The day I schedule to take care of the blown exhaust and halfshafts, and whatever else I can get to. First, a little background info.
After much digging around, I found that Borla offers a Cat-Back system that is supposed to "Bolt right in" to the 78-84 928s. The part number that I found was Borla P/N 14276.
Here is a pic from Borla's website:
I called Borla and one of the guys there sent me this drawing:
(Click image above for full-size drawing)
I found what seemed to be a great price at Performance International; they are(as of this writing) selling them for $365, plus tax and a reasonable shipping fee.
I placed my order and tried to be patient. Meanwhile, I found one good halfshaft with good boots on it at PartsHeaven for $75. I purchased the second one elsewhere but it turned out to have cracked boots and too much play, so I returned it:
It was in better shape than the ones that were on there, but not good enough to use:
I ordered a set of CV joints to rebuild the other shaft from Devek and will update when I finish that process.
So, moving right along, first I have the shark "Assume the position", and here is a peek underneath at the original exhaust... looks OK, right? Riiiiight....
A closer look reveals that the muffler has rusted off of the tailpipe, and the resonator is blown:
Amazingly, the rubber hanger donuts seemed a bit stiff but otherwise fine, as in "no cracks", but I had planned from the start to replace them whatever they looked like. I knew I needed two and ordered three "just in case". For the curious, here is a view of the front hanger and the flange on the back of the cat:
After about 45 minutes of goofing around getting the car on ramps, taking pictures, doing the occasional bit of actual work on the car, etc., I had the stock exhaust out... pretty, eh?
So then it was time to open Pandora's -- er -- Borla's box that they sent me:
Interestingly, Borla chose not to provide the proper flange to allow me to re-use the exhaust donut.
I ended up cutting some bulk Mr. Gasket header gasket material to seal the flange behind the cat. It seems to be holding at the time of this writing, about a week later. The next pair of pics show the mounted resonator from a couple of different angles. The holes in the Borla flange and hanger bracket were almost big enough to swallow the OEM washers, so I temporarily mounted everything up with some cheap washers I had laying around; I plan to put some better washers on there when I get back underneath. I had to tweak the heatshield a bit to clear the hanger bracket at first, then again later to keep the inboard edge of the resonator from rattling against it.
At this point I did a test fit of the rear muffler, and found that it interfered with the battey box bracket. I found out later from Susan at Devek that some of the early 928's had a longer battery box, and they knew of this issue already. Lesson learned... AGAIN.... ask the experts first!
OK, screw the muffler. I need to get on with the halfshaft before I finish the exhaust anyway, so I press on with that. The used halfshaft from PartsHeaven needed a good cleanup; I removed all of the old grease that I could and loaded them up with fresh CV joint grease, the black stuff with moly disulfide. Here is the halfshaft after cleaning and greasing one end:
I cleaned up the cups on the axle and the diff as well as could be, and put fresh gaskets in. I didn't take pics of this step because I was filthy and covered with grease at this point. Maybe I'll go into more detail when I detail the process of rebuilding the halfshaft. The gaskets have a peel-off backing and an adhesive to stick them to the cups, so the cups need to be squeaky clean. I used a scraper, then a wire brush, then carb cleaner to get them clean enough. I cleaned all of the hardware(actually, my good friend Brian was helping; mostly with smartass comments, but he also cleaned the bolts for me) and torqued the flanges down to the factory spec 60 ft-lbs. Don't the CV joints look nice now? Oh, later cars are welded at the hub end; if you don't have this six-bolt flange at the hub end, you're in for some fun. You need to take the wheel off and break loose a big nut that by all accounts breaks loose at ~400 ft/lbs, and needs to be re-torqued to 332 ft-lbs. You can get the minor details on Nichol's site, but basically get a beefy breaker bar, lock the parking brake, and use a jack on the end of the breaker bar to loosen the nut. Be sure you have a torque wrench that reads accurately to 332 ft lbs!
So the next steps are, get to a shop that can weld stainless and have the rear muffler massaged, and rebuild and install the second halfshaft as soon as I can. Driving the car with just the resonator on it is kind of a kick, a reminder of younger days. It's real loud, and sounds a lot faster than it is... I should have it fixed before it begins to get on my nerves though. Since I only half-finished what I set out to do, this counts as a tie and there WILL be a rematch. Updates coming as I have time... :)