Well...good news and bad news. I was able to start the car and drive it back onto the trailer for the very first time. The clutch, transmission and driveline are all operational and that is a really nice feeling.
I was stuck at the exhaust shop for an hour though with people asking questions and eyeballing the swap.
Exhaust looks great. A couple of extra beds to keep it tight to the driveline in the mid section, but all in all it was exactly what I wanted. All using stock hangers too.
So, you can't really see it here but its really, really tight here around the starter and lower control arm.
This is with 2 1/4" pipe as the 2 1/2" pipe would have been even tighter. THe outlets on the manifolds are 2 1/4" and the flanges were 2 1/4" so we ended up just running that back to the muffler. Then out the back with the 3". 3" looks small
Exhaust fits really well and it would have taken me forever to build.
It sounds awesome too. Ended up fitting an 18" muffler in the stock location. It is not a quiet car though by any means. Its hard to explain but it sounds very modern. Does not sound like a 5.0 or an old school hotrod but sounds like a late model corvette.
So I got it home and still needed to add coolant to it and do a little bit of troubleshooting on guages.
Filled the system with water and actually let the car run for a little bit. First problem, my volvo fan switch does not function at all so no electric fan turned on....got that quickly bypassed but the car got really hot really quick.
I bled the system and toped it off with water, and got the thermostat to open and flow water but something is not right, either an issue with the water pump or an issue with the system in general. I have heard that these engines are a little bit finicky to get the system bled right, so I am heading out early this am to see if I can take astab at getting it running better.
Sean