Performance Exhaust Systems: Mandrel Bends

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Doug. I work with twenty great guys in St. Louis at Doug Jenkins Custom Hot Rods, and we're going to do some work for you today on Expert Village. The total build price of this car is very expensive; it has a lot of costly parts in it, a lot of labor. But I can have the same car cost twice as much money if I do everything perfect. So a way to triple the cost of the exhaust system is with a mandrel bent system. A mandrel is simply a rigid piece of metal you put inside a pipe when you bend it so you do not deform the diameter of the pipe when you do the bending. It's a very costly machine and it's impossible to do custom one-offs in one big piece with a mandrel bender. You can do one long piece after you've got your pipe design, but you can't do an as-you-go kind of deal like we're doing here with a mandrel bender. The mandrel bend is great, you have to cut and weld small pieces of pipe in order to get everything going in the right amount of space. It's really expensive. Don't get me wrong, three inch exhaust is expensive, but mandrel bent three inch or two and a half is incredibly expensive."