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Well wow, NB8B's have a LOT of under-body bracing and it's done tight from the factory.... In the last 2 days I've claimed the lives of a 1/2\" drive, a 1/4\" drive. 14mm, 17mm and 19mm spanners. Bent a sid-chrome ratchet handle and discovered that only 2 out of about 7 of the 14mm sockets I have...fit these odd standard nuts on the stock exhaust manifold and the flange directly after the manifold before the EGO sensor....

By pure stubbornness I have managed to get everything off...but the EGR fitting on the end of the standard manifold....

So now that I'm relatively finished...is there any simple solution to breaking bolts/nuts put on from factory with a rattle-gun overly tight?

Also do all Mx5's have water reservoir's the size of Texas? I plan on moving it so it's not melted by the racing beat headers but I really don't think it's going to clear the bonnet if I move the reservoir down to where the standard air filter box was.... Or am I underestimating how sturdy the standard plastic is?

OK:
A) WD40 is your best friend. I had to use it on my EGR pipe to get that one off. It wouldn't budge. 2 minutes after spraying WD40 on it, it loosened up straight away. IF you used it on the underbody bracing, you wouldn't have gone though 1 spanner or socket.

I only split 1 socket when doing mine, and that was because I was trying to undo a nut that was spot welded to th PPF!

B) The reservoir won't melt as it SHOULD have that metal bracket between it and the headers.

If you need any advice, just ask. I've changed my whole NB8B exhaust.

yep wd40 is good, i used it extensively when removing all my intake and exhaust recently.

Well I just got home from work, we'll see how productive tonight is I only have the EGR nut to remove. I've got some asbestos heat-wrap on order but it won't be in until monday for the headers. So I might start clearing some excess carbon out of the racing beats. I also need to unravel some AFM wire and the MAT sensor wire so I can start making the Cold-side CAI.

I think by far the worst part wasn't the bracing, it was the small exhaust mount off the transmission, that little 12mm nut had about an inch of thread travel...and you couldn't get anything on it but a ring spanner..even then you could only turn in about 1/4 a turn at a time....I want that 15 mintues of my life back I'm praying the massive length of the racing beats means I wont' need to put that mount back on....

I'll also put the reservoir back, worst case if it dies...I'll get a smaller one. It'd be a weight reduction:P

You don't need to put that pain in the ass bracket on. Acually, don't put any brackets on that brace the aftermarket exhaust to the body of the car.

It caused blown constant gaskets and the stress ended up cracking my cat converter.

So the EGR was a piece of cake, removing the dipstick which is for some reason blocking the headers....that was harder with those heater hoses still installed . Though by FAR the worst was that god-awful exhaust mount that bolts to the gearbox. I could not for the life of me get them off yesterday, luckily my dad's a fabricator so he just got a length of pipe at work that was big enough to just slip over the ratchet handle, cut it to length to fit under the car and the nuts were off in a few swearwords.

I had no intention of putting that mount back on unless it the exhaust was floppy. The racing beat headers are pretty long so I hope that's enough rigidity in itself.

So the old exhaust is finally off.....just waiting for my heat wrap to put the new exhaust on.

It's been incrediable how many small problems have cropped up, I was really expecting it take just an afternoon to take it off and put the new one on. Not having flanges, bolts and actually getting half the bolts undone that probaly havn't been cracked since it left the factory has been such a headache. I've been running around in stores in the 30 minutes I get after work everbefore everything closes to get intake parts. There doesn't appear to be a car or 4WD that ever had a larger than 2\" radiator hose. Which scrapped that idea for a temporary pipe before I hit an exhaust shop up when I've worked out what length's and angle I need. So I've settled on a 65mm PVC 90 degree elbow. I can find nowhere with a suitable length of vacuum hose for the cam-cover to intake pipe so I got a meter of 1/4\" fuel line for $9. I'll have to make a 1/4\" fitting from scratch which is not a problem but time consuming. Then I still need to get a filter to put the MAT in....

Still will be fun when it's all done...exhaust, ECU and intake at once. Fingers crossed it'll be about 95-100kw atw.