Exhaust Repair

So on my 2004 Mitsubishi Galant GTS my exhaust began sounding really loud and vibrating the whole car on Thursday night. So I take it in on Saturday to Meineke and find out its the Flex Section leaking and that I have another leak a little further down the pipe. It had been getting louder and more shaky for a while and I guess the flex section just finally went kaput. In any event they quoted me 250-300 to repair it by cutting a custom flex section for the pipe and sealing another small leak. I ended up usking them down to $250 at first then $230.19 when all was said and done and it now feels a lot better when accelerating and idling.

I feel like I got a fair price on repairing the flex section considering that they had to actually cut a new part for it and weld it onto the pipe vs replacing the whole thing and it took them about 3-4 hours to do it. But now I've seen varying prices online for doing Flex Section Repair, some around where mine was, some less and some way more than mine was. I'm just wondering if I got a good price or did I overpay for the repair? Have other people repaired just the flex section on their exhaust before?

Your price isnt the worst i've heard, a muffler shop would usually do it for about 120-200. Also you can get the flex sections at autozone or any parts store for around 70 i believe and if you have a friend who welds then youre golden. All in all i wouldn't sweat it, its already done.

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Originally Posted by 00galantguy

Your price isnt the worst i've heard, a muffler shop would usually do it for about 120-200. Also you can get the flex sections at autozone or any parts store for around 70 i believe and if you have a friend who welds then youre golden. All in all i wouldn't sweat it, its already done.

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Yeah unfortunately my usual mechanic doesn't weld and couldn't find the replacement part from his suppliers. So I kept putting it off until it got to that point. He did my other services, timing belt, water pump, transmission fluid change, rear rotors replacement, all brake pads, tire balancing, tire rotation, repairing a nail in my tire, oil changes etc.

All of that combined cost me way less than $1000. So not sweating it just wondering if I should take it back to that Meineke again for services my regular guy won't tackle.

Upside is the more I do maintenance to the car the stronger it feels even at over 144k miles. All-in-all the car is holding up very well considering it is over 8 years old now.

I wouldve just replaced the whole exhaust system sice youd be willing to spend that much anyway. Or get custom piping done.

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Originally Posted by djouw

I wouldve just replaced the whole exhaust system sice youd be willing to spend that much anyway. Or get custom piping done.

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he didnt say he was willing to spend $1k dollars he said $230 was better than $1k,

To replace his whole exhuast with Oem or Equivalent parts would cost him over $2k in parts alone.

I guess i didn't realize it'd be that much. A full 2.5" exhaust with a muffler should only cost around that depending on the brand of muffler.

The stock exhaust is 2 1/4 right?

djouw, I'd love to replace the exhaust, especially now that theres a definite noise coming from the heat shielding. But thats just out of my budget to drop upwards of 1k-2k for exhaust. I haven't been able to find any mods the the exhaust for any cheaper and most people want to charge out the ass for working on exhaust so I was kind of stuck. Especially since I need to replace the brakes on it and fix the radio before I can start working on things that aren't quite as major of issues like my o2 sensor being out and my speed sensor going out and malfunctioning causing my traction control to never work.

what size is the stock exhaust? 2.5 or 2.25 inches??