Well, I have been playing with the TIG welder I got last month quite a bit, so I decided to make some things. First, a stainless 4" downpipe. It still needs the wastegate routing, and some o2 bungs, but it's mostly done, and it fits, so I'm calling it a win. I went with 4" because there's enough room with the engine upright, and it has to help with spool, at least a little. That's what I'm telling myself.
The plan with the exhaust manifold was to bring it to Noah for finish welding. Coronavirus has been preventing that, and I got impatient. It took a while, and of course I made some mistakes, but overall it went pretty well for my first big TIG project. One significant downside to doing it myself is that I wasn't able to purge it, like we would have at Noah's. Maybe this will **** me later on, but I was getting full penetration anyway, so I'm hoping it will hold up. I think I want to media blast, then pressure wash the inside of it before I run it, in case there's any small sugar clumps in there.
Related to penetration, if you're making a weld el manifold, make sure you give yourself big enough bevels. The factory bevels are almost knife edged, which will allow full penetration. My bevels were much smaller. Oh, and the cast collector I used is pretty sweet, but the super short connections for the runners make it very tricky to weld out. I actually have to try to bend a tungsten to get the last 10mm or so. And in some spots it just wasn't possible to use filler, so I had to just fusion weld them without filler. A few people said they wanted to build weld el manifolds, and as a beginner welder, I now have some advice on what not to do.
