mm0000001

well to make a long story short, me and a friend were going to try to raise the exhaust pipes up a bit on my car to keep them from hitting the ground ocassionally.



but instead we took off the thermal reactor (i think) and knocked some holes in it like one would do to a catalyic converter. i have a 79, but the motor thats in it came out of an 84. the thermal reactor "thing" looks alot like a catalyic converter, except the insides seemed a little different than i expected them to look. very very hard metal inside.... we used an air powered hammer and spent about an hour working on it to get holes "big enough" that we thought it would help out. is this actually going to help HP and gas mileage any? i figured it cant hurt any, more breathing room is always better.



while we had the exhaust off the car i drove around a bit with just the manifold open.... wow that has to be by far the loudest car i have ever heard in my life. fun fun fun, after we put everything back together we ended up breaking a small pipe that run from the side of the thermal reactor back up to something in the engine bay (we didnt really look exactly where the hose went, just took the pipe off, and fired it up.) whats that pipe do? its really small.. less than an inch diameter and had a rubber hose going to something in the area of the carburator/intake. i'll get a better view of it tomorrow in daylight. is that pipe very important? it must not be... it drove just fine without it just wanna check though, i'd hate for it to cause problems later on just because i didnt get someone to weld the piece back on for me.



thanks

-Adam

Jeff20B

I think it's an air supply to the heat exchanger or to the thermal reactor itself. you'll need to get it fixed because the thermal reactor will get too hot and possibly overheat the apex seal springs if they come to rest right over the exhaust port when the engine is shut off.

83turbo

Jeff20B -

Is the rx-7 reactor much like the rx-3 one? As I recall air could be

directed into the exhaust (to heat the reactor), or through the cooling

jacket. I would assume that in the '7, the heat exchanger helps out with

the first purpose (no use preheating the cooling air I would think?)

Jeff20B

I honestly don't know. I'm going to remove mine and replace it with a GSL-SE exhaust manifold soon.

83turbo

FC exhaust manifold has a larger outlet than the GSL-SE, if that helps.

Jeff20B

That's interesting. I'll keep that in mind if I ever do another manifold instead of a header. For now, the nearly 2" output matches the rest of the exhaust, so I'll use the GSL-SE one.

mm0000001

that doesnt make that much since. i understand what your saying, just looking at it and thinking where its located is going to heat up the apex seals... i just dont see that happening. where is the thermal reactor located? maybe what broke wasnt connected to the "thermal reactor", maybe it is a catalytic converter... but why would someone have put one of those on it ah well anyways, i took some pictures of what i broke and where it connects to.



i'm going to call the pictures as numbered in this order:



1 2



3 4





#1 is a picture of where the pipe broke off of.

#2 is a picture of the hose the pipe connected to. the A is for reference in #4

#3 is a another picture of where the pipe broke off of, with notes on it

#4 is where the hose in #2 goes to. the A is on the same hose #2 points to





so now that you guys can see what i am seeing. whats that pipe do?



on a side note i decided to go look at a truck's exhaust to see if it had something similar, which it did... at one point in time, but evidently someone broke the same pipe off of it. and the ranger is still running just fine.



thanks

-Adam

mm0000001

anybody?

treceb

looks liek u broke the "extra air pipe" or something for the catalytic converters, provides air to burn excess exhaust stuff...best i could describe it.

on pic 3 u see 2 of the 3 stock catalytic converters. and it looks like someone ran the car over a curb.

mm0000001

sounds like something that really isnt needed to me. now i guess the big question is why would this car have 2 of the 3 catalyic converters, and a thermal reactor since its a 79. (a guy told me that the thermal reactor is part of the exhaust header, which upon inspection it doesnt look like any other exhaust manifold i've ever seen before... so i'm pretty sure thats correct)



someone must have been very concerned with emissions....



do you think it would help out power/gas mileage to just take off all of that junk and have a streight pipe put on? emmissions/loudness isnt really a factor where i live as long as its not extreamly loud and doesn't leave too much of a smoke screen behind the car.