The exhaust bits arrived in the week, and today the assembly paste showed up so I decided to crack on. There was an element of 'hope for the best' with all of this, with the silencer I ordered being a lot bigger I had to make an educated* guess on dimensions. I finally settled on a 5" x 18" stainless silencer which looked like it should fit.

As you can see, it's quite a bit bigger than what came off. I measured up the pipe about 20 times then finally bit the bullet and cut the straight pipe. This was the point of no return.

No going back now! Actually there was a plan b, if I totally hammed it up I could use a joiner to remake this, so it wasn't 100% jeopardy

I splodged some assembly paste on and slid the pipe onto the silencer onto the mid section of pipe and clamped it

So far so good, then onto fitting it to the car. I used the assembly paste and amazingly it all went together correctly. Mid section went on fine and hanger fitted, the rear section is a bit fiddly as it routes over the rear beam but that eventually went on too and got clamped into place.

I need a slightly longer hanger for the rearmost section because the tailpipe touches the rear bumper, but for now I have cable tied the bumper up a bit to stop them contacting

This is the finished article, the new silencer fits really well into the transmission tunnel with room to spare. The joints don't seem to leak and it's knocked a good bit of noise off the exhaust note. It's still louder than stock, but just sounds nicer.

I removed the bung from the tailpipe and went for a drive, it's now a lot less noisy, especially about 4000 rpm, when it's a lot more civilised. It also revs a lot better, previously the bung seemed to really restrict it revving above 4000rpm, now it revs really well through 6000rpm and isn't a piercing roar any more.

I should have just fixed this myself ages ago, I'm really happy with it now. Next up is to replace the windscreen before the MOT, and look at changing the short driveshaft to try and cure the 70mph wobble