Exhaust Tip Mounts Part 1

I’ve been pondering how in the world I wanted to mount my big chunky/heavy exhaust tips for a while now, so yesterday I figured I would see what I might be able to figure out.  In order to make sure everything was going to sit where I wanted, I first had some trimming of the body to do.

There were a couple of flanges around the bottom rear corners of the body that I believe are just there from being pulled from the molds.  When I looked at a lot of up-close photos of the actual car these flanges were not present.  In order to make sure that I get the look I want these flanges had to go.  I marked off the areas that needed to be trimmed with some masking tape and then used the Dremel cut-off wheel to slice it all off.  As you can see my newly created jack points came in handy to raise the rear of the car for this work 🙂

I lowered the car back down and sat the exhaust tip where I wanted it.  I used a series of wooden boards to raise the tip up to the desired position.  Then I figured I would make a ( for lack of a better term) “arm” that would reach down and be welded to the back of the plate on the exhaust tip.

The concept would be to have the arm permanently welded to the exhaust tip and then find a way to bolt the arm to the chassis.

This arm would tuck up next to the chassis with one end flush against the new jack point that I created.  I figured that I could then weld a couple of nuts into the chassis and create a steel plate that would connect to the arm and then be bolted to the chassis.

My theory is that I really only need to have something that supports the end weight of the exhaust tip, because the back pipe will be connected to the exhaust system which will be supported by some exhaust hangers.  My idea is to have a small flex section between the exhaust and the exhaust tip so that there’s some flex.

I used some bristol board to make a template and mark my holes and also tried to make it look nice with a curved piece that goes up over top of the exhaust pipes.  I used the floor jack to hold the arm into position while I bolted on this mounting plate and welded one side to the arm.

Of course when I took the jack away I realized that the steel that I used was too thin.  Not that it drooped down at all, but instead it had play going backwards/forwards.  So next step is to trace the pattern out onto some 1/8″ steel and give it another go.