26 Nov The Silver Metal- Powdercoat and Exhaust Fabrication
While a silver medal is actually 92.5% sterling silver, that’s not what we’re talking about today. Today’s silver metal is aluminum! We’re going to be looking at Powdercoat and Exhaust Fabrication!–more–>
Okay, so it’s aluminum and its electroplated variant, chrome. That still counts, though. Either way, we ended last week with a quick look at a G55 AMG that was receiving an aesthetic upgrade in the theme of ‘murdered out.’ Specifically, we would be painting the calipers black, and powdercoating the wheels a matte black as well. We showed you the calipers at the end of last week, and shortly after the blog was posted, the wheels came back from the powdercoater. Once they did, we reassembled everything and did some quick testing of the brakes to ensure they didn’t need to be fiddled with more. The brake test passed with flying colors, but since the owner would soon arrive to reclaim this beastly SUV, we snapped a few pictures in the garage (the worst light possible for an all black car, but hey, it was dark outside). The chrome pops perfectly against the dark body, don’t you think?
Over in fabrication, we’ll move from one silver metal (aluminum) to another — steel, stainless to be exact. We’re all finished with Tim’s 911 exhaust up to the muffler, and while we wait for one more thing to finish before we start on the tip, it’s time to add some permanent braces between the various twists in this pretzel of an exhaust. We utilized two of those braces — basically strips of steel — to keep the entire unit moving around as one:
Returning to aluminum, remember the final piece of Tim’s HVAC system that we constructed last week? Essentially, it’s a box that’s meant to channel air from the engine fan, down through a special sealed chamber in the exhaust manifolds, and then up towards the heater vents in the car. Well, we finished that box up over the weekend, and we’ve got a few shots to share from the construction and installation. Basically, we needed to construct an aluminum box that would have three pipes coming into it. We built the box first, then cut out three holes in that box, which we then placed pipe into and welded away. The pipes end at the box’s edge so as not to mess around with the flow of air, and everything rests just above the exhaust thanks to some well-placed brackets. It’s essentially the FMU take on the OEM system, seeing as how the OEM 993 system wouldn’t fit in the 911’s undercarriage.
We’re just about done with Tim’s 911, so we’ll have updates (and hopefully some video) as we get closer to the end result. For now, though, we’re still plugging away at the various jobs still hanging out in the shop. For example, we’re currently underway with the paint work for the bike. Everything has been stripped and prepped, and now it’s just a matter of getting down to it while we wait for a truckload of parts to return from the powdercoater. We hope you all had a good weekend, and we’ll see you tomorrow!
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