Well, say hello to 1337ssei's exhaust manifolds!
I arrived at his house in the Aerostar with a compressor, some hoses, sheets of wood, and a camera. The Aerostar is quite the ghetto work van when you take out the seats, throw in wood and tools, and drive with no AC. Have a look at the cargo area:
http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m242 ... CF1316.jpg
It was vanny that day.
http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m242 ... CF1319.jpg
Here are some exhaust pipes. They were ported by danthurs, and Austin (1337ssei) had them bead blasted.
Here's the black exhaust manifold paint that we used:
Observe Austin's latest grinding kit.
http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m242 ... CF1328.jpg
It was about $20-30, and it worked pretty well. The most aggressive burr turned blue in seconds and went dull but still cut. Most of the grinding bits either fell off or sanded themselves down against the exhaust manifold after some minutes of work. The reason for porting is interesting. Allegedly, no one has so far done it. Austin has a 3" Hogan downpipe ready for installation, and he wanted to port the OE exhaust manifold outlet to fit it better. That's the only thing we had to port & polish. We did that on his front porch! Please note that both pictures below are progress pics. I took a lot of pictures of the outlet, but very few turned out well. The finished product was very smooth... until the paint!
The spray gun was bought exclusively for this use with the hope that it could be used again. It was only $10 at Harbor Freight, and it had just enough oomph to coat exhaust manifolds.
We cleaned the exhaust manifolds very well before painting.
So, you might think all that we did thus far was not necessarily ghetto? Don't worry! I cannot disappoint you! We needed to let the manifolds dry on one side while we painted the other. I suggested using sticks and whatnot to hold these up so we could hose down both sides. One of the items in the three pictures immediately below is a broken weed whacker, and in the pictures, the manifolds are standing upright.
The ported outlet looks like this now:
Vice grips were used to prop the crossover pipe on an upside down coat hanger that hung from the Aerostar's hatch and was balanced with the air compressor's power cord.
We ran acetone through the spray gun to flush out the paint and clean up around ourselves. Then, something bad happened...
À la willwren, we baked the freshly painted pipes in Austin's kitchen's oven.
It was good, but I ended up parting with my favorite painting board. In the video in this link, I tried to capture all the stencils I left. It left at last with some EM stencils, but also included are my SSEi badges, some of the ricer case, and some parts of my newest case painting/modding project.
http://s106.photobucket.com/albums/m242 ... CF1372.flv
I thought they were 5x114...guess that 1 mm difference doesn't matter that much? seems like that could cause some strange stud loading... Wish GM would have used 5x114 like daimlerchrysler, ford and many other companies did. I don't get it. 
