Reply to "Sticky #4: Pantera Exhaust Systems"

Show Them To Me!

That opening line is for all you Rodney Carrington fans and connoisseurs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16cWiWj--8E

But since I’m in the processing of fabbing a set of 180s for my Pantera what I’d really like to see in this thread is your 180 header installations and thought it might be beneficial to have a sticky to form a repository of sorts of Pantera exhaust mods and George obliged with pasting in some related threads (thanks G).

Of particular interest to me is the routing of primaries, mufflers used, and choice of tail pipe exit locations.

I’ve committed to do the deed in stainless, using stepped primaries (1.75”-1.875”-2.00”), merge collectors, and straight through packed mufflers. I’ll piece the primaries together from mandrel bends and have a long block and ZF mocked up on a dolley in my shop and have taken the various measurements for routing.

I chose the 6.25” diameter by 17” OAL Burns single stage mufflers over the smaller 4.5” versions. I have 4.5” units on my GT40 and do not find them objectionably loud for my use but because my Pantera is a street car, I thought a little extra attenuation might be beneficial but did not feel the need to go to a the 2-stage muffler, although, there is a version that is dimensionally identical if I ever wanted to go this route. I actually bought the mufflers from Coast Fab because I wanted a couple minor inlet and outlet mods and they fab all of Burns stuff any way. For what it’s worth, they were great people to work with and turned them in 2 days!

I mocked it up first to see how they laid in and what would be possible for routing and exiting centrally in the condenser opening. It became apparent fairly early that I wasn’t as flush with length as I thought since the total stacked length of the turns of the primaries as they enter the collectors, the length of a true merge collector, muffler and tail pipe length, adds up very quickly. I think I’ll need a slight turn down in the tail pipes to exit in the center of the condenser opening as the mufflers begin to interfere with the ZF selector box as shown in the picture.

I must confess that I have a difficult time looking at the rear end of my Pantera without the Ansa style cans, but just can’t stand the performance hit for my state of tune. I plan on making a couple of fiberglass filler panel inserts for existing Ansa muffler cans that allow for easily reversing the mod and swapping back if so desired in the future. It’ll be a slow moving but worthwhile project.

So, show them (your 180s) to me!