Sacramento mustang 3" downpipe

[SVOeric]

I bought this piece a while back, and have been trying to get it right since I got my car running.  It is still leaking!.


the good :
The pipe don't really hang down any farther than the stock downpipe, so you don't worry about dragging it


The pipe is nice quality material.


the bad:


It is very hard to get the pipe to not hit the floorboard where the bend is. the bend really needs to be about 2 inches farther back, there is plenty of room there, without making the pipe too low. 


The ball on the end that connects to the Y pipe is not large enough.  The edges on the socket of the stock Y pipe will hit the flange on the downpipe before it can get tight enough to seal.


The end of the downpipe(where the ball is)  tapers down too far, the hole in the end is actually smaller than 2.25 (2 1/4) inches.


Overall Rating: not recommended -- I would suggest researching some others

[8T6 SVO]

Sacramento downpipe

Eric,

I have this pipe also - I have not installed it yet and up till now, my main concern was finding a stock hanger support so I could weld it to this pipe. My car is close to stock (y pipe is in the stock location) and I'm hoping this 3" pipe will fit good because of this. I have heard of other people having problems with other brands of 3" down pipes, but never this pipe.
Has your exhaust system been altered before (mufflers changed, cat changed)? Will modifications from a muffler shop make this 3" downpipe work o.k.?

I wonder where they got the specs to build this pipe from?

Anyone else have issues with this pipe?

[SVOeric]

My car was has the original stock exhaust on it, except for the downpipe.

I also welded the hangar off my old downpipe to the new one, to get some extra support.

The place I had the most trouble was keeping it from hitting the floorboard.   The original pipe has 2 bends, it looks like the sacramento pipe tried to accomplish this same turn with one bend.  After 3 atempts, I think I finally got it where it won't rub.  It will go in without rubbing, but there is plenty of room there, why make it so dificult?

where it connects to the Y-pipe is just a bad engineering job.  They either needed to make the ball bigger, or move the flange they weld on back farther on the pipe.   Without doing some grinding, or putting a donut gasket in, there is no way to keep this connection from leaking.

I'm sure a muffler shop could make this fit, and not leak, but like I said, It will either require a gasket, some grinding, or some welding (which I wouldn't recomend)

 

 

 

.

[8T6 SVO]

Sacramento Mustang 3" downpipe

Is this the same as your pipe Eric?

[8T6 SVO]

Sacramento Mustang 3" downpipe

Y-pipe end.

[8T6 SVO]

Sacramento Mustang 3" downpipe

Turbo end

[SVOeric]

I-dentical!!

[8T6 SVO]

Sacramento downpipe

I-screwed!?!

[indiana dave]

I have the Esslinger downpipe, and noticed the mouth at the trubo was very small also... Didn't have time to change it though...
It also took some tweaking to get it so it didn't hit the body, or the frame, or both on acceleration. It was also a pain to get the nuts tightened onto the turbo because the pipe widened out to quickly & the studs were too long to get a deep socket on them... Had to use a lot of spacer washers to get it tight.
I'm not sure who Esslinger is, or if they still sell them, but they pretty much told me to get lost when I tried to call them to talk about it. Something about ETS (Esslinger Turbo Scene) splitting up into ETS (Essential Turbo Systems) and neither wanted to take responsibility for it.

[SVOeric]

I'd say you're not screwed, You just have to do quite a bit of work to keep the pipe from rubbing, and to get it to seal up...

 

Most of my problems were on the Y-pipe end, not the turbo end.  The flange on the turbo end was pretty thick material, so I didn't have any trouble getting it to tighten up on that end..

The Y-pipe end will not seal tho ... Just be ready for the leaks on that end.

[SVOeric]

A pic is worth 1000 words...

After installing a new exhaust system this weekend (Thanks Ryan!) It made a AWESOME difference

Check out just how far down the sacramento downpipe tapers...

[Majestic]

That's why I went with the short pipe/no cat. No worries, mate!

Chris

[lonchair]

I had the Sac Pipe (full length) on my car for about a year before I switched to the ATR one. I never any problem with it hitting the floorboard or any other part of the body and no leaks either. Later I even had a 3" high flow cat installed and no clearence problems with that either.

[SVOeric]

did you install it yourself, or did you have someone do it for you ?

Just curious...

There is no way the ball end of that pipe will fit into the socket on the Y pipe without leaking... unless you do some work on it, or use a gasket of somekind.

And did you look at the pic of how far it tapers down?

[lonchair]

I had a muffler shop do it for me while I was at work one morning. It only took them around 2.5 hours and the only problem they told me about was that they had to tweak the bends in my new duel exhaust pipes so they sat even under the rear bumper. Oh, the y-pipe was a stock replacement so there was no custom stuff going on there to mate to the down pipe.