Before I go spending $600-700 on a new exhaust, is this one salvageable? It's a UUC RSC36 and is supposedly T-304 stainless, although it's hard to tell after roughly 10 years and 80k miles. The guy that I usually use to weld things told me it was a lost cause, but I wanted to double check before I wrote it off entirely.
Thanks!
Are those resonators? If so, could you just chop them out and weld in a section? Won't be pretty, but you might get a year or 2 out of them before they are total garbage.
You're not going to get that welded back together as is. Either do as Appleseed suggested or move on.
I have booger welded stuff like that back together in a pinch, but it failed because the metal got very thin, and welding thin metal is not only a bitch and a half, but it's just going to fail again.
If you do insist on trying to weld it back together, don't weld along the break. Weld across the break. To get started you will have to set up blobs of weld about 1/2-1/4" away from the break, this will be a heat sink to prevent it from instantly blowing through. Then add to that on either side until you can bridge the gap. Do this in three or four places. Then when you weld it together, keep welding across the gap by adding to the bridges that you made.
You will end up with about 3/4" of weld bead all the way around the pipe, in addition to the places that you will invariably blow through and have to make a ring around the blowthough and then fill in, because you got impatient and put too much heat into it. This will take a while and will use up quite a bit of materials too.
That's pretty much what I figured the answer would be. Thanks guys!
I might keep it around for practice when/if I get a welder.
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