Jackaroo breathes !! Restrictors removed !!

Hi one and all, now that i am a 'man of lesiure' i took the opportunity to take the jack down to the local exhaust centre and have a look see at the pipes . As some of you might know i have previously mentioned that the V6 exhaust has some penny washer style restrictors in the up pipes just forward of the join to the 'y' section. So i tell the boys about it and they give me the 'look' , no worries i say i'm paying no probs so whip off the pipes !! They were adamant that no manufacturer puts restrictors in the pipes, but bugger me if they didn't let fly with some expletives when the pipes dropped. There in the 'y' section of the pipe just aft of the join were a different set of restrictors to the ones i had seen on another jack, these were like a tapered piece of pipe with some holes drilled in them pressed into the pipe and spot welded in place. leaving the system effectively as twin 1 1/4 inch pipes !! Not nice mr holden i say... A couple of minutes with the oxy heating the spot welds and prying them out and we had a nice open system. The pipes up to the cat converter are all mandrel bent and very well made, the cat is an ok size - any bigger and you would put too much heat into the gearbox/trans case. But from the cat back it is only press bent garbage, so the best bang for the buck is to just replace the cat back section with a 2 1/2 mandrel bent pipe and single chamber quality muffler, cost about $450. Cost to remove the restrictors and refit pipes with new gaskets and bolts - $50 yee ha...

So road test time, fire it up and you can tell straight away it is breathing better, out on the road it acellerates beautifully with only 1/4 throttle and is actually quieter than before, 3rd gear takes you straight up to 100kph before you know it. The resonance between 3k and 4k is gone and it will pull cleanly from 60 to the limiter in 5th no dramas. It is now actually hard to hold 100 on the flat because the throttle blade is only just cracked open so the future economy readings should be interesting :-))) The only down side i have noticed so far is that there is some cam chatter in the pipe when changing up while going hard but it only seems evident when trailing the throttle from 5k or higher - a small price to pay i say.

So i can highly reccommend this little project to al the v6 owners ( Savvas and Adam especially) Happy driving :-)))))))