I bought the Titanium exhaust from Milliken Ford and installed it yesterday. Here are my learnings:
- when removing the rear diffuser, the shop manual has some deficiencies such as showing 5 wheel liner pins to remove. There are 7 on each side
- the shop manual says to disconnect the rear back up lights after removing the diffuser. NOT! Disconnect the reversing lights' electrical connections per the shop manual, and then use trim tool to pop out push pins holding the reversing light wires away from the muffler so they don't melt. If you remove all the diffuser bolts before this it will be extremely difficult to get them out, and you may pull the wires out of their connectors to the reversing lights.
- the shop manual does not tell you to unplug the rear camera wire. This was a challenge as even with the diffuser dropped you need slender fingers and a good grip to disconnect.
PERHAPS THE MOST SIGNIFICANT LEARNING WAS THAT THERE WAS A LOT OF GRAVEL AND GRASS INSIDE. Most of the grass and some small leaves and bugs were piled up around the rear camera and on the inside of the vents in the bumper cover. Not sure if during driving the grass would fly around in there, but I was concerned about how much had collected in only 2400 miles. Potential fire hazard given the proximity to the muffler and tailpipes?
I looked and found that there were gaps in the rear brake scoops that would let all that stuff get in there. There is a wire mesh screen inside the scoop but on one there was about a 1/2 inch gap between the bottom of the screen and the scoop body. A little black duct tape solved that problem. Not sure if my car is the only one that has this issue, but given how the scoop and screen are fitted, I expect more have the problem. Here is a picture of it.
