Stuff We Use: Exhaust Repair Products

On our never-ending quest to improve this place by listening to feedback from the B&B, we are taking a new tack with these product posts, choosing instead to focus on items we use and may have purchased with our own meagre income. After all, if we’re giving you the truth about cars, we ought to give you the truth about car accessories.

Most of our readers and contributors alike have had at least one terrible hooptie in their fleet at some point in their vehicular career, meaning that carrying out a field expedient (or at least wallet friendly) exhaust repair is familiar to us all.

Bedwetting lawyers from the VerticalScope mother ship are squawking this article needs to incorporate an acknowledgement that exhaust fumes are bad and major repairs should be undertaken by a professional. This would include the proper replacement of rusty pipes and mufflers with fresh copies of the same, thereby ensuring an unfettered path through which carbon dioxide can safely waft out the back of yer car.

With that out of the way, we return to reality and find numerous people just trying to keep their cars on the road and safe in this era of hyperinflation and high prices. Popping for an entire new exhaust system sometimes just isn’t in the cards, no matter what a cadre of corporate attorneys might think. Then there’s the crew who are just trying to limp their cars along through one more winter and for whom a brand-new exhaust wouldn’t just be impractical and cost prohibitive – it’d be an utter waste.

Enter products like exhaust repair patches and putties. That pleasingly alliterative duo spent time in your writer’s garage this past weekend, sticking together an exhaust system on a decade-old Hyundai which suddenly started to sound like a derby car on startup. The culprit was, as it always is around these parts, rust which had formed along a pipe in the system. It is no small chance that copious amounts of road salt accumulated there over this car’s 350k lifetime, blasted up from the road and mixing with water to turn the area into fine iron oxide filings.

Scraping off the loose rust is an important part of surface prep in this instance, providing a spot on which the patch can stick. The product used here was more like wide pieces of tape than a patch one might put on a muffler, to be clear, meaning it was tightly wrapped around the pipe numerous times to affect the repair. A few dollops of high temp putty on the ends helped, with the remainder of the tube’s contents spread on the system’s joining flanges to forestall the inevitable leaks which will surely occur in those areas. Hey, I was up in under the car and to my neck in grease, anyway.

I have found, though no small amount of trial and error, that it doesn’t hurt to add clamps at the fore and aft of these tape-based repairs, especially if they are wrapped around a piped portion of the exhaust and not the muffler itself. This seems to help the tape from flapping off like a bird’s wing in the breeze, something which may happen through no fault of the product but rather a less-than-thorough preparation of the surface to which it is trying to stick. This author has made such an error on multiple occasions, either through a lack of care or it simply being too dark to see whilst lying supine on the wet parking lot of a parts store. At the very least, it’s a bit of cheap insurance to avoid having to carry out the repair again in short order.

As planned, this series of posts will continue to focus on items we’ve actually used and bought with our own money. In this case, none of the products were supplied and just happened to be what we picked up at the parts store. We hope you found this post to be helpful.

[Images: eBay]

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