Do you know why the HJS cats are so insanely expensive??
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Bolt on performance exhaust for the 500e (testing waters)
- Thread starter 5thscaleracer
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Do you know why the HJS cats are so insanely expensive??
A lot of reasons but here are a few...
1- material used, HJS use a high content of precious metals so the cat actually works. A lot of other brands cut corners and use less material as cell count goes down.
2- spiral core design is expensive to produce they have the machinery to make them.
3- emissions testing on every catalyst they produce.
Don't forget importation taxes.
It really boils down to quality, construction and testing.
Similar reasons why One would buy a Lexus ES350 over a Camry V6.
Do you have any exhaust's left, either complete or cat back?
Thanks,
Brian Seattle WA
Thanks,
Brian Seattle WA
Sorry to say we have been sold out for the past 3 months.
The only components left is the front section with out catalytic converters.
Our next planned run for exhausts is fall of 2017
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
The only components left is the front section with out catalytic converters.
Our next planned run for exhausts is fall of 2017
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
We are tooling up to make a second round of 500e kits for 2017.
I will start a new thread: http://www.500eboard.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10919
I will start a new thread: http://www.500eboard.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10919
Dave and JC, I have in this past year spoken with both of you about the fact that I am the owner of the header/exhaust system to which you refer. It is now 7 years since your above comments, but I thought I should mention this info here, just to complete the discussion of it on this thread, which I am just reading for the first time, I believe, at least from the beginning.
Since you both already know, I will say for everyone else that when I bought this car in 1999, it had a Renntech rear muffler assembly, which rattled. Someone I met suggested I give this locally known craftsman named Herb Gebler a call to see if he could weld/repair it. Herb's business was racing headers and exhausts and was called Gebler Racing Headers. Herb made the case it would be better just to let him make a new rear exhaust piece in place of the Renntech one. He persuaded me to let him ditch the rear muffler entirely in exchange for stainless rear pipes with spirals inside them. They made the car a fair bit louder and sound really good.
Herb then convinced me on principle (not because he was an expert on the Mercedes 119 engine or the 500E OBD 1 ignition system) that he could in principle make an entire system from headers on back that would, in combination with adjustments to fuel and timing in the ignition system, create a HUGE amount of more horsepower. Herb really and truly believed this based on his experience with road cars through the years.
Unfortunately, only after Herb had custom made the headers and exhaust, building them on the car, did we discover through the tuning shop, Intersport in McLean, VA, that the car had an OBD 1 ignition system, meaning there would be no way to adjust the timing, meaning the entire exercise was likely for naught. This was a MAJOR FAIL for Intersport, whose owner, Charlie Murphy, was a highly recognized and on the spectrum brilliant Porsche expert and engine rebuilder. Charlie never considered the idea that the car was not properly tunable and did not do his homework prior to Herb's building the exhaust.
Nevertheless, once that was realized and after the exhaust/header system was installed, Charlie went ahead and worked with Autothority, a very well known Porsche chip tuning company in Northern Virginia owned by a supposedly nationally recognized chip guru named Al Collins, to make a fuel (or EPROM) chip for the car with the new exhaust. I went with them to Autothority to have an EPROM chip programmed with the car on the dyno.
In the next couple/few years, I burned through two or three sets of catalytic converters and eventually blew the engine, taking the car into my service company with what turned out to be likely a bent rod (from the banging noise which rose an fell in tempo with the engine rpms) and two or three badly scored cylinder walls. Fortunately, Potomac German had a 50,000 mile 500E engine they had just acquired at that time from a t-boned 500E, and I bought it from them for $5,000 -- much cheaper than the $13,000 I was being quoted for a rebuild from a well known Mercedes engine rebuilder or the $20,000 Mercedes wanted for a new one!
Needless to say, after this entire experience, I blamed the aftermarket exhaust and chip and replaced them both with the original exhaust parts, including a new Genuine rear muffler from Mercedes. I also blamed myself, as I knew very little about cars at the time and just put myself in the hands of others, who dropped the ball at great learning expense to/for me. I still have the headers and exhaust in storage.
It was not until this past year, in speaking with JC, Dave, and others, that I realized that the exhaust was likely not the culprit but that the chip was. All my unfortunate experiences could not be explained by headers and a more free flowing exhaust but could be explained by a fuel/EPROM chip running too rich. So, it seems the chip was the problem, not the exhaust.
Regardless, while I will not say I lost power, which Dave seems to remember incorrectly, I don't think I gained any either, at least not that my butt dyno could tell, and there was never any proper dyno measuring done before and after.
In reading this thread just now, I thought to look and see if Herb Gebler, a gruff hunting and fishing old school redneck sort of patriotic American with a heart of gold underneath, had ever created a web site for his business (Herb wasn't exactly the internet type in 2001). In my search, I discovered a legacy web page devoted to him. Apparently, he died in 2011. Very sad. He was a good man. One of the comments on the page said Herb built headers for Richard Petty, which if he had told me I had forgotten. Here is the page with a couple of photos of Herb:
Herb Gebler Obituary (2011) - Washington, DC - The Washington Post
View Herb L. Gebler Jr.'s obituary, send flowers and sign the guestbook.
www.legacy.com
Last fall, in exchanging PMs with JC, I note that JC made the following observations about the exhaust and headers after viewing detailed photos of them. (JC, I don't think you will mind if I share the following. If you do, please let me know, and I will delete):
"That's race car status right there.... I commend the builder utilizing pre-bent mandrel bends and pie cutting it all into an exhaust.
There are a lot of things i would have done differently, and with the access to CNC benders here in California i should be able to replicate that and clean it up by ten fold.
But anyone that would use something like this would not appreciate it because the sound would simply be too loud. I doubt the car would pass the 90db sound limit in most tracks out here in the west coast.
But the craftsmanship is top notch especially since its all done by hand."
The sound was very loud. No question. It was also a truly unique sound. Much nicer, frankly, than any of the E500E modified exhausts I have heard here on the Board or on YouTube (although certainly in person they would have sounded a bit different). Herb's exhaust and header sound on this car was cleaner, lower, more throaty, more powerful in an old school way, more manly, if you will, less metallic, and smoother. Believe it or not, I received many many compliments on it.
However, I will confess the drone/resonance inside the car got pretty old after a while -- made me keep the music up loud
I'm sure the H&R lowering springs I had on the car at the time (came installed when I purchased the car) didn't help -- creating less space underneath for the sound to travel outwards and instead reverberate back into the car.Anyway, overall it was a beautiful sound. You'd have to hear it to believe it.
Here again are images of the exhaust, both on and off the car:
Index of /images/M119/exhaust/500E_custom_exhaust
Godspeed, Herb.
Jamie
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I remember you telling me the story, but perhaps not in quite that much detail. Your post above connects a lot of dots. I'm sorry that you had to go through all of that and ended up having to replace the engine. Most people would have walked away, and you didn't. Props for that.
I'll tell you, Gerry, I love my car, but I find it unacceptable that for a few years during the OBD 1 period Mercedes made it impossible for us to have better access to tuning our cars. That would have made a lot of this debate over third party exhausts less of an issue. Let's face it, Mercedes' telling us basically how loud and free flowing our exhaust should be isn't really a whole lot different than telling us what color our paint should be or what seating position is best, etc. Some easy non-invasive things should be left to the customer. Anyway, with OBD 2, I am told that restriction is far less or non-existent. Perhaps I heard wrong?
J
You can get a bit more from OBD2 but not much, say less than 10% (using my S55 as an example). On these performance models, tuning and exhaust are pretty much maxed out from the factory, +/- a safety margin for shit gas. The biggest thing I would do would be headers and a tune. Which for you would mean using the custom built headers and downpipes with some resonator and muffler out back — all the flow and sound without the drone sort of thing. Forced induction is really the way to more power here, but the 500E really doesn’t support that. On the M113k, you can go with headers, tune, and some path to more air through the kompressor to wake up as much as 20%.
Nice headers and downpipes though. I’d be using those if I were you @linjam given the work you’ve gone through already.
Cheers,
maw
Nice headers and downpipes though. I’d be using those if I were you @linjam given the work you’ve gone through already.
Cheers,
maw
These can be tuned...it's just a lot harder....very few folks have the knowledge and equipment to make changes to the fuel mapping..even less so the ignition/ezl module.
For what it's worth even OBDII cars that are running early/legacy versions of ME are hard(er) to get tuned vs the newer versions....once the market narrows enough folks drop out/walk away.
Sadly, if you really want to be able to tweak cars of this vintage to the degree which we have become accustomed it will require changing out to a full stand alone setup for fuel and and spark. Not that it can't be done and integrated in...it's just Very time consuming.
jono
Thanks, Jono. Yes. Once it was discovered my system was not properly tunable, I was told the only other option was to go with an entirely new ignition system. For a variety of reasons, I found this idea unpalatable.
Jamie
Sorry not Maw, but have some experience on this front
Get the BIGGEST muffler you can for the rear of the car. Only utilize factory mounting points. Some judiciously placed dynamat/vibration deadening material helps as well IME.
Jono
Thanks, @jhodg5ck ... I was gonna say that’s what the center resonator is for... I ended up with a smaller muffler box out back and a larger muffler serving as a lighter than factory resonator. But all those changes are a distant second to those headers. If a header option were readily available for these cars, I think everyone would be in on the group buy. And to second @jhodg5ck point, the one thing I didn’t do while the interior was out for the stereo was to Dynamat the floors, which I immediately and continually acknowledge was a mistake.
I can tell by how much it quieted down the M3. On that little buggy the engine noise through the firewall and front floor is like running a chainsaw for an armrest. Dynamat to the doors and floors changed all of that, like wow! Suddenly I had a real cabin listening experience.
maw
PS. There may be a picture in my profile of the exhaust from underneath. Not artistic by any means but effective enough that I haven’t doubled back to have an artist do it. All magnaflow components. It’s cut and welded metal, so it’s simple enough to redo. And like you, it’s the sort of thing I would have done better on if it wasn’t one of my first newbie mods on the car. But it demonstrates the principle.
I can tell by how much it quieted down the M3. On that little buggy the engine noise through the firewall and front floor is like running a chainsaw for an armrest. Dynamat to the doors and floors changed all of that, like wow! Suddenly I had a real cabin listening experience.
maw
PS. There may be a picture in my profile of the exhaust from underneath. Not artistic by any means but effective enough that I haven’t doubled back to have an artist do it. All magnaflow components. It’s cut and welded metal, so it’s simple enough to redo. And like you, it’s the sort of thing I would have done better on if it wasn’t one of my first newbie mods on the car. But it demonstrates the principle.
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Thanks, Jono. I am sure that will reduce the overall volume of the exhaust, but I wonder what it will fo to the pleasing tonality of it.Sorry not Maw, but have some experience on this front
Get the BIGGEST muffler you can for the rear of the car. Only utilize factory mounting points. Some judiciously placed dynamat/vibration deadening material helps as well IME.
Jono
On the Dynamat, around the same period, a car audio installer put three layers of dynamat extreme throughout every nook and cranny of the trunk area, the entire floor of the cabin (including cross braces, etc), the doors, etc. He was trying to get rid of subwoofer resonances, buy it didn't really work. All that dynamat extreme, in addition to being really messy, has to weigh at least two hundred pounds. I am having it all removed as we speak. They have been working on it for a week or two. A big job. I am looking forward to seeing how much the weight loss affects performance.
I will put some Killmat back in in specific places for basic sound deadening, but nothing like the overkill engaged in before.
Anyway, while I can't remember exactly, I am pretty sure the dynamat overkill existed during the exhaust drone period, so likely sound deadening won't improve it.
Jamie
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If you're going for race car loud you're not going to ditch drone...that said, we make systems that are borderline obnoxious even for an 18 y/o and they don't drone.
DM is just a trim/tidying factor, it won't solve the underlying drone but it will make the cabin more pleasant at steady state while still barking through at WOT
Jono
Wow, what a story, thanks for sharing!Dave and JC, I have in this past year spoken with both of you about the fact that I am the owner of the header/exhaust system to which you refer. It is now 7 years since your above comments, but I thought I should mention this info here, just to complete the discussion of it on this thread, which I am just reading for the first time, I believe, at least from the beginning.
Since you both already know, I will say for everyone else that when I bought this car in 1999, it had a Renntech rear muffler assembly, which rattled. Someone I met suggested I give this locally known craftsman named Herb Gebler a call to see if he could weld/repair it. Herb's business was racing headers and exhausts and was called Gebler Racing Headers. Herb made the case it would be better just to let him make a new rear exhaust piece in place of the Renntech one. He persuaded me to let him ditch the rear muffler entirely in exchange for stainless rear pipes with spirals inside them. They made the car a fair bit louder and sound really good.
Herb then convinced me on principle (not because he was an expert on the Mercedes 119 engine or the 500E OBD 1 ignition system) that he could in principle make an entire system from headers on back that would, in combination with adjustments to fuel and timing in the ignition system, create a HUGE amount of more horsepower. Herb really and truly believed this based on his experience with road cars through the years.
Unfortunately, only after Herb had custom made the headers and exhaust, building them on the car, did we discover through the tuning shop, Intersport in McLean, VA, that the car had an OBD 1 ignition system, meaning there would be no way to adjust the timing, meaning the entire exercise was likely for naught. This was a MAJOR FAIL for Intersport, whose owner, Charlie Murphy, was a highly recognized and on the spectrum brilliant Porsche expert and engine rebuilder. Charlie never considered the idea that the car was not properly tunable and did not do his homework prior to Herb's building the exhaust.
Nevertheless, once that was realized and after the exhaust/header system was installed, Charlie went ahead and worked with Autothority, a very well known Porsche chip tuning company in Northern Virginia owned by a supposedly nationally recognized chip guru named Al Collins, to make a fuel (or EPROM) chip for the car with the new exhaust. I went with them to Autothority to have an EPROM chip programmed with the car on the dyno.
In the next couple/few years, I burned through two or three sets of catalytic converters and eventually blew the engine, taking the car into my service company with what turned out to be likely a bent rod (from the banging noise which rose an fell in tempo with the engine rpms) and two or three badly scored cylinder walls. Fortunately, Potomac German had a 50,000 mile 500E engine they had just acquired at that time from a t-boned 500E, and I bought it from them for $5,000 -- much cheaper than the $13,000 I was being quoted for a rebuild from a well known Mercedes engine rebuilder or the $20,000 Mercedes wanted for a new one!
Needless to say, after this entire experience, I blamed the aftermarket exhaust and chip and replaced them both with the original exhaust parts, including a new Genuine rear muffler from Mercedes. I also blamed myself, as I knew very little about cars at the time and just put myself in the hands of others, who dropped the ball at great learning expense to/for me. I still have the headers and exhaust in storage.
It was not until this past year, in speaking with JC, Dave, and others, that I realized that the exhaust was likely not the culprit but that the chip was. All my unfortunate experiences could not be explained by headers and a more free flowing exhaust but could be explained by a fuel/EPROM chip running too rich. So, it seems the chip was the problem, not the exhaust.
Regardless, while I will not say I lost power, which Dave seems to remember incorrectly, I don't think I gained any either, at least not that my butt dyno could tell, and there was never any proper dyno measuring done before and after.
In reading this thread just now, I thought to look and see if Herb Gebler, a gruff hunting and fishing old school redneck sort of patriotic American with a heart of gold underneath, had ever created a web site for his business (Herb wasn't exactly the internet type in 2001). In my search, I discovered a legacy web page devoted to him. Apparently, he died in 2011. Very sad. He was a good man. One of the comments on the page said Herb built headers for Richard Petty, which if he had told me I had forgotten. Here is the page with a couple of photos of Herb:
Herb Gebler Obituary (2011) - Washington, DC - The Washington Post
View Herb L. Gebler Jr.'s obituary, send flowers and sign the guestbook.www.legacy.com
Last fall, in exchanging PMs with JC, I note that JC made the following observations about the exhaust and headers after viewing detailed photos of them. (JC, I don't think you will mind if I share the following. If you do, please let me know, and I will delete):
"That's race car status right there.... I commend the builder utilizing pre-bent mandrel bends and pie cutting it all into an exhaust.
There are a lot of things i would have done differently, and with the access to CNC benders here in California i should be able to replicate that and clean it up by ten fold.
But anyone that would use something like this would not appreciate it because the sound would simply be too loud. I doubt the car would pass the 90db sound limit in most tracks out here in the west coast.
But the craftsmanship is top notch especially since its all done by hand."
The sound was very loud. No question. It was also a truly unique sound. Much nicer, frankly, than any of the E500E modified exhausts I have heard here on the Board or on YouTube (although certainly in person they would have sounded a bit different). Herb's exhaust and header sound on this car was cleaner, lower, more throaty, more powerful in an old school way, more manly, if you will, less metallic, and smoother. Believe it or not, I received many many compliments on it.
However, I will confess the drone/resonance inside the car got pretty old after a while -- made me keep the music up loud
Anyway, overall it was a beautiful sound. You'd have to hear it to believe it.
Here again are images of the exhaust, both on and off the car:
Index of /images/M119/exhaust/500E_custom_exhaust
Godspeed, Herb.
Jamie
Many years ago I had a (decidedly happier) saga of getting an OBD1 naturally aspirated 2.5 liter 6 cylinder engined bored and stroked to 3.2L, then turbocharging it to 1 bar, which, at the time, was a lot. At the time there were many vendors on the market advocating the use of additional injectors for additional fuel, unknown "black boxes" to change ignition mapping, etc.
Ultimately I retained the services of an expert in the field at the time, who was quite familiar with OBD1 Bosch Motronic. He developed the proper fuel / ignition map for the engine based on many many hours of tuning on a Mustang dyno, doing everything inside Motronic with no additional "black boxes" ..... and with 42 lbs injectors instead of stock 24 lbs injectors. After I received the car, I bought a EEPROM programmer (the Bosch ECU was the old school kind that used EEPROMs that could be erased with UV light) and I went through a couple more revisions with the expert emailing me files to to provide for more richness under full boost (at most 12:1) as well as compensate a little for the oxygenated gasoline in my neck of the woods at the time.
I would burn a bunch of different EEPROMs, take the car to a local facility with a dynojet, read off power and AF/mixtures over RPM, drive the car for a while, and report back. Then repeat.
I was quite happy with the way the car turned out. Ultimately it made me appreciate how much effort there is in tuning and generally how little people assign value to the turning effort. One can imagine that if a manufacturer can amortize tuning costs over a production run of tens of thousands of cars, that the process can be profitable ...... but to account for those costs for one car is almost always a money losing deal for the tuner.
I also learned to appreciate the extremely scarce supply of folks that really knew what they were doing wrt the code in Bosch Motronic ECUs (which is not Bosch LH) and now and I understand why people go with full standalone systems.
After all that many years ago, I have since been content with cars, these days, to leave custom one-off engine programming alone. It is a slippery slope that I feel requires bucketloads of dollars.*
* does not include "semi-mass-produced" engine tuning for modern turbocharged cars where the tuner can amortize development costs over thousands of units sold and where gains are easily derived from increased intake manifold pressure.
Well, the OBD-1 years were sort of a twilight zone for instrumentation and computers. That's about all that can be said. It is what it is, and TBH it's not that horrible once you know how to work with/around it. OBD-2 isn't necessarily the bee's knees all the time, either.
The OBD-1 was certainly a step up from the analog stuff you had with the CIS-E cars (say early 124s and Gen 2 126s).
The OBD-1 was certainly a step up from the analog stuff you had with the CIS-E cars (say early 124s and Gen 2 126s).
Yeah. The purpose of an exhaust system is to convert acoustic energy to heat. By converting that energy to heat, it cannot vibrate air and metal which your ears pick up on.
Dynamat increases the mass of the metal panels, making it harder for the acoustic energy to vibrate those panels, but the acoustic energy is still vibrating the shit out of the air if that energy is not converted to heat.
Agreed. I have a Sport Beetle, model year 1996, which was the first year of OBD-2 implementation for the manufacturer. It sucks. The manufacturer was still figuring all that new OBD-2 compliance shit out . The gist of it is NEVER DISCONNECT THE BATTERY. If the battery ever gets diconnected, the ECU loses its marbles and will throw all kinds of "Emissions systems not ready" codes when trying to get the car smogged. The solution is to go through a VERY SPECIFIC drive cycle requiring at LEAST 2 cold starts (i.e. multi-day process) to reset the emissions indicators. Not fun.
Oh yeah, and chip is not socketed on the board, so the only way to reprogram the damn thing is to buy a new ECU from a later model year which has a socketed chip. Of course, it is very costly.
AFAIK, it's effectively unpossible to modify the EZL programming. Or at least, I've not heard of anyone successfully doing this, other than selecting different maps which already exist (all of which have reduced timing, not increased timing needed for power gains). Fuel mapping is doable, but I believe these LH-SFI systems are simply adjusted for displacement... no power gains for an existing displacement setup. This is why we can't get power gains from a fuel EPROM swap.
Exactly correct. The problem is not OBD-1 vs OBD-2, it's the Bosch engine management systems. Everything was OBD-2 starting in 1996 USA model year, but 1996-99 M119's were all ME v1.0 which was NOT tune-able by commercially-available flash programming. I spoke with Hartmut on the phone years ago about this, related to the W210 E60 M119 ECU, which was ME 1.0 (OBD-2). He said he was unable to reprogram them in-house, he had to send the ECU's to AMG in Germany and have them send back a modified ECU for all his ME 1.0 E60 builds. (!!)
It wasn't until ME v2.0 came out in the early 00's, where it became relatively easy to reprogram/tune the ECU via flash loader. The Bosch ME ECU controls both fuel and ignition (no separate EZL) so once tuners could access those maps, both fuel and ignition could be changed. No M119 was ever controlled by ME v2.0 from the factory. Even after this point, big power gains were only possible with forced induction (think M113 Kompressor, or anything turbocharged).
This is also spot-on. For significant changes in M119 hardware (beyond just displacement changes), like custom race headers or forced induction, aftermarket standalone ECU is required to maximize the output. The LH-SFI systems with EZL just don't have enough flexibility. They work very well within the original design parameters, but once you go outside those limits, aftermarket engine controls are needed.
Keep your dynamat, get a resonator and muffler back in, and you should be happy. Oh, and the biggest change to exhaust tonality and volume are headers, then muffler, then resonator (drone killer). So use the headers, add a resonator to kill drone, and use whatever muffler you desire.
The performance of this car is what it is, and it’s not really the point by today’s standards, IMO. It’s daily driveable today, which is all the win in the world for a classic car given the horse power wars that took place between ‘02 and ‘08 — again, IMO. Sounds to me you’re after good engine sound with no drone and good stereo (all required for daily life) in a classic car format, more than any mind blowing performance improvement. So limit your time and money focus to that, would be my $.02. You can get an E55k for more power, which also highlights everything you lose.
The fact that I can jump in a car this elegant and timeless, lose nothing in interior modernity and keep up with everything else on the road, kinda checks all my boxes for this car. If I spend 50 hrs a year behind the wheel, it’s a lot.
GL, and we learn from you too, which IS the point exactly.
Cheers,
maw
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Fair enough, Maw, although I won’t keep three layers of dynamat in the car. Way to heavy!
Maybe I’ll give it another go after a few other projects. I’d have to cut the pipes, though, to add a resistor and muffler, eh?
J
We don't typically run resonators, but one question... still running catalysts or no?
J
Or just add muffler for now as @jhodg5ck suggests. You can always add resonator(s) later if it’s still too loud. That’s certainly the easiest way forward.
These look like converters to me... http://www.w124performance.com/images/M119/exhaust/500E_custom_exhaust/L1010206.jpg
If the rest of the exhaust is on the car as depicted here, I’d definitely just add a muffler before I butcher the rest...
maw
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Yes. Herb welded some small efficient catalysts into the system -- two in each front pipe (see photos). He had to do it a number of times, as the rich fuel mixture was burning them out. Of course, all of this is in storage. The stock system is on the car now.
Yes, those are the converters. The exhaust is not on the car. Those are old photos. The stock system is currently on the car.
J
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