[mpathic]

Lots of amateurs posing as professional exhaust shops just because they can slap a new cat on a car good enough to pass smog.

Burlingame Muffler is a real pro who does megabucks restorations on vintage racers and antiques, California legal power train swaps, as well as custom performance fab jobs like he's done on three cars for me now.

You're right, my guy is probably the exception to the rule. A local shop butchered a cat installation on my old M3, that's what led me to Burlingame. He's not cheap, but not overpriced either. He also has to choose you as a customer as much as you wanting him to do work for you. That said, its well worth having Dan do any exhaust work you want when it really matters.

One neet part of the job he did on my MZ4, was to retain some of the factory pipes that had gone from the resonator to the mufflers, but round back out the exhaust pipe sections that had been squared off by the factory. This opened up the flow to the mufflers much better than squeezing air through a squared section, and without needing to bend completely new sections of pipe to fit around each side of the differential.

There are no doubt other 'arteestS' with the torch and pipe bender elsewhere around the country. They're well worth finding, if you want the max flow increase with least needed noise volume increase on the street, or don't care about noise and just want an exhaust that will flow like a raging river and attract every cop for miles around.