Re: New muffler <mostly wob>

[Michiel van Wessem <jmvw@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Scott-

At 10:01 AM 1/26/99 PST, SMILLER@domain.elided wrote:
>Hi Michiel, glad to hear of your positive DIY muffler install.  Just a=
 couple
>of sarcastic comments (I'm so good at that, you know):
>
>1.  It took you 4 hours, but was a "piece of cake".  So, of course, I
>envisioned 3+ hours to hack the old one off and clean up the mess, and
>maybe as much as an hour to install the new one.  From my
>muffler-changing experiences (not recent), this would be "normal".

Actually, there's about an hour there for taking a shower afterwards. It
started raining halfway and I got pretty messy lying on the driveway. 3
hours is closer to the time it took me to change things.=20

It seems long to me as well. Same thing everytime I do stuff on cars, I
always seem to take more time then I thought I would. Probably in part
because these things are new to me and I want to be careful.=20

It was easy to remove the old muffler. I think it was installed by some
kind of muffler place and they must have used anti-seize compound as well.=
=20

>Then you said removal of the old muffler was "easy".  So what took 4
>hours?  Did your time estimate include actually baking the cake, just
>eating the cake, or was cake only a metaphorical reference?

Did I really say cake? I may have eaten some cake halfway.=20

>2.  For future projects, we measure work time around here in beer, not
>cake, OK?  It is harder for us to relate to "cake time".   :^)

Oh! Sorry!=20

Cake is good though. %)

>But seriously, I guess we've gotten spoiled by the fit of the factory
>chrome tips on the factory muffler.  Too bad you had to bend up the
>chrome tip to get it to fit.  The anti-sieze was a good idea. The extra
>locking nuts were probably an oversight.  Or, maybe they use the same
>installation kit for both the 325e and the 325i?  The "i" system uses dual
>pipes.  Were there extra gaskets, too?

Nope, just one gasket, so it must have been for the "325e".

Following advise by Jeff Patch, I bought a $.99 muffler clamp to hold down
the tip. I became a little dilemma for me, whether I should keep the tip or
not:

Tip pros:
- - I paid money for it.
- - it's shiny=20

Tip cons:
- - it needs a heavy muffler clamp to be held down.=20
- - it took some of my time.=20
- - it's extra stuff, with no mechanical purpose.

>I'm gonna need a new muffler some day, probably sooner than later.=20
>There's a hole in mine that was really small when I bougt the car almost 3
>years ago, but has grown larger.  It gives my car a distinctive sound that
>my dogs recognize 2 blocks before I get home, thus allowing them to
>bark and wake up the neighbors to alert them that I've arrived home.=20
>When I change the muffler, it's gonna mess up the early warning
>system...

I know what you mean. My parents used to have a Citro=EBn 2CV. I don't think
they exist in the US, but it's a great car. It was designed somewher in the
late 40's or early 50's with french peasants in mind, so that they could
drive their produce over dirt and rock roads to the market. It had a very
soft and long suspension, which made it lean over like crazy in corners,
but supposedly impossible to tip over. There was a vinyl roof you could
roll up and fasten with snap buttons. See http://www.spbarnes.demon.co.uk/
for a picture of a 2CV (although only close to the end of their production
they came with those goofy stripes). It was a cult car, I think similar to
what the Beetle was in the US. At one time they even had a four wheel drive
version, with two engines, one in the back and one in the front.=20

Citro=EBn made a lot of interesting cars. Too bad they don't seem to be
present in the US. They also made what I think was the first front wheel
drive car, the Traction Avant, which had headlights that turned with the
wheels.=20

I could talk more about Citro=EBn cars, but hey, I'm way off topic. What I
wanted to say is that this thing had air cooling and that gave it a very
distinctive sound. As a kid, I always knew it when my parents came home and
had to stop whatever evil I was doing. :)

Good luck when you get to your muffler. I liked doing mine.

Apologies everyone for this being kind of chaotic. If you enjoyed reading
it as much as I liked writing it, that's not a big deal.

Michiel (87 325es http://www.vramp.net/~jmvw/cars/BMW/ )
(snipping rest)

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