a bit more of a race-ready aesthetic to the rear end.

Before we get into this next set of pictures, we’ll give you a little insight that we’ve picked up over years of body work. When you buy a fiberglass aftermarket bumper, whether it’s the front or the rear, it will never sit like OEM directly from the box. Usually you’ll have to adjust certain parts to your liking and undergo a bit of filling-in where the fiberglass gets wavy, and even then, it may take a few more hours than anticipated to get the correct fitment you desire. On Anthony’s bumper, the forward-most parts of the bumper (that make up the shape of the fender arches) were a bit bowed out, even after tens of additional hours of work on it. Therefore, fabrication came up with a quick solution to fix the bowed-out parts — two bars, running from the bottom of the bumper to the aluminum undershield, with adjustable links to help position the rear bumper’s edges perfectly.

We still have one more bit for the C55 in store, so stay tuned and have a great week!