Clearance Measurements

I was talking to a fellow GRRRR8.net member about the mid-muffler and the discussion ended up around how much the muffler actually 'sticks out' and how much clearance I have. It's been going on almost 2 weeks now since my mid-muffler install and keeping away from known trouble areas (e.g. part of my driveway with a tree root under it ) i haven't had any major scrapes (just one teensy tiny one). So it was time to crawl under the car and see exactly what's going.

At first I did the super-duper-scientific method: I stood a small piece of wood up under the car and marked the level of the lowest point on my cats (my previous lowest point). Then I moved the block to the mid muffler and did the same. Looking at the marks they were within basically a few millimeters of each other right around 3". So officially I have 3 inches of clearance. Of course that is with how much my car is lowered which is who knows exactly how much...  The discussion then circled back to 'but how much does the muffler stick out' etc because every one's car is different as far as how much it's lowered. And really stuff like "651 mm" as described by Pedders (measured to the bottom of the rim) never made any sense to me since i'm running 20's.I know there's probably an easy conversion i'm missing (add/minus 1 inch probably?) but I figured I'd measure on the body instead.

Some quick measurements came up with the following points
Front Driver Side wheel - Straight up through center from Ground to Fender : 27"
Rear Driver Side Wheel - Straight up through center from Ground to Fender : 27"
Front Door Line - Eyeballing while standing from the edge to the ground: 6"
Between Front/Rear Door Line - Again eyeballing while standing; 7.5"
In front of rear Wheel well - again eyeballing; 9"

Now the Line I was following was the 'upper' line (if you paid attention while washing your car you know it slants up while it curves under. I've made the following photoshop to make this a little clearer:

So that at least gives a baseline for how much my car is lowered etc. which if someone else were to measure their car would give a possible indicator how the muffler would sit. (e.g. say that mid part is 9" instead of 7.5 it'd be safe to assume they'd get at least 4.5" of clearance depending on fitment etc.)

For the final measurement I went back under the car and measured from where the cross-member used to sit to the ground. The actual Measuring Tape is about 2.5" tall when it sits up like in this image:

 So the total clearance from the ground to the crossmember is about 5" inches (the angle of the camera makes it look a little larger, but when measured from the side it was 5 inches).If we take that with the 3" of actual clearance that we found earlier it would mean that my muffler sticks out 2" past the body line where the cross-member used to sit. Seems a lot - but so far I am quite happy I installed this because the car sounds a LOT more refined and not having had any scraping issues really so far makes for 1 happy camper!