Well I was bored today so I brought my gen 3 with 5SFE into the shop where I work to fix that notorious stock exhaust sag issue. I had planned to just replace the old worn rubber hangers but found that if I hoisted the exhaust up too high the down-pipe in the front would hit the cross member and would likely rattle like hell. Upon closer inspection I realized that the down pipe that is on there now is not stock but is custom. (I have had this Cam for less than 3 months.)
Okay so anyway after some thought I decided to, cough cough, remove the stock, cough cat cough. Shhhh........ and welded up a test pipe with a gentle upward curve from horizontal to and back to horizontal. This gave the exhaust on the backside a push into the body of about 2" higher than it was and kept the pipe before it from rattling on the cross member. So after replacing the old hangers all the way around on my way home I was delighted to find a fairly good increase in power all across the powerband. This Cam is equipped, (for now), with an auto trans and I noticed that it did not have to upshift once for any of the hills on the way home that it would normally have to with the cruise on. I live in the hills
. A bonus to this is that the exhaust note is much lower and more, rich?, than before. Actually sounds pretty damn good. Its mellow yet still growly. When I bought this car it had thrown a rod through the block behind the compressor, (another 5SFE classic...KEEP OIL IN YOUR ENGINES KIDDIES), I had replaced the engine and ported and polished the head while I had it out. (Another note...I recommend that if you decide to do your own port and polish to only port match the intake side and only polish the exhaust side. I am sure a lot of the more seasoned wrench heads know this already.) The head was also decked and given a 5 angle valve job. The downside to this is that I really had no previous experience with this engine so had no real feel for this cars stock power. Well after freeing up the exhaust side with the test pipe I took real notice of it. By the way, I live in a smog free state. Long story short, if you live outside of CA and have sagging exhaust on your Gen 3 or 4 this might be a fairly simple fix for some and a nice increase in power for all.
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