After completion of pumpkin work, I am now installing the exhaust and trying to align it better than before (The Tubi was installed by the PO). As you can see on the pics, the right pipe is somewhat in, compared to the left. There are absolutely no signs of the right pipe being hit so it looks like the fabrication precision was not there. It appears that the misalignment is due to the right pipe's "S" bend being deeper (bent more towards the front of the car) than the left. Has anyone else experienced poor build quality with Tubi? If anyone has done corrections, I would like to know how easy/difficult it would be to pull the right pipe some 20mm out if I cut the stiffener plate (marked with a red line on the 2nd pic). Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
I have the same Tubi on my 348, (exept for that strange logo, bird/6 thing on your second picture.) Mine is streight, and I have no fitting issues at all. To be honest, I think yours is just bent in some way.
I'm not convinced it's bent, I think there is a manufacturing defect on the right hand pipe. Looking at the first picture, it looks to Me as though the right hand pipe prior to the "Y" exhaust tips, is shorter than the left side, causing the "Y" tips to come out short and at an angle. OP: Get a piece of string, tape it to each pipe in turn, from the exhaust box to the "Y" tip joint and compare the lengths. I suspect you'll find they're not the same length and that's your problem! (You could also try making a cardboard template of the left hand pipe, flip it over and see how it would look on the right hand side). I have to say that that exhaust would bug the c:censored: p out of Me every time I looked at it! One of the 348's I looked at had the exhaust tips pointing slightly downwards and I told the dealer that I wouldn't be able to live with them like that. I said if I bought the car they'd have to sort out the exhaust tip angle out first (which went down like a lead balloon!). In the end I didn't buy that car but the one I did buy had the tips pointing slightly upwards nicely. (To be fair, I do tend to suffer a bit of OCD though! One of the very few things that really bugs Me about the 348 design is the single intake for the air-con! I mean, if you're happy to design the car with a dummy front grill purely for looks, why not add a second, dummy intake to the front spoiler purely for aesthetics?).
mine is slightly canted just like yours. It almost touches the exhaust hole on the body/left side. My car was never hit. I think it's like many other exhausts out there with minor flaws. My MV Corse exhaust for my F4 it bent a little "down" on the rear. It's a $3600 exhaust...!
I wouldn't cut it and try to re-bend it. That sounds like a disaster. I would instead loosen the entire system and slide the stock donuts to try and move the whole thing. Some of the stock donuts are just clamped on. They move up/down, in/out to fine tune the position.
If an adjustment will not align the pipe I would grind off the main weld on the muffler and align/weld the pipe correctly. This is super easy to do.
My Tubi also does not fit exact. Seems like they have this issue. My mechanic is going to cut, bend and re weld next year when I do my annual service.
As you can see on the first picture, the box is perfectly parallel with the rear body line. It is just the right pipe that is a bit more bent forward than the left. After I installed the bumper (correctly shimmed to the body left and right), the difference in lengths of the tail pipes protruding is not too bad - the right one is 8 mm shorter so I can live with it (since I cannot look at both tips at the same time). But one wouldn't expect this when paying a few thousand. I also found another major misalignment - the left and right hangers. With the height of the left and right tail pipes adjusted correctly, the right bracket sits much lower at the spring-support than the left. The silencer box, however, sits perfectly horizontal so the error is in the lengths of the hangers. If I one day decide to change the exhaust, I will be looking at other brands.
Tub exhaust on the 348 and 355 never really fit very well. For such an expensive part, the fit could be much better
You should be abl3e to make is align fairly well using a combination of adjustments to the hangers, the cat-to-muffler connector and the header-to-cat connector. Minor tweaking can get you where you want to go, or at least pretty close.
I checked the fit and adjustment holes on mine. Everything lines up really well and the mounts are adjusted to roughly the same height on both sides. About the only thing I noticed is that the tail pipes are not perfectly centered in the bumper cutouts, but they are off symmetrically.
As I recall 348 was the first Tubi exhaust made, or at least the first promoted here. In the early 90s we had a lot of trouble installing them due to inconsistent fabrication. Incorrectly bent pipes were the norm. They got much better over time.
