I took my car to a custom exhaust shop today, they fabricated a custom y-pipe in about an hour for $370 installed including tax. Not bad considering the magnaflow would have costed me $380 + install. They recommended to take the cat out at the end since no sensor after that so i went with it.

 

Hmm, mandrel or crush bends?

 

I don't know what mandrel means but the machine they had kepted the tube perfectly round during the bend so I'm assuming Mandrel as oppose to crush.

 

thats a muffler not a convertor... looks good though

 

Do you guys get new cats as well as the pipe?

 

Are you asking if they come with the pipe? ...or are you asking if people purchase them separately, with the pipe?

 

Separately changing the cats

 

Ahhh... gotcha. Well, when I purchased my replacement pipe I just went ahead and ordered new cats since I'll be changing out the entire exhaust from the headers back. I figured I might as well since the car is closing in on 140K miles.

 

Never understood why it went down to one just to split back out to 2 again. Supporting 300hp seems like you'd want true duals all the way with either a X-pipe, H-pipe or a 2 in 2 out muffler/resonator to equalize the pressure..

 

Ah, ok that's a great deal then! Crush bent piping is usually cheaper for you and the shop I believe (e.g. 2.5" pipe gets bent by "crushing" the inside area and often leads to almost 0.25" to 0.5" of lost diameter).

Mandrel bends are done on a much, much larger mandrel $$$ machine (from work done on one of my previous cars) and using a different method and makes the pipes keep their diameter around the bends, but can be limiting when dealing with tight, close together bends.

 

I ordered the Magnaflow direct-fit and the correct part number arrived but it was a few inches too short, the way people described SC430 Y-pipes. I got on the horn with Magnaflow and they confirmed that the SC and GS part numbers were the same in their catalogue as well as AllPart (their OEM part catalogue). I had the exhaust shop extend the mid-pip to meet the Magnaflow piece and sent pictures of the process to Magnaflow. I'll update when I hear back from them.

 

Sucks to hear that it didn't fit but I tried to warn you guys that the SC430 and GS430 y-pipes aren't compatible. As for Magnaflow, they should've checked harder as the part numbers between the two are different as well: SC430 (1741050340) and GS430 (1741050330)... They shouldn't be advertising this product as cross compatible.

 

I ended up adding a flex section to extend the pipe

 

Just ordered a Megan Y-pipe for SC430 and will be adding the extension to fit it onto my GS400.

 

Post some pics when you get it put in