I appologize for those of you that are tired of seeing this thread come back, but I need to vent. You can catch up on the history on this thread and here:
http://www.msprotege.com/forum/showthread.php?t=123623489.
I'm getting too old for this. Mine got to rattling pretty badly so I decided to go ahead and work on the heat shield. My plan was to mark where it was hitting, remove it, cut clearance holes in the sections that hit the exhaust, and then spray it down with rubberized spray (I found some at Wally World). Jacked the car up and loosened the 4 bolts holding the heat shield on. So far so good. I got two of the bolts out and started working on the other two. All of a sudden while turning, it got too easy. The short of it is that the bolt screws into a nut that's tack-welded (or glued for all I know) to the underbody sheet metal. The weld broke leaving me with a spinning nut and no way to hold it. Ditto for the last bolt. I was pissed. Nice work, Mazda - crap engineers (and I've been an automotive design engineer for 7 years so I can say that)! Good thing you saved those 3 cents. Ended up having to tear the heat shield and slip it off around the bolts, which are still hanging from the underbody of my car - I can't take them off or tighten them. I guess I'll have to dig through the carpeting and such in the floorboard to see if I can get to them from the topside.
Anybody want to sell me a heatshield cheap? Mine's trashed.
Anyway, I went for a drive to at least enjoy the pure unclanging sound of the exhaust for a change and everything was a little more cheery. I do love the sound when things are right. After a 15 minute spirited drive I pull into my driveway, pull up the parking brake (yes I prefer a manual transmission AND I use my parking brake), and get an earful of clang clang clang. Get out and trace it down to the fact that now the rear pipe is banging into the rear subframe! This sucks. I also now notice an exhaust leak at the front connection to the cat where I had to improvise a gasket because Megan Racing couldn't bother to provide 3 instead of 2 (yet another dollar saved).
I have 3 kids under 3 and don't have time for this anymore. Should've left my car stock. I think I can adjust everything to get rid of the subframe problem and try again with the cat gasket, but I'm tired of climbing under this thing at night after the kids go to bed. At least it's in the 70's so I'm not freezing my knuckles off.
Hopefully y'all have more time energy than I do. Otherwise, don't bother installing this exhaust.
