Ok so the vibrations was getting worse. At certain rpms there was a VERY audible rattle coming from the back of the car. Today I crawled under there and found this:





It looks like the third hanger from the tail pipe is scraping right up against the frame of the car. I'm not sure how I missed that when I was installing the pipe but there you have it.

I took a breaker bar and used the leverage to bend it away from the frame. Funny thing is the hanger didn't actually bend but the section of pipe where the hanger is welded on actaully caved in a bit The concave section isn't huge and the hanger is now a good distance away from the frame so I'm happy.

Still need to clean the throttle body

 

Yes that would do it for sure

 

Ok so I just cleaned out my throttle body. Dirty as hell. It was idling funny afterwards so I disconnected the battery and followed the factory manual's idle relearning procedure. Still have to drive it for ~20 kms in order for it to fully learn its idle apparently.

Here are some pics of my throttle body cleaning:


Before


A few minutes into the cleaning


Finished! Looks much better. Hopefully will cure my shitty idle and roll on


Other Side of the throttle body

The whole job took around an hour

 

I thought that might be the problem with the exhaust. Glad it was an easy fix.

Edit: now that I take a closer look (and read), I see which hanger that is... I had a similar problem, but it was the hanger on the opposite end of the muffler.

 

I'm glad I installed the pipe it because making the car louder uncovered some other issues that have gone un-noticed and neglected. I'm going to clean my MAF and injectors next week.

I'm going to just take the MAF sensor out and spray it with cleaner but how do I go about cleaning the injectors? Are they hard to take off? Does anyone have suggestions as to how I can clean the injectors?

Also should I make the car re-learn to idle after each one of these cleaning jobs?

 

holy very nice job on the tb +1