Got it installed, and mentioned it in the other thread, but want to update here for posterity.
New muffler after paint, compared to existing muffler with zero packing material... basically a header collector muffler. The AP Xcelerator is a straight-through muffler, but has packing material (think Magnaflow). After driving around for a few days now, the drone/resonance is much less... almost completely gone from where I sit in the car.
Since the new muffler was 2" longer than the original (28" vs. 26") I needed to shorten one of the pipes, and the intermediate pipe, off the cat., was the easy choice. You can also see how well the VHT primer & paint held up over the winter, with all that road-salt.
New muffler needed some notches cut to allow for positive clamping.
Here it is mounted under the truck. Nice and tight.
I also replaced all the exhaust hangers with new pieces. The four that I pulled off appeared to be fine, but since I had new hangers, and was under there, I was gonna change them out.
Impressions: Quieter on startup; less bark. Much quieter in the cab while cruising, but can still hear some noise when I mash the gas pedal. The big deal is that there seems to be less resonance reverberating through the cabin at certain RPMs, which were pretty bad. I would have left it in, but if the backseat people don't get their brains rattled, I'm cool with it.
