Broken exhaust on a 360? Is this normal?

The muffler does not look like a stock Ferrari one. Can you find out who made/sells it?
There is a lot of vibration and heat stress that takes it's toll on the welds and any weak areas.
A top notch welder could do a repair... or take a chance and buy a different name brand one.
Is the damage just on the muffler and brackets?

Good luck to your friend on this issue.

 

probably a fabspeed unit... LOL j/k... I would find out which mfg it is and try to get it replaced.

 

My money is on FabSpeed....I bought FabSpeed 360 tips some time ago and the weld that holds the tips together broke apart and caused a nasty vibration sound...I was told to stay away but I liked the look of the wider tips! I'm glad I did not buy the complete exhaust and stuck with OEM.

Chris, if I'm mistaken I owe you dinner buddy...

 

it looks like the welds didn't fail but rather than metal just beyond the welds failed (in a very jagged fashion as well, no less).

i have a Challenge Stradale silencer I may be selling if your friend is interested, PM me.

 

My Tubi had the welds coming apart and had to be fixed, its common for any brand.

 

Aww. just glue it together with bailing wire and JB Weld.

 

Any exhaust will break due to age, heat and stress on metal. You still can save this exhaust by professional welder

 

I have a trash can for that, just let me know and I will give you the address of my trash can.

That is a easy fix for a welder.

 

are there any welders in the forum? the welds didn't break, the metal failed, as evidenced by close inspection of the 2nd pic. actually, it looks like some of the welds did crack, but the large majority of the failure was not along a weld.

i would bet this was made with a lower grade of steel. i think 304 SS is preferred. i would guess this is 409 SS. wikipedia has a good write up on steel grading.

i recently hired a welder and he told me that even with higher quality grades of SS sometimes after its been through enough heat cycles the steel won't take another weld very well. maybe i misunderstood him. in any event, its pretty obvious the welds didn't fail, the metal did, and even if a welder could fix this, who's to say that part of the metal wouldn't just fail again, making a repair now an annoyance as well as a waste of time and money.

 

Weld didn't penetrate enough .... in addition to vibration. A competent welder can fix it !

 

Don't throw it away, sell it on ebay for a few $$

I dont blame him, nows the time for a Capristo. i wouldn't want an old, re-welded exhaust in my 360!

 

It will be a little difficult to weld the crack under the pipe once the two pieces are joined since there would not be much room to maneuver the welding anode. I have a moderate amount of experience and I know I could do it. Could probably be mig welded, but would look better tig welded. A good experienced welder could do the job without much trouble. The only problem I see is that the exhaust is plated (cad plated or gold chrome?). The welds would have to be plated or at least coated since they would rust. The redneck in me would weld it up, paint the weld with a fine art brush using gold engine paint. I would then proceed to drive the heck out of it. If/when it failed a second time, I would buy a new one.

This reminds me of one of my "I am a redneck" stories. Several years ago, the front exhaust manifold on my wife's Mazda MPV cracked. I took it to the dealership where I bought it new and the technician could distinctly hear the leaking exhaust gas under the heat shield. He said "yeah, I have seen this a few times before". The girl in the service department got the diagnosis from the technician and said with a smile, "we can replace the manifold for $1400, when would you like to bring it in?" Spending $1400 on a problem that was an obvious design flaw on a minivan that my kids would eventually destroy brought out the redneck in me. I said "let me get back to you". I drove it home, removed the manifold, drilled out the welds on the heat shield, and found the manifold had cracked in two pieces just below a factory weld. I beveled the edges of the crack with a grinder and welded it together with my mig welder. I put the heat shield on, welded the holes up I had drilled out and bolted the manifold back in. We drove it another 80,000 miles with no issues. Took me about 4 hours and $5 in material to repair.

 

why not ? nothing wrong if its properly welded back together.

I would tig that up and put it in my car with no second thoughts, I would not mig it like someone already suggested, I prefer tig on stainless. Grind out the opening to a square and weld a nice solid square piece of stainless there, then clean up the pipes back to clean metal, cut a hole i the plate and weld away, better then new when done, might not look stock but its a exhaust do people really look at a exhaust for cosmetics ? I sure dont and for those that do, I can lay down a bead that is a work of art.

 

Damn Glad I went with Capristo.

 

i guess a reason why not is because it can waste time and money to do something that is not guaranteed to work and could look bad too. when I say not guaranteed to work i mean this two ways: first the weld itself could have an air leak when finished (due to the complexities of what is trying to be welded in terms of curves and access [even when its out of the car]) and second because the metal could fail again. no offense to the friend of the OP, but it looks like its low grade steel. the '3' '6' '0' "stencils" both have cracks near the '0's and one of the '0's has the center completely missing. he could be repairing this unit over and over again and if he can't get it out of the car himself, he could be paying a good bit in labor to a mech plus money to a welder only to keep repeating the process. the supports may also be poorly designed, which could have contributed to stress on the unit to cause the cracks near the stenciling and connection that broke apart and if that's the case, the failures could continue. it just seems like its throwing good money after bad.

 

Now that I look at your pix and what I recently put on my car, I can say that muffler and tips are from FabSpeed.

This does not bode well for me. Looking at your pix and where the cracks go through the brackets (where the 360 numbers are cut out), it seems that the metal may be too thin and maybe the cracks started at the bends and propagated over to the cut outs. Once that happend, ther was no support for the muffler and where the pipe is welded. Welding can affect the metal around the weld and weaken it.

I wonder if FabSpeed will stand behind there product and do the right thing or blow you (and others) off. I bought mine thru VividRacing last year.

Not sure if I want to remove the muffler and wels additional bracing or not.

Please keep us posted how this shakes out.

 

I weld mig and tig. That is weldable and cheap to weld even if you pay the local welding shop. A new oem exhaust "used" is expensive. Don't sweat it weld it. Then keep your eyes open for a tubi and pounce when the price is right. Also, don't blame the muffler until you are sure everything up stream of that is correct. You can have other vibrations and stresses that encourage stresses on the parts that broke. Maybe you are lucky you did not crack something more important upstream and the muffler gave out instead. Motor mounts as an example are things to check. The fleet of these cars are around 15 years old.

 

i was thinking along the same lines -- that something more expensive could have failed and this had been the best outcome with the failures being a case of incorrect mounting of the silencer and the silencer is what yielded to the stress. but then i remembered that the OP said the muffler was 2 years old so if it was in the car that long, i think it just failed due to age and thin/overstressed metal at the mounts and a combination of lower quality steel and thin weld material at the can. if the silencer was mounted too high / too low and it was stressing the mounts, i would guess the cracks would have appeared within a few drives of the original installation, not so long after the fact. of course, it could be combination of factors as well. then again, aren't the header/cat connections those spring-loaded donut connectors? this should help spare the headers, even if a silencer is poorly aligned/installed.

 

I guess your friend isn't the original purchaser of this exhaust since he didn't know the brand? I thought Fabspeed had a lifetime warranty on their exhaust products?