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Is this a good deal for a killer exhaust


280Zen

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I know most of you have looked at Jeff Priddy's website with his 400+ HP 280zx. On one of his pages he shows a custom designed 3" exhaust system. I emailed him the other day and got a response that the shop would build some but only if there were 14 buyers. Jeff said he had about 13 or so people that at one time or another were interested in having that exhaust system. Jeff said it costed him around $850 with him doing the machine work on the flange, making the brackets and running around getting parts. Jeff said he would put me on his list and get ahold of all the people that were interested and see if he can come up with enough to have this exhaust system duplicated.

 

What do you all think? is it worth my money? Im not really all that impressed with the exhaust systems I have looked at so far to fit my 280zx.

Jeff Priddy's Extreme 280zx

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  • 1 month later...

Yes the system does semm like it is expensive, but just to give yourself an idea of what the materials cost why dont you take a look at what some of the various components cost, and then you will understand that my quote is very reasonable. Just the stainless steel tubing 16Ga 3" is about 10-12 dollars a foot for that stuff. Mild steel is about 30% the cost of the stainless. I looked at a number of couplers and I could have gone with mild steel three bolt flanges andthat would be cheaper, but that would have madethe system a pain in the butt to install. You would have the muffler shop do the cutting and welding of the flanges, so your savings after the shop did the rest of the fab work would eat up all of your savings and then some. The couplers I used are extremely high quality and they dont require gaskets. The last option was a V-band type coupler, nd they are almost double the cost of the parts I used, and again you would have to have the shop weld them on for you.

The cat and the muffler you can price out yourself. They are a car sound cat and a Magnaflow muffler.

Then when you look at places like MSA, they are pricey themselves, and you cant even get a 3" system in stainless.

You can also look at some of the stuff made for the 300 from companies like stillen and you will find that they are way more expensive. I priced a system for my car at well over 1200.00

So maybe it is pricy, but well worth the money in my opinion. I think the thing that really pissed me off was that I had the system first made in mild steel and I did it in three trips to the muffler shop. The first was the muffler and tips that cost me 206.00 installed and all the guy did is hack off my muffler and weld the dynomax and tips on. The second trip was to get the 3" cat back pipes done and that cost me another 100.00. The last one was the real pisser. I had the pipe cut for the down pipe, and the flange made, and the gasket. I needed it welded together and needed the 3 feet of pipe to the cat, and needed the cat. That trip cost me 471.00 for the cat and to weld the system together, and I had most of the fab work done. Now we are talking about a hacked together system (in mild steel) that ended up costing me about 775.00 and I had to make the flange, buy the ubends, and let some hacker work on my car. When the system was done it worked well, but it sure looked like crap in my opinion. Heck I even made the O2 bungs because the standard weld on parts you can buy are to thick to properly expose the O2 sensor to the exhaust gases.

That is when I decided to do the system myself. I bought a welder the pipe and the u bends. I made the bungs, and the flange along with the gasket. I made all of the mounting hardware also. That cost me another 300 or so, and then I was ready to take that proto to the pipe bender and let hin duplicate that in stainless.

anyway that is the story on the system. if you want to check out some of the costs of the parts I mentioned you can look on http://www.burnsstainless.com and get a good idea of the cost they have for some of the components and the tubing.

oh well, anyway, I think I priced the system very conservatively considering the time and effort I myself have to put out for a completed system, yea it works out to about 5 bucks an hour for my labor. This was done so that other people could have a system that they would need to run high Hp numbers with their engines and have the looks and function of a very well designed complete system.

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