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I have a hole in my heat exchanger and need some advise. I will hopefully soon replace the whole system with a custom stainless steel one. Does the heat exchanger come off the exhaust pipes or is it part of the system. Can the cover be taken off the exchanger and repaired / replaced. What is the exchanger like inside and what is it made of, could I get my exhaust shop to make a stainless one? Any info and pictures most appreciated.

The heat exchanger is a separate piece in the system. It has a flange on front and on back with a copper gasket between the header flange and the muffler flange. 6 bolts each flange. There is a mounting bolt on top holding a mount with a rubber isolator. The heat exchanger is comprised of 2 pipes running from front to back with a cast aluminum set of fins running length wise (front to back). There is a molded in separator to separate the top from the bottom. Then air is induced in the ( have had a glass of vino or 2 so excuse the lack of memory) the top and flows from front to the rear and makes a u turn and flows from the rear to the front on the bottom and then into the system or I may have it backwards and goes from bottom to top. The outside shroud is welded together with a seam along the top and the bottom. For a while there were replacement shroud halves. I don't know if they are available now. You could fabricate a stainless steel one, but you need a way to effectively transfer the heat from the Stainless steel pipes to the air flowing by them( reason for the cast aluminum fins). A shroud shouldn't be too hard to fabricate if the dealers don't have one in stock.

As a thought, Dennis and I kicked around the idea of building a heat exchanger with 1 or 2 small catalytic converters in the shroud as a cat converter runs at about 900 to 1200 degrees f. We never got to prototyping and testing to prove that there would be adequate flow on hot days to adequately cool the converters. 1970's in America there were MANY Fords/Mercurys with back seat fires attributed to overheated cat converters. You will notice the valve controlling heat into the system is set up to valve between inducing the hot air into the heating system or dumping either into the engine compartment or a hose running toward the rear of the vehicle. This is not a plug and play description as engineering time needs to be spent proving that it will work.

Best of luck

If you look through the forum profpinz cut his in half at the welds so he could take it apart to clean it. I believe he had drawings? It could have been milez tho.

It was profpinz that opened up his heat exchanger, you may want to check out his web page. I haven't had a chance to tear into mine yet, maybe when it starts to cool down here in Vegas. I will take plenty of pictures when I do.

Miles

Hi,

My heat exchanger is pretty rusty. It hasn't got a hole in it (yet...), but I will definitely make an attempt soon at extending its life... I was thinking about stripping the rust and applying some high-temperature POR-15 paint.

Ideally, that would take place together with a swap of both the exhaust pipe flex and the muffler for stainless ones.

Jan