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So, part of the reason I haven't posted since our trip to Great Britain is that I've been having exhaust issues on my 91 Golf. The system, as you may know, is a Brospeed (Bosal) header into a Techtonics high flow catalytic converter and then straight pipe to a single Flowmaster Delta Flow muffler. Let's just say it has plenty of "character" (that means it's loud). Ever since I finished the shift linkage rebuild, there has been a little bit of a leak between the header and the catalytic converter. It wasn't much of a leak, but just enough so that I noticed it. The part that was sealing that join was nothing more than a strip of stainless steel mesh wrapped around on itself to form a ring. A couple weeks ago I decided to drop the exhaust again and get that sealing ring seated a little better. To make a long story short, I disassembled and reassembled the exhaust 5 or 6 times over the next couple weeks and only managed to make the leak even worse. Along the way, I tried several different parts to replace the strip of mesh that was on it. I tried a ring from a Jeep Cherokee downpipe, but that was too small. I tried two different factory VW exhaust rings, and both of those were too big (in fact, they appeared to be identical even though they were different part numbers). Finally, I got in touch with the good people at Bosal North America and they sent out the correct part to fit their header. I figured that was the best way to get something that was going to fit correctly. Even if I had managed to find a universal part with the correct inner and outer diameters, I really wasn't sure how deep (thick) the ring needed to be in order to seal properly. Well, the part from Bosal arrived today and I just finished installing it this evening. No more exhaust leak!

I'm now surfing the web, looking for good prices on cat back exhaust systems. My cat-back system is just too loud for this quiet little neighborhood we moved into, and it's getting kind of tender anyway. I can get an entire Ansa cat-back system, but it's a factory replacement system and isn't likely to have much of a sound at all. Our 95 Jetta has the Ansa factory replacement cat-back system, and it sounds great for a stock system but it's just far too civilized for an A2 GTI clone like mine. I need something with a little bit of a bark. I would be thrilled to find something that sounds as nice as the stainless Neuspeed exhaust on Claire's 96 Golf, but I doubt that's going to be the case with the cheaper systems that I'm looking at.

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Date: 08/23/06, 10:45:35 PDT
From: jp
Comments: Max, have I not taught you a thing...... just weld in a cherry bomb, and stuff some leaves in the tailpipe! Seriously, the best sounding exhaust I ever did was the one on mikes white gti. it was a conglomeration of nuespeed pipes and a corrodo muffler. I recommend buying an over axle pipe from techtonics, cutting it and welding 2 flanges (dont forget to buy the seal too) that you can buy at midas, and using a short glasspack before the axle and a turbomuffler after it. if you want stainless, you should be able to source all of that stuff in stainless too.

Date: 08/24/06, 13:30:54 PDT
From: Max
Comments: Haha, you and your homebrew exhausts. Actually, Mike's system and the system you built for Shelly were both pretty impressive. Well done on both of those. The thought of building one using a TT over axle pipe did occur to me, but I got discouraged when I went to their site and saw they don't list the over axle pipes. I will try calling them to see if they still sell those. It would be fun to build my own system. I also toyed with the idea of building a system to go *under* the rear axle instead of over it. There's only an inch or two of the rear axle that is capable of swinging downward where the exhaust would run. My old VW Fox had the factory exhaust run that way, with the same type of axle, and there were no clearance problems.