E30 Aftermarket mid pipe/cat- what a piece of garbage !!! (pics)

[LJ851]

When i bought my 89 e30 10 years ago it didn't pass emissions and i didn't want to spend a fifth of the purchase price of the car on a real bmw cat. So i did the next best thing (i thought) and bought an aftermarket cat/mid pipe assembly.

I have put 100k miles on this pipe and replaced the universal cat portion of it twice over the years which is not bad for aftermarket cats. So far, so good.

Well, recently it developed an exhaust leak that was from a fracture at the 02 sensor bung welded between the two down pipes so i took the pipe off to weld it back up. Here is what i saw:





They welded the 02 bung to a pipe that was inserted between the two down pipes and as you can see was blocking a considerable amount of flow in the down pipe.

Another view:



Reasonably appalled, i said to myself, i wonder what the other pipe looks like? My jaw is still on the floor as i type this.

Here is the other pipe, it is hard to get a pic that shows just how bad it really is, this area of the pipe is actually in the middle of a compression bend so the down pipe is even smaller than the section i cut out to show in the pics.



Another view:




What a piece of shit!

[blunttech]

That is bad enough that i would write them and send pics to them and demand they do something. Id also let them know you are a member of an active BMW forum

[F34R]

That is garbage! I am shocked it even ran right haha.

[LJ851]

I had to edit my first post and remove the brand name because I am not 100% sure of the brand. I do know I wanted to keep twin pipes all the way back like it was originally and this was the "best" non BMW unit I could find. Apparently i made a very poor choice.

[Fusion]

WTF did they use to cut that "mid-piece"? Do you see the edges? It looks like someone hacked away at it with an axe. The manf. seems to not only employ amatuer welders, but they don't even have angle grinders?
If you didn't say you were the buyer, I wouldn't believe this wasn't done by PO at home.

You should find a manf. name stamped someone. Unless they're so utterly ashamed to put a brand name on the piece of shit.

[Jb325is]

Wow. That is terrible.

[LJ851]

Thought i'd update this. Just finished re doing the entire mid pipe assembly, 02 sensor bung in each pipe and zero restrictions all the way back to my muffler.

The car is easily 30% louder than it was before and pulls noticeably harder especially from 5k to redline.

Now my problem is that the car is too loud.

[Northern]

what does it have, a cat and a muffler?

[LJ851]

what does it have, a cat and a muffler?

Right now it is 2 separate 1.75 inch pipes all the way to my original muffler which has 2.5 perforated straight through cores and is glass packed.