Hey guys, Adam here with americanmuscle.com.
Today we're taking a look at, listening to, and installing the MBRP three inch catted
down pipe available for all 2015 to 2018 EcoBoost Mustangs.
Now, if you're the owner of that S550 four-cylinder Mustang, you might be looking to upgrade in
sound and a bit of power as well in which case the down pipe is extremely affordable
and, of course, a very easy one to install.
This particular one is the high flow cat version that MBRP offers, which means it does retain
your catalytic converters, which means it remains street legal.
If you guys are going for the off-road version, keep in mind that it might not be legal in
your area.
So check with your local laws and regulations.Now, this one in particular has a three inch diameter,
a bump up from the stock option, which means you get a better airflow and the mandrel bends,
of course, streamline that flow for less restrictive piping.
Now, as far as that sound goes, you just heard our sound clips.
It's a small bump up from stock.
At wide open throttle, it's the most noticeable.
But at idle and very low RPMS, you'll barely notice the difference.
It's definitely gonna have a small bump in throttle response, you'll feel that at the
pedal, but you can maximize that if you throw a tune on top of it, which I would definitely
recommend if you're looking to get the most out of your down pipe and other power adder
mods.
Now, with that sound, I'm giving it two out of five on our loudness meter, simply because
it's just a very easy upgrade over stock that doesn't go too overwhelming, and since it
retains the cats, the volume stays pretty mellow.
If you're looking to pick this one up, you can do so for just a little over 400 bucks.
Now, the installation for this down pipe, I'm gonna give one out of three wrenches on
a difficulty meter here if you're working on a lift.
If you're working at home in the driveway with simple jack and jack stands, might be
a little bit more difficult.
You've a little bit less room to work with.
I'd give it a little bit of a softer two out of three wrenches on our difficulty meter.
It'll take you about an hour on a lift.
Maybe two hours if you're working on the ground.
Without further ado, I'm gonna show you guys how this gets done.
So let's get to it.
So to kick off our uninstall, the first thing we have to do is pop open our hood.
And I'm gonna disconnect the upper 02 sensor on our passenger side.
So the first step in the uninstall is to disconnect the harness connecting your upper 02 sensor
on the factory down pipe.
So let's get to that.
Here's your 02 sensor on the upper side.
Follow this green wire up to this connector.
This is actually held on by a push clip.
So you can pull back on it and it'll come out of place.
From here, you can disconnect this.
Give it a pinch.
Pull back and it's disconnected.
So now that the 02 sensor is disconnected on the upper side, we have to get to the lower
one.
In order to do that, we're gonna put the car up in the air.
Now, we're using a lift.
If you're working at home, you can use a jack and jack stands.
All right.
So we disconnected the wire for the upper 02 sensor.
Now it's time to tackle the lower one.
So you got a little less room to work with here now that we're underneath the car.
If you follow your secondary 02, which is actually on the catalytic converter itself,
follow that back here to the trans, you're gonna see this clip clipped into this pre-drilled
hole here with a white snap-on clip here.
So what we're gonna do is push up on it to disconnect that clip.
We're gonna pull back on the wiring here with a little pinch.
And that'll disconnect our 02 harness.
All right.
After the 02 is disconnected, the next step is to actually start removing the bolts on
the mounting bracket sitting on your cat to the trans.
So we're gonna use these two bolts to remove the nuts, disconnect this plate, and then
loosen but not fully remove the two bolts on the trans itself.
So I'm grabbing my 13 millimeter socket and let's get these off.
You wanna save this hardware.
Set it aside for later.
All right.
The two on the other end of that same bracket holding it to the transmission, you wanna
use your 13 mil socket to loosen them up but not fully remove them.
You just wanna leave a little wiggle room to be adjusted.
That's all we really needed.
We needed just a little bit of rooms to get those off of the studs.
All right.
Next up we get to the fun part.
I'm gonna grab my 15 millimeter socket, and we have to remove the two bolts holding on
the down pipe to the turbo end.
Now, this one can be a little bit tricky.
There's not a ton of space but then again we're working with a lot more space than we
would have in a five liter Coyote motor.
Now what we're gonna be doing is gonna be taking our 15 millimeter socket and our ratchet,
getting up in here from the bottom to work on our lower bolt.
I'm gonna crack it loose, switch over to my air ratchet, and get it off that way, just
a little bit easier.
If you don't have air ratchets, of course, just the simple hand ratchet will definitely
do the trick.
I'm just gonna try to make my life a little bit easier.
Once we get that bottom one off, I'll be doing the same thing from the top.
All right.
This is actually really simple with a hand ratchet.
So I'm not even gonna need to switch over to air.
So I'm just gonna work this nut off of that stud and we'll move on to the top one.
We got it loosened up.
I'm gonna work it off with my thumb.
All right.
So we got that bottom nut out.
So what we're gonna do is the exact same thing for the top one and then it'll disconnect
from the turbo.
All right.
Now we can work on the top one up there.
So we have a lot more room to work with.
I'm gonna switch over to the air tool now simply because I can actually get it to fit
in here.
That'll just make life a little easier.
All right, got that top nut loosened up and pull that down.
Now you can see, down pipe is now disconnected from the turbo.
All right.
So far, we've got the 02 sensors disconnected at the cat and up top.
We've got the two bolts disconnected holding the flange onto the down pipe to the turbo.
Now, all we have left is to pop off this hanger from the isolator and remove the two bolts
here at our mid pipe.
So I'm gonna use a hanger removal tool, pop this out of place, switch over to my 15 millimeter
socket and get these two off.
You wanna be careful.
Once you pop this out of the hangar, it will drop down a little bit.
Just watch your head.
All right.
We got our 15 millimeter socket here.
I'm gonna crack these loose, get these two off and then we'll be able to disconnect your
down pipe and set it aside.
So we finally got our factory down pipe off of our 2018 EcoBoost and on the table here
sitting next to our MBRP down pipe, the catted version.
Now taking a look at them side-by-side, you can see pretty clear differences between the
two.
First and foremost, our 2018 EcoBoost does not have a ton of miles on it, but you can
see the condition of our down pipe.
Now, it's got a little bit of, you know, wear and tear in the piping here, it's discolored
whereas our MBRP one is fresh out of the box.
This one also is a three-inch mandrel bent stainless steel, a little bit higher quality
than the factory option.
So it'll last a little bit longer and look a little bit better when it stands the test
of time.
Now, some of the biggest differences here come along with the catalytic converters.
Now the factory cat you can see it's pretty massive but also pretty restrictive.
Our new cat here on the MBRP one here is a high flow cat.
So that means you get a better airflow through the three inch mandrel bent tubing while also
keeping your ride street legal.
If you pick up the off-road version, it gives you a little bit more power, a little bit
more volume and rasp, but it's also illegal for street use.
For the guys looking to pick up a down pipe that's not only street legal but also has
a high airflow percentage to give you a little bit more power and sound, the catted version
is a really good way to go.
As far as everything else goes, you're looking at a direct OEM fitment.
The flanges up here are the same size as your factory one.
The diameter of the tubing is a little bit bigger than the factory one here as well and
it goes into a two and a quarter inch of the factory exhaust.
So it will fit perfectly with your factory cat-back.
If you were to upgrade to an aftermarket cat-back, just make sure you're working with a two and
a quarter inch inlet.
So that way it'll connect to your down pipe easily.
Now, at the end of the day, all we have to do to get this installed on our 2018 is to
transfer over a couple of things including our 02 sensors.
I'll use a wrench to get those off in just a second.
The last thing we'll need to do is transfer over our gasket.
This is gonna fit directly into our new flange here at the end and then we'll swap over the
clamp on the opposite side and we'll be good to go.
So let's get to it.
All right.
Step number one here to transfer everything over is we're gonna transfer over the 02 sensors.
Now I'm grabbing a seven-eights wrench here.
We're gonna work this thing off.
It might take a little elbow grease to pop it loose but it just screws on with the threading
and there's threading already in this hole over here.
So pop these 02 sensors off.
I'll transfer the upper one to here, the lower one to here, and we'll work on the clamp.
Once you break it loose, you can work it off by hand.
All right.
You just wanna make sure you're being real careful with these.
Transfer it right over.
All right.
Transfer over the lower one then we'll tighten them down.
All right.
So on the other end, our mid-pipe end, we have to transfer over this clamp to our MBRP
one.
Now, it doesn't just slide straight back.
It's got a clip holding it on.
If you can do it with your finger, that's great.
If not, flat-head screwdriver, pry up on that, and it will slide straight back.
Now that we have everything transferred over, it's time to get our MBRP down pipe installed
on the 2018 EcoBoost.
All right.
Now it's time to get this installed on our turbo side.
And you wanna make sure you're reusing the factory gasket.
That's gonna sit right in the top flange.
You'll see it's got that little bald off kind of rounded shape on the one end.
That's gonna go inside the flange.
This little lip is gonna connect to the turbo.
So we're gonna sit that inside.
We're gonna make sure you have your flange seated upward.
We're gonna insert that into the studs and work our factory nuts back on and tighten
it down.
All right.
Now that we have our nuts slid into place by hand, gonna use our 15 millimeter socket
to tighten these down.
Once you have it set in place on the turbo end, you can feed the nuts by hand onto the
studs.
It only gets you so far.
So I'm gonna switch over to a 15-millimeter ratcheting wrench, which is small enough to
get in there to work it on a little bit better.
Now, if you have a little bit more room, of course, you can use a ratchet.
I find this to be a little easier to get it back on.
Now, at this point, you don't wanna tighten them down too much.
You just wanna get them nice and snug so the gasket seats properly but you wanna leave
a little room for adjustment.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna attach the back end here to connect to our mid pipe
and then we'll come back and tighten everything down.
This gives us a little wiggle room if we need to make adjustments to make everything fit
perfectly.
So let's get to the mid pipe.
We're gonna slide our clamp end over top of the end of our down pipe here and then that
will allow us to line it up with our mid pipe and slide it over.
You wanna keep in mind that you're using one of the new clamps provided by MBRP.
Slide that over to the end here.
Let's get to work.
Now those clips we loosened up earlier on this side actually slide into this clip pipe
that's on this side.
So there's a tube on the mid pipe that'll actually get that to clip inside.
So you wanna line that up perfectly so that your bolts are facing down.
That makes your life easier as well.
Once you have that in place, let's slide our hanger over the isolator and start tightening
down our clamps.
Now remember, we're not tightening everything down perfectly just yet.
Don't over tighten anything.
We wanna make sure the clamp is snug so that we still have a little bit of room for adjustment.
All right.
Lining up everything looks pretty good.
It's all in the proper position.
So I'm gonna take my air tool and our 15 millimeter socket, go back up to the turbo, tighten down
those nuts, attach our bracket, reconnect our 02 two sensors, and we're good to go.
All right.
Just a couple more steps and we'll be complete.
So what have to do is get this bracket back on holding it from the transmission to the
down pipe.
I have this plate.
That'll go on first.
Next up you wanna use these little tube spacers.
That's gonna slide in tube end first.
Now, you might have to do a little adjusting on the bracket itself to get that in.
Cap that off with a nut.
Do the same thing for the other one.
Grab our 13-millimeter socket and tighten these down.
All right.
Last step here we wanna reconnect both of our 02s.
The lower 02 sensor we can do right here because it clips onto the transmission.
The upper one we'll do when we put our car back on the ground.
As you remember, we unclip this from the trans since it's a factory OEM like clip.
Snaps right back in like your stock one does.
You feed it back over and clip it back to the trans.
This piece here, this little metal clip, can go upward and it'll clip right back onto one
of the fins of the transmission.
So with this end of the bracket reconnected, we're gonna now tighten up the bolts that
we loosened up but didn't fully remove before on our transmission.
Once we have everything tightened down, let's get the car on the ground and we'll reconnect
the upper 02 sensor and we're good to go.
All right.
Last step here is to reconnect our upper 02 sensor.
We got our car on the ground.
So we're gonna go back in here.
This is our 02.
Follow that green wire back, reconnect it to our factory location.
And as you remember, we unclipped it from this plastic clip here.
That's gonna slide in this little bracket.
All right, guys, that's gonna wrap up my review and install of the MBRP three inch catted
down pipe for the '15 to '18 EcoBoost Mustang.
It's a really easy mod for an install that gives you a sound upgrade and a small power
upgrade especially if you pair it with a tune, although this one is a no tune required.
So that's a really good thing to keep in mind when you're shopping around.
If you wanna pick this one up for your own Mustang, you can do so right here at americanmuscle.com.