Polished Exhaust!!! :-D

[75stepside]

As you know, i got my 4 year project on the road in late July of this year. The last thing was getting the exhaust put on the truck. I had a local shop with a great reputation bend the exhuast - 2.5" aluminized steel. Well, i've been waiting for the chance to take down the exhuast and polish it up. It feels pretty wierd to spend 4 years building and building and building only to take some of it apart again!

I took the entire system down in about a half hour. I was a little disappointed in that the steel clamps that I had just put on less than 4 months back were rusted pretty good and this was on a truck that was never in the rain and has less than 300 miles on it! I took down the steel hangers and painted them chassis black.

For the pipe, i put a 6" soft polishing wheel from Lowes on a 3600 RPM bench grinder... and used the #3 cleaning polish bar (brown) from Lowes in step#1 and then a final step using #6 high gloss polish (green) from Lowes to complete it. It took about 8 hours to do the entire exhaust (minus the stacks, which are stainless and have yet to be done). I am very pleased with the results and am looking forward to bolting it back up - with STAINLESS STEEL clamps!

Here is the full system after i took it off. The right side is a little more complex due to routing around the gas tank... makes me wish i would have put in a blazer tank or fuel cell...




right side split polished:


contrast btwn left and right side:


both polished:


intermediate pipes polished:


full system: