I built this exhaust 4 year ago with mandrel bends made of aluminized steel. Seemed like a great idea at the time I've put it through hell and back, driven it across the country twice, modified it for 3 different manifold/header setups and 2 different mufflers, as well as added the good ole redneck cherry bomb

Now 4 years of Canadian winters has rusted it to ----. The straight sections of pipe are fine, but anywhere that it's been welded is rusted almost completely through, and it's broke in 2 different places this summer. I looked it over and found that every other welded joint is just about ready to break free. School is starting in just over a week so I gotta make this thing last 2 more years.

Here's some of what I'm dealing with. I've chipped off most of the loose scaley rust.






The more rust I chipped, the deeper I found that it went. I can tell this one was very close to letting go too. Now I hit it with the angle grinder to get most of the old weld bead off. You can see how thin it is, I actually went through in places and uncovered places it was cracking from being too thin and brittle.






Now that the area is roughly prepped, I got a piece of 16g satincoat steel roughly 1.5" wide to wrap the old weld joint. I tacked it onto the top of the pipe, and bent it around with my hands tacking it all the way around. Once I got back to the top, I cut off the excess, tacked the end in place, and went nuts with the fluxcore








Just make sure to keep things sort of clean. Chip away all the scale rust, wire brush it real good, and if you really want to get fancy you can even grind the area down to bare steel... if there's any left.

Once I've got all the welded joints on the exhaust patched over this way, I'm going to spray bomb them with tremclad to hopefully slow down the rusties for a little while.

Here's the weapons of choice:

110v 70A MIG/wire feed welder. Notice no bottle. Went at this with a true HMT spirit.




The settings.




The tools.




And the wire that god himself wrapped over a core of holy flux. .030" flavour




Hope y'all enjoyed my saturday breathing toxic fumes and I hope this ------- thing lasts me 2 more years

 

looks like a giant Band-Aid

 

fucken sweet

$10 can of high temp paint will go a long way

 

HMT patch work. Nice.

 

true hmt spirit. love the bandaid

 

did you paint over those welds the first time??

 

that was probably the most appropriate way to fix that without replacing it. good ----

the welds came out damn nice for flux core too

 

no I didn't. Maybe I should have, or maybe the paint will come off just as easily as the rust starts. we'll see this winter.

 

Impressive flux core, props.

 

very nice for bird ---- welds