The Barbara Chronicles

[Vass 854]

Somewhat impulsively jumped into another side project in the form of RHD headers from Malian Exhaust / Kage Trading.

tl;dr of it is - THESE ARE NOT A STRAIGHT BOLT ON. They will require (quite extensive) modification to bolt up to the rest of the exhaust, nor will they clear the steering linkage, contrary to their claims. Unless you have the welding equipment & experience, or are prepared to shell out another 1-1.5x the purchase price in paying someone to have these reshaped, my recommendation would be to AVOID. I knew some of the downsides prior to diving into it so had time to emotionally/financially prepare.

These were originally purchased by @Eagle who discovered the fitment issues and subsequently abandoned them in favor of an M52 setup. I then took over the baton knowing that at the very least they'll need new flanges welded on in place of their stupid '2024 revision' slotted bolt hole design. Eagle also kindly provided the new flanges.

I took off the stock manifolds (bit of a mission having to support the engine & taking out the exhaust side engine arm & mount to gain enough clearance to slide them out) and dropped both sets off at Flame Performance. They used the stock manifolds to make up a jig to accurately position and weld up the new flanges.

Bank 1 was fairly straightforward and just needed a bit of extending and a bit of an angle adjustment. Bank 2 however was angled completely incorrectly and needed a lot of work. Also have them weld on the supplied bolts to turn them into studs and make installing the rest of the exhaust a bit less of a hassle.

The initial test fit revealed that bank 1 needed to be extended by another 4mm so got dropped off back at the shop to get redone.

With that done the angle between the two flanges was still slightly off but close enough for the gaskets to eat up the slack.

I gave both headers a quick polish to get rid of the discoloration from welding and wiped them down to avoid having any fingerprints permanently burnt on. Came out looking pretty flash.

[Vass 854]

With the catless headers being significantly more compact, bolting them on was a fair bit easier since they slid through easily enough so that the engine arm didn't need to come out again. I also replaced the stock studs with new ones from the N-series engines that are slightly shorter and have an E-torx head, making installation a lot easier than the double-nut method.

I thought about reusing the manifold gaskets with the heat shields, mostly to retain the clips for the O2 sensor wiring but due to the different positioning of the bungs those wouldn't have worked anyway. The new headers are angled straight down, are quite a way away from the valve cover so keeping the heat shields probably wouldn't have had much effect apart from making access to the bolts a lot more tedious. Opted for brand new M52 gaskets that are pretty much identical to the M54 ones, minus the heat shields.

The bank 2 O2 sensor (990mm) had enough length in it to fit into the factory clips, bank 1 however (570mm) was now considerably further away and wouldn't reach at all. The options were to order in a new longer bank 2 sensor (which might still have been too short) or make up an extension which I decided to have a go at. Not the first time the spare wiring loom has come in handy. Hacked it up a bit more, as well as a spare old O2 sensor and made up a nice factory-looking extension that blends right in.

I only recently discovered these heat shrink + solder butt connectors and now swear by them. So easy to use and seem to create a nice, solid connection. 10/10 recommend.

The additional new connection didn't fit under the beauty cover but slotted in between the valve cover and the fire wall and sits there quite securely.

The other issue with these headers was that the bank 2 O2 sensor bung is positioned so that the top of the sensor pretty much sits right up against the fire wall heat shield. I bashed them in at that spot as much as I could but it's still mighty close. Not ideal but it is what it is.

The exhaust was a bit tight going on but the flanges bolted up fine in the end. The bank 1 flange must still have ended up angled slightly wrong with a slight gap over top of it but luckily the edge of the inner opening looks to be slightly bulged and the gasket looks to be sealing fine.

[Olaf 3339]

mate, that's commitment!  how do they sound?   how does it go now?!

 

[Vass 854]

The next issue I ran into was the steering linkage. Having initially hooked up my stock one with the CMP coupler, there looked to be plenty of clearance... until I turned the wheel and the bolt holding the coupling to the main shaft started hitting on the headers.

Video

They claim that the clearance is there but might become a problem if your engine mounts are worn. Mine are barely 12k km's old and the bolt is not even close to clearing so I doubt it'd be any better with brand new engine mounts.

Luckily, I anticipated this being a potential issue or that the clearance would be tight at the very least so I pre-emptively ordered a slim linkage from @modz. Great bit of kit, arrived quickly and well packaged with handy instructions, would definitely recommend. Glad I had it on hand by the time the headers came back from the shop so it didn't hold me up.

Compared to the stock linkage the ends are clocked slightly differently so all I had to do was reposition the plastic alignment sleeve at the steering rack end. It does end up being slightly shorter than stock so the steering column does extend out of the firewall a bit further. Mine seems to have a lot of play in the column so might look to replace some bushes or the whole column at some stage.

Heaps of clearance now so I'm happy as Larry.

[Vass 854]

28 minutes ago, Olaf said:

mate, that's commitment!  how do they sound?   how does it go now?!

Cheers! I'm getting to it, just breaking the spiel up into parts as the posts are getting pretty long.

[Vass 854]

Have now put a few hundred km on with the headers installed and they've developed a nice bronze-ish tinge. Looks pretty cool.

Performance wise, can't say I notice much of a difference. The engine does rev quite freely but then again I wasn't really complaining beforehand either. My butt dyno isn't awfully well calibrated and I wouldn't have realized it was 30hp below stock power numbers until we put it on the dyno. Gonna try address a few more things and do another power run at some point to compare.

Having driven a bit monitoring fuel trims the LTFT's still keep jumping between 5.6 - 6.3 - 7.8 - 8.6 for both banks so doesn't looks like it's made a difference there. Would have been wishful thinking to expect it to have done though.

Didn't notice a massive difference in sound either. It did make the tone somewhat deeper but the difference is very marginal and it still sounds quite subdued to my ear. At idle there is no difference at all, at around 4-5k RPM and above you do hear it more but not as much as I would have expected. I was hoping for a more throatier tone but with the rest of the exhaust remaining stock I guess the muffler does what mufflers do. I want to retain the secondary cats so as to not smell like a bag of rotten eggs so might look into getting an aftermarket muffler at some point instead, but that will be sometime in the distant future.

Video #1

Video #2

Should have really made the comparison a bit more scientific and taken some 'before' videos and maybe a dB reading but of course only thought of it after the exhaust was already off the car.

Here's a brief summary of my experience with the Malian Exhaust RHD headers:

• The flanges at the engine head end are perfectly straight, fitment is good and they bolt up nice and straight.
• The flanges on the exhaust side are horrible, it's like they never fitted them onto an actual car before rushing them into production - the angles are wrong, the lengths aren't even and the whole slotted bolt hole design is baffling - even if they did line up and weren't hitting each other when bolted up to the head, I have no idea what guarantees that the tubes remain in proper alignment. They had a previous version of these with stock-style flanges that apparently worked fine, why they moved away from it is beyond me. They've even kept photos of the original ones bolted up on an actual car on their website, yet sell a 'revised' kit that doesn't work. Again to reiterate - these will not bolt up to the stock exhaust without extensive modification.
  
• The position of the O2 sensor bungs is way off. Even cut down the Bank 2 O2 sensor is hitting the chassis, even with the heat shields bashed in. Could have clocked them differently since there's heaps of room to facilitate it but guess they never bothered test fitting. They could have omitted the secondary O2 bungs entirely since they're so tight against the chassis they're unusable anyway.
• I don't believe the stock steering linkage would have cleared even with brand new engine mounts so be prepared to fork out for a slim one.
• The supplied gaskets are garbage and went straight in the bin.

As far as RHD alternatives go, there doesn't appear to be much choice out there. There's Gravity Performance, who don't ship to NZ, and there's Supersprint that are eye-wateringly expensive. There's also Coby ones that look to be mild steel and would still need some welding to mate up to the rest of the M54 exhaust.

All in all, with the purchase price, paying for having these re-welded, the slim steering linkage and new gaskets, this exercise cost me around $1.2k, which is still pretty reasonable in my eyes, with @Eagle also taking a bit of a loss on the initial purchase. Despite not quite getting the sound gains I was hoping for, I feel it was still a worthwhile thing to do and a step in the right direction and I'd still do it again if I had to. Just would have been good to know what to expect before jumping into it so hopefully this might help someone else out there.

[Vass 854]

I did also swap out the amber indicators for a fresh set of clears as some eagle-eyed folk might have noticed from those videos. TYC brand corners and fender indicators are good quality and still pretty cheap from Spareto so got sets of both ambers and clears last year. Paired them up with chrome bulbs from LEDPerf since they were the only ones I found (other than Aliexpress) that carried the smaller chrome fender indicator bulbs. Pricing seemed reasonable but did find dealing with them quite annoying so probably wouldn't bother again. Despite a .co.nz website and NZ flag plastered all over the place, they ship their stuff out from France which in my case took over 3 weeks to arrive with little to no tracking updates along the way. The bulbs look to be random brand and probably Chinese-made anyway so would just go direct to Aliexpress next time.

Chrome bulbs do make quite a difference though and give a nice clean finish instead of the egg-yolk look you get with amber bulbs.

With the fender indicators I somehow ended up with slightly different ones with one having a pearly white edge and the other more of a beige. Might tack on another pair with the next order to have a matching set since they cost the equivalent of a pack of chips.

I've also taken up the practice of super-gluing in those metal tabs after having 3 of them shoot out one after another into the fender cavity when reinstalling them after a polish. Don't need the hassle of trying to fish those out again.

Did enjoy the amber look but wanted to switch it up a bit after a a year and a bit on that setup and the car does look way more modern with the clears. Need to take her out for a scenic photoshoot up in the hills on a cloudy day sometime.

[Olaf 3339]

that's looking very well cared-for.  kudos.

[KwS 2429]

Love the look of your wagon. So good

I also appreciate the effort you went to to both make the headers work, and document the shambles they are out of the box

[modz 149]

On 12/9/2024 at 2:50 PM, Vass said:

The next issue I ran into was the steering linkage. Having initially hooked up my stock one with the CMP coupler, there looked to be plenty of clearance... until I turned the wheel and the bolt holding the coupling to the main shaft started hitting on the headers.

Video

They claim that the clearance is there but might become a problem if your engine mounts are worn. Mine are barely 12k km's old and the bolt is not even close to clearing so I doubt it'd be any better with brand new engine mounts.

Luckily, I anticipated this being a potential issue or that the clearance would be tight at the very least so I pre-emptively ordered a slim linkage from @modz. Great bit of kit, arrived quickly and well packaged with handy instructions, would definitely recommend. Glad I had it on hand by the time the headers came back from the shop so it didn't hold me up.

Compared to the stock linkage the ends are clocked slightly differently so all I had to do was reposition the plastic alignment sleeve at the steering rack end. It does end up being slightly shorter than stock so the steering column does extend out of the firewall a bit further. Mine seems to have a lot of play in the column so might look to replace some bushes or the whole column at some stage.

Heaps of clearance now so I'm happy as Larry.

Great to see it on the car @Vass- I rarely get to see the finished product in place as they go all over the world.  Very tidy build, well done!

[Vass 854]

1 hour ago, modz said:

Great to see it on the car @Vass- I rarely get to see the finished product in place as they go all over the world.  Very tidy build, well done!

Happy to vouch for a good product mate. Thanks for making these! I would've been left in a right pickle without it.

Feel free to use the photos for reference or promo if that's something that would be of use to you.

[Eagle 1669]

Yep thanks to @Vass for buying these. Lucky (or not) he bought them and had sorted them to save someone the expense and headache of doing it. The LHD versions probably would of been cheaper to modify especially using the slim joint. 

Malian Exhaust / Kage Trading are easily the worst and most scummy company ive ever dealt with online. Finally got some money back a few days ago from credit card dispute after they stuffed me around in various ways for months. Too bad we didnt have a proper invoice in time to make them pay for what they really owe.  

[balancerider 770]

On 12/9/2024 at 4:29 PM, Vass said:

Did enjoy the amber look but wanted to switch it up a bit after a a year and a bit on that setup and the car does look way more modern with the clears. Need to take her out for a scenic photoshoot up in the hills on a cloudy day sometime.

Roof rail delete looks so good on the e46 (and the PFL e91 for that matter)

[Vass 854]

In a more sombre development, I stumbled upon whatever THIS is.

Still struggling to figure out the rich running condition and with the beauty covers off messing around with the headers, I decided to swap out the spark plugs. The current ones were put in when rebuilding the engine and had only done around 12k km's since brand new but that did include the full break in period so, clutching at straws, I figured that might have gunked them up somehow. Easy enough item to tick off so might as well. Whilst at it, I decided to stick my cheapo Aliexpress endoscope dongle down into the cylinders and have a gander.

Almost wish I didn't.

Whilst 5 of the 6 cylinders/pistons looked pretty much spotless, cylinder 2 looked like it had a crater in the top of the piston. The camera resolution/quality of course didn't help and probably made it look like worse than it was. It was nearly midnight when I discovered it, which set my mind spiralling and I went to bed thinking the engine was toast.

The next day I borrowed a better quality endoscope off a mate and had a second look which cleared it up a bit. What I originally thought was a hole was just some nasty carbon buildup but nevertheless the silver, shiny blob still looked like something burnt to the top of the piston. I ended up sticking a piece of wire down the spark plug tube and started picking away at it. Was pretty hard work getting any control and leverage on it but you can see chunks breaking off at around 50 seconds into the video. I taped the endoscope to the piece of wire and went at it some more. You can see a bunch of those chunks littered around, still no idea what it might have been or how whatever it is got there but hopefully not enough of it to do any real damage.

I taped a rubber hose to the end of the shop vac, stuck that down the cylinder and tried to suck out the debris, then turned the engine over to get the exhaust valves open on that cylinder and blew it out with compressed air to hopefully clear out any remaining loose stuff. I also had a look at the exhaust valves themselves which didn't reveal any obvious defects.

Full video investigation catalogue if anyone cares.

The spark plugs themselves actually looked fine, not overly sooty and no obvious bits missing so no smoking gun there.

Did a compression test just to be safe which showed around 170 psi but at that point the car had been sitting for close to a month so wouldn't have been an accurate result. Will recheck on a warm engine sometime.

I reinstalled the old spark plugs for now. Once the headers got bolted up, I poured a bottle of Techron fuel system cleaner into the tank and topped it off with some BP 98 to hopefully clear out some gunk that might have accumulated and caused this. Need to go on a few more longer runs and give it some spanking to help burn off the remnants. Once that tank is up and the cleaner's worked its way through the system I'll do a proper compression test and install the fresh spark plugs.

Bit of a nerve wracking episode that but the car is still seemingly running fine so seem to have gotten away with just a scare. Bit weird still that only one cylinder looked as bad whilst nothing of the like in any of the rest of them.

Cars are pain.

[Vass 854]

Also, I keep seeing a slight damp patch at the bottom of the gearbox that feels a bit oily to the touch. It's never properly dripping so not an obvious massive leak but seems to be slowly weeping from somewhere. Almost looks like it's coming out from the bottom two casing bolts. The drain plug threads also seemingly look shiny at all times so could also be that. Then again those are the bottom most parts of the gearbox and it could just be accumulating down there from above. The plugs themselves were brand new so shouldn't really be leaking. Would it be a good idea to wrap some teflon tape around them next time I do a gearbox flush?

At this point all the seals apart from the output shaft seal have been replaced. I do have one sitting on the shelf but they're not known to be particularly failure prone and I didn't feel confident enough to mess with pre-loading the output flange so left it alone for the time being. Not a big enough leak to start getting concerned about just yet but would be good to know if it's a common occurrence and whether there's an obvious remedy.