Ok so first thing's first, I got the turbo outlet and downpipe off. Not much drama with that, I've done it before and it's relatively easy, although if you have hodor hands I could see why it would be a pain in the a**.
Here's a comparison of the Tomei pipe and stock O2 pipe
Pretty significant difference! That's a pretty big bottle neck. Here's the ISR downpipe
Heres the 2.5 inch downpipe. Look at that surface rust!
Additionally, Tomei engineered this outlet with having in mind that you are using a stud on the bottom-most hole, because you can't really fit a bolt in there. So I got an extra outlet stud and it all fits no problem. Place this stud at the notched part of the elbow.
With that said, the downpipe is clocked incorrectly on my setup. The 3 hole flange is fine and mates to the Tomei unit, no problem. The flange that connects to the cat is at a weird diagonal whereas my cat flange is parallel to the ground. Also for some reason the downpipe flange is not on a flat plane. They put a stupid little curve at the end of the pipe. Doesn't make any sense to me.
So my downpipe is now held to the cat with one bolt, just so I could secure it and get it partially going into the rest of the exhaust. Obviously it's a massive leak because the flange is clocked incorrectly. So I'll be taking this to the exhaust shop so they can chop and reweld it. Also I needed to take it there to get an o2 bung welded to the downpipe anyways. Strange that Isis doesn't already put a bung there.
After that, I'll finish sanding my brake booster, as it's always had rust on it from the previous owner having a master cylinder leak it looks like. I'm doing this to bide time until I go get a tune which will be sometime mid April. More to come!