Volkswagen Corrado (1.8T BAM)

Who doesn’t love a good clean retro car! When we were asked about assisting a customer by completing his long-term project, we were more than happy to help, to the extent that we specifically opened our shutters for the customer on Christmas Eve to ensure it was ready for Christmas.

We were pleased to see the Volkswagen Corrado in such a great shape, and to top it up it had a clean BAM conversion done to it with a ready supplied 3” down pipe reduced to 2.5”. It was our job to complete the remaining system in 2.5″ T304 Stainless Steel, trying to keep as tight as possible to the chassis as the customer does intend to lower the car in the near future.

As requested by the customer we built the independent middle and rear section in 2.5” / 63.5mm T304 Stainless Steel, consisting of stainless steel flanges, a small oval rear silencer with an oval tailpipe, all pipe work completely mandrel bent and TIG welded together. Building the system in two individual sections allows the customer to easily undo and take the exhaust off in the future. Taking into consideration that Corrado’s along with MK2 Golfs have exhausts that go over the axle, it is only sensible to flange the stainless pipework for ease of dismantling.

After a consultation with the customer, we chose to opt for an oval rear silencer. An oval stainless steel silencer suited the car better, but it also sat nicely under the car. If you are looking to reduce sound and are limited to space it is always a good idea to use an oval silencer as it has a greater surface area within which allowed us to create a non-droning sound, producing a perfectly purring sound on the this retro ride.

We began by fabricating the middle section, which was built with 2.5” pipe, mandrel bent on our NC mandrel bender, the engineer on the day chose to use radius varying from 1D, 1.5D and 2D. We thereafter decided to flange the exhaust as it was a suitable place for anyone in the future to undo the 2-bolt stainless steel flange. We always throw in a gasket to ensure that the system is leak free.

The rear section gets tricky, as the over axle section is very tight, however nothing is impossible with the right tools, machines and handy engineers. After manipulating the mandrel bends we were able to successfully clear the axle and the body of the car. Tests were undergone to ensure that no matter how much pressure is put on the system it would not knock or bang.

After 4 hours of fabricating and welding the end product was a respectable exhaust and a very satisfied customer. We were happy to have the customer float around and witness each step on the build, as we are confident enough in our work to do so. After some feedback from the customer it was confirmed that the Corrado produced 300bhp on the dyno after a custom map.

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