After taking care of the moldings and bumpers and other body trim on the El Camino, the next target area was the undercarriage. Here I had a homemade crossmember that I threw together from some angle iron and iron pipe. The crossmember is only held in with a bolt on each side temporarily just to keep the tail of the transmission held up. I also had remnants of the old exhaust system still in place. The axle pipe and most of the intermediate run of pipes on each side were still in place. Now most of these pipes were either bent or rusted or both, enough so that it wasn't worth even trying to save any of this pipe. This stuff will have to go. Now I did have a factory crossmember that we picked up in Texas along with the rear bumper. Only problem is the factory crossmember only has a depression on one side, meant to accommodate one pipe going to the muffler. This car was made during the time when engines were detuned for emissions purposes so there weren't any dual exhaust systems and high performance engines. The exhaust manifolds' flange pipes merged into a Y pipe which then routed to a single pipe going through a catalytic converter and muffler and out a single exhaust pipe. Any aftermarket modification required custom crossmembers made for dual exhaust systems. Ironically the homemade crossmember I made conveniently sits in a way under the frame rails where there is proper spacing between the top of the crossmember and the floor of the car to allow for exhaust pipes to pass over without interference. As for the exhaust pipes, I'm still up in the air on how I want to handle this. The engine currently has regular exhaust manifolds in place. I would need to hit the junkyard and remove a couple of flange pipes from another truck's exhaust manifolds then cut a length of the pipe with the flange so these can be attached to our exhaust manifolds and terminate at a point where extra pipe can be added easily. Of course the extra pipe would have to be sourced from the junkyard from other donor trucks/cars as well. This includes the axle pipe. Now I could do that on the cheap end or I can add a set of cheap headers with their own flange pipes and piece together an exhaust system from generic pieces of pipe like the U pipe for the axle and straight lengths of pipe for the intermediate runs between the engine and the axle. Of course to remove these pipes the reciprocating saw had to come out so I can chop these lengths of pipe into multiple pieces in order to remove them with the least amount of trouble to myself. Since the pipes were getting scrapped anyway it didn't matter just how badly I hacked up these pipes. Now as for the mufflers, I could recycle the mufflers as they were still in good shape and not rusted through. I would just need to weld on any fittings to adapt to whatever size exhaust pipe I do use. If I was really on some bootlegging I could actually acquire some lengths and bends of pipe and make what would be the bootleg equivalent of a header by welding a short length of 45 degree bend pipe to the ports of each manifold and just connect to these with couplings and the pipes for the exhaust system. There are a few ways I can approach the exhaust system and I'll have that figured out when I get to that point. Now back to the crossmember. What I planned on was still using the homemade crossmember, but adding to it to make it stronger. I planned on doing this by adding a piece of thick flat stock crossways to both ends, then drill holes in the ends of that piece of flat stock so they can be secured to the holes on the car's frame. This will be about the same as the two bolts per side that the factory crossmember uses except it'll allow for exhaust pipes to pass over the top. That doesn't fully write off the factory crossmember though. I do have to cut the tongue that the transmission mount rests on and invert it since this crossmember is meant for a Turbo 350 transmission and the 700R4 that is currently in the car has a thicker mount that would require the tongue to be mounted lower on the crossmember. I'll remount the tongue and that should make this crossmember able to be mounted with the 700R4. As for the ability to accommodate dual exhaust, I'll probably have to cut a chunk out of the crossmember tube and reweld the metal in to have the same depression like the factory depression for the one exhaust pipe. This had to be done on the Monte Carlo's crossmember as it had the same situation that this one has. If I get the factory crossmember reconfigured to accommodate dual exhaust then I may very well go with the factory piece and put the homemade piece aside, just in case I run across another similar GM car missing a crossmember. The homemade unit is more easily modified than the factory piece.
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