| Well, I was finally able to get ahold of my welder over the weekend and schedule some time to finish up the exhaust system components. To date, all of the piping is complete and I have been spending the past few days working on building the mufflers - they are coming along as planned but I ran into a small snag with the muffer's internals and have changed my mind on the internal design I will be using. I picked up the stainless steel tips for the mufflers for around $18 a piece; polished 304 stainless steel. I also picked up the stainless sheet to build the muffler body and endcaps from an ebay seller - 304SS, 16-gauge. Rolling the cans turned out to be a challenging step that unfortunately didn't turn out quite like I wanted it to, so I sacrificed the old mufflers from my Z that were in the accident and used a plasma cutter to gut them out, as well as another pair that were given to me by DaytonaZ (I just wanted the resonated tips on them) What I found was rather interesting - I didn't take pictures but I drew up a diagram of the two different designs I ran into with the mufflers' guts. 
The grey areas indicate the perforated tubes within the muffler that allow the exhaust pulsations to pass through and dissipate into the packing medium (in these mufflers, these tubes were tightly wrapped with a stainless mesh, and the remainder of the body was filled with what appeared to be a fiberglass wadding). My old Naxos mufflers were designed as shown in version "A", having a split in the exhaust flow just after the inlet of the muffler whereas Roland's (DaytonaZ) mufflers had the split just before the tips. I never heard Roland's exhaust, but he commented on how loud these mufflers were on his car. The Naxos mufflers weren't the quietest mufflers I've ever heard, but they did have a very clean, non-raspy sound to them all the way through the revs without any of that ~3000RPM resonance buzz at all. I was originally going to go with the large single center tube and then split the flow just before the tips, but after seeing the construction of the Naxos mufflers I will be changing up on my design. I ordered these items a few months back in anticipation of building the mufflers, but I placed an order today for four 2.5" diameter, louvered pipes to build my mufflers with the "A" design. These are 3.0" diameter:
 
Pretty neat looking pieces, no less, but I anticipate that they aren't going to give ample sound reduction. I'll have to wait for the new silencer tubes to show up but in the mean time I have been getting the mufflers constructed and pretty much have them ready for the internals. Here's a look at how they stand: 
I've probably been overexposed to all the damn Hardly-Abelson motorcycles around here: I wanted a rugged, machine-industrial look to the mufflers so I went with a ceramic flat-black coating on the tip baseplates to give strong contrast with the tips and the stainless steel fasteners. Something about it reminds me of all these black and chrome motorcycles around here - *shrug*. But it definately has the look I wanted. Rule #1, Function over Form. I didn't make the rear plate flanged just for the cosmetics - I wanted a serviceable, modifyable, tunable muffler. This setup even has function with the form as it wont be difficult at all to make additional backplates and mount any barrage of tip styles. There is still yet more to come in the design of these mufflers though - we'll just have to wait until the parts arrive to me next week sometime and I build the rest of the guts to this muff for the variable backpressure system. More to come there..... The pattern for the fan shroud is just about done.. I've gel-coated, sanded, polished, sealed, and applied about 4 coats of mold release wax to it. Tomorrow I will lay up the mold and likely be producing the first part from it later in the week. 
These are pretty much the last two items that need to be completed in order to put the car on the road and take her for the maiden voyage - I'm sure you can imagine my anticipation! :) Take care guys/gals and thanks for all your support!
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[ agpowers@bellsouth.net ] Enthusiasts soon understand each other. --W. Irving.
Are you an enthusiast? If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
Albert Einstein
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AshsZ-II Ultimate Street Z Progress: 3.0" Exhaust Pt2. >>>> - 
