Missouri Safety inspection exhaust hole, fail

Follow up to the failed emissions and safety test earlier this week. Last night I got under the car again and checked for leaks, found that one of the gaskets I hadn’t touched was leaking, so I tried to cover that up with some exhaust tape.

I also wrapped some of the tape around the hole in the pipe, then let the car run for 20 minutes at idle to try to get it to set in.

I swapped the wheels on the car to run the tires with good tread on them, and headed off to Washington Missouri to put some miles on the car to try to get the computer set with proper responses for the emissions code tests.

While in Washington Missouri I managed to draft the exhaust over two bumps, figuring out how the hole got in the pipe to begin with (this was the first time I had bottomed out with it).

I stopped in at the local Wal-Mart (the only thing open at 10pm in Washington, MO) to see if I could get any more exhaust tape, figuring I had torn the existing tape. Low and behold, WM didn’t have anything I could use, so I headed back out to the parking lot, started up the car and reached underneath to see if it was leaking. Fortunately it didn’t appear to be dumping any exhaust out from where it was leaking, so I thought I was okay.

I figured out that my SLIP light that keeps coming on is not related to my wheel bearing, it must be that I mistakenly tore the clock spring when I was trying to fix the horn/airbag earlier this week. So that’ll likely mean that I need to replace that again, but we’ll deal with that down the road, I don’t need it for the inspections.

This morning I took the car back to Dobbs to get the safety and emissions inspections done. Good news is that the car passed the emissions check! The bad news is that apparently exhaust repairs need to be welds, not tape…

So, next weekend I’ll head down to Solo Performance Specialties​ and weld something onto the pipe to close up the exhaust.

This winter I will replace the exhaust entirely, but for now I just need to pass the darn safety inspection.