Installation Time
(approx) 1 Hour
Difficulty Level:
Light to Moderate mechanical skill required.
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Okay, guys. So, as you just saw and heard, today we're checking out the AFE Rock Basher Single Exhaust System with the Rear Exit, for all 2020 and later Jeep Gladiators. All right, guys, so, after we took it for our little road trip there, I would rate this at about a three out of five on our loudness meter. Nothing too crazy loud until you really get on the accelerator. But just cruising down the road, I didn't notice any drone or any kind of unpleasant noise, and to be quite honest with you, if you're running mud-terrain tires, you're already gonna have that noise kind of competing with the exhaust as you're just cruising down the road. But when you put your foot in it, that's when the exhaust really comes alive, and especially with the exit just behind the cab of your truck, it's kind of real close to you, as opposed to the exit that's usually out by the rear bumper with your factory exhaust.Now, I think this kit is really gonna appeal to the Gladiator owner who is looking for more aggressive tone to their exhaust note, but also wants something that provides hi-tuck, high clearance in their exhaust. Now, the term hi-tuck exhaust is something you see a lot with the Jeep Wranglers, and I've done several of those exhaust here at ExtremeTerrain. And it typically refers to that higher tucked-in tailpipe that's gonna provide a lot more clearance, and it's not gonna provide anything dangling down below that's gonna hit on a rock or the ground if you're on some uneven terrain.This exhaust is tucked neatly up higher than the bottom of your frame rail, so this exhaust is never gonna scrape on anything unless your frame is scraping on something. So, it's really a nice, attractive piece if you're gonna be out there hitting some rough trails. Now, as you can see, the exhaust basically ends where your rear suspension begins. So, the other nice thing about this kit is if you're gonna be doing anything radical to your rear suspension with a lift kit, different control arms, what have you, none of the exhaust is gonna be in your way for either that work or for the operation of that lift kit.Now, aFe Power really makes a quality kit here. Working with it today, I really liked the fitment. It was quite an easy kit to put together and get mounted up on the Jeep. They use quality 409 stainless steel, and that's gonna give you a lot of protection against weathering and corrosion for years to come.Now, even though this is a shorter kit, that eliminates two out of the three sounding-deadening devices that your factory exhaust has, this price on this kit is right around $425. That kind of puts it middle of the road. There are cheaper kits out there, but I don't think you're gonna get the same quality of exhaust note, and you're definitely not gonna get that same hi-tuck installation.Now, speaking of the installation, I'm giving it a very solid two out of three wrenches on our difficulty meter. Give yourself about two hours to get this job done from start to finish. You're not gonna need anything exotic as far as tools are concerned, and we'll show you those in just a second. However, your factory exhaust, if you wanna preserve it in one piece, is gonna be a little bit challenging to remove off of your Gladiator.Now, if you're gonna take that exhaust off and never look back, go ahead and cut it into pieces. It'll be a lot easier, actually, to get it off that way. But, as you'll see in our installation, we're gonna show you how to get your exhaust off in one piece, in the event that it's something you wanna preserve that way. So, let's go ahead, show you the tools, and go ahead with the installation.Okay, guys, tools we're gonna use in this installation. I highly recommend wearing a pair of protective gloves, working with exhaust kits often have sharp, jagged edges, as well as some eye protection, an electric impact wrench, a regular socket wrench, a socket extension, 10-millimeter, and a pair of 13-millimeter sockets, 15-millimeter, 18-millimeter socket, and some PB B'laster or some other penetrating oil.Okay, guys, first step, obviously, is we're gonna have to remove our factory exhaust. Now, we have our Gladiator up on a lift, to give you guys some better angles to show you exactly what we're doing underneath the Jeep. And the way we're gonna do this is gonna preserve our factory exhaust. If you don't care about your factory exhaust, it might be easier just to cut it off, but we are gonna show you how to get this off while preserving the piping. So, let's go ahead and get started.All right, guys, first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna remove the skid plate here, and that's so we can drop the front end of the exhaust down. That'll make it a little bit easier to kind of work it way out. The factory exhaust is basically one piece from the Y-pipe all the way back to the tailpipe. So, what we're first gonna do is we have a 13-mill bolt, or a nut right here we're gonna remove. And then we have four 18-millimeter bolts here, and then two up front here that we're gonna remove, and that'll let us get the skid plate down.And, like I said, guys, that one we just did was a 13-millimeter, and the next four are all gonna be 18-millimeter sockets you're gonna need. All right, guys, now, before I do the front two, make sure you're supporting it with your hand, because once you loosen these, the skid plate's gonna wanna drop on you.All right, guys, now, this point back is what we're gonna be removing. So, this clamp here, we're gonna loosen. You're gonna need a 13-mill socket for this ball clamp. Now, unlike a regular flat clamp, these ball clamps have a kind of a curved edge. They kind of cup around the end of the flange here, so you have to loosen it quite a bit in order to slide this out eventually. So, we have that pretty good loose, so we're gonna move to the next step.All right, guys, now we're gonna pull back on this lock tab. This is just kind of to prevent the clamp from sliding at all. So, just get a screwdriver in there. Pull that back. All right, guys, now we're right near the tailpipe, and this is the rearmost hanger. We're gonna remove this bracket, because it is the one bracket that is pointing in a opposite direction from the other hangers further forward on the exhaust. We're gonna use a 13-mill sock on these two bolts as well.All right, guys, now, just to get it out of our way, we're gonna pull this hanger off. You're gonna have to pull it out a little bit, and rotate it down. There's this little tab right here that hooks into the frame rail, so you need to get it away from there. You should be able to just pull this out. Like that. All right, guys. Now, go ahead and assemble the tool that comes with your Jeep. We're going to lower our spare tire, get that out of the way, and then also remove the spare tire guard, to finish getting out our exhaust pipe.Now, this tool basically goes into a plastic sleeve that's behind the bumper here. Once you get that in, and you can't twist it by hand, then you know you're on the...it's kind of like a bolt back in there that the end of this tool goes on, and we're gonna use this just like a socket wrench. And then the lug wrench here has a square opening in it. Put that in the end here. All right. With a bunch of slack let out, guys, you don't wanna drop it all the way to the ground. You might wanna be able to get a hand underneath your tire.Lift your tire up. And there's a black bracket the tire rests on. Slide it up the cable, and get it through the lug hole. All right, guys. Now, to remove the heat shield that protects our spare tire, you're gonna have five bolts. They're all 10-millimeter. There's three up here that are gonna be very hard if not impossible for you guys to see on camera here, but we're gonna take those three out first.All right. Then we have the last two right here. Again, 10-millimeter. All right, guys. Now, at this step, we only have two hangers that are holding our exhaust pipe up, and they are both pointing towards the front, which means with the help of my friend back here, we're gonna slide the entire pipe backwards out of these two hangers, and then drop it down and actually pull it forward, to clear the rear axle.All right, guys, now we have our factory exhaust off our Gladiator. I wanted to put it here on the floor and give you a quick side-by-side comparison with our new aFe Power exhaust kit. Now, obviously, it's a dramatic change we're going for here. We're eliminating almost half of our entire exhaust from our factory setup. You're going from three sound-deadening devices on your factory exhaust down to a single muffler on your new aFe Power kit. And that's where that more rich, aggressive tone in your exhaust is gonna come from. So, let's go ahead and get this mounted on our Gladiator.All right, guys, real quick, before we go over to our truck, I just wanted to lay the parts out here and show you how everything lines up, and how it fits together. So, starting here, this is the engine end, or the front end of the exhaust. We have our factory ball clamp already kind of set on here. And this connection piece is going to go from the factory pipe to our new aFe kit. And this slides in here. And slide it in as far as you can. Get a clamp on there first, obviously, and have it oriented so that the nut side is down, so that way, when you're underneath it, you can get a tool on there.And slide that pipe in as far as you can. That way, we can adjust it as needed once we get it up towards the truck. Now, moving towards the rear end of the exhaust here, the offset section here on your muffler is towards the front, and the centered exit right here is towards the rear of the exhaust. Get a clamp on there. Now we have that in there as far as we can. That way, once we get up in there, we can adjust that as much as we need it. But making sure that you have enough overlap there between the two pieces is critical. You don't want any gas leaking out anywhere in this section of the pipe.So, let's go ahead and take this over to the Gladiator and get it fitted up. All right, guys, now that we have everything kind of loosely assembled, we're gonna go ahead and slide the rear hanger on first. Slide it down as far as we can. And up front here, we're going to connect up the factory pipe in our new aFe kit. You guys are gonna see a pole jack here in our shot, and that's just gonna help me support this. If you have somebody helping you, obviously, a second set of hands, you can use them at this section too.Up here, you want...your aFe pipe is gonna overlap the factory pipe a little bit, so you wanna press it forward. And then this ball clamp that is the factory clamp, we're gonna reuse, kind of pinches on both of them. So, you wanna make sure you have that overlap there. That's proper fitment. And then, checking alignment there, as well as at the back.All right. Now that we have the alignment the way we want it, start tightening up our clamps. All right, guys, now we're gonna tighten up this clamp here a little bit. We're gonna leave a little bit of play in it, but we need to snug it up quite a bit to help us so we can tighten them up on down the line here. You're gonna need a 15-mill socket for the new clamp with the aFe Power kit. All right. Now we're gonna tighten up our ball clamp here. Again, this is a 13-millimeter.All right. Now we're gonna tighten up our rearmost clamp here. And again, 15-millimeter with the new clamp. All right, guys, one of the last things we gotta do is replace our skid plate back onto the Jeep. Go ahead and grab those large 18-millimeter bolts that we took out. And we're gonna get a couple started here in the front.All right. Now we have them started. Go ahead and grab your tool. Again, 18-millimeter socket. And then lastly, our little 13-millimeter nut goes right here. All right, guys, now we're gonna replace our heat shield for our spare tire. Go ahead and slide it on those studs. And grab two of these 10-millimeter bolts, and we'll get them started by hand. All right. Grab your last 10-mill bolt, guys. This might be hard for you to see, but we're gonna thread it back in. It's kind of on the corner of the heat shield.And then the two 10-mill nuts that we removed earlier. All right. Once you have everything started, go ahead and grab your 10-mill socket and tighten everything down. All right, guys, go ahead and get the tool out of your factory tire change kit, and get it reinserted here. We're gonna lower the clamp back down, so we can get our spare tire back in. All right. Now we got the bracket and cable mounted back onto our spare tire, so we're gonna go ahead and crank it up.Okay, guys. That wraps up this review and install of this aFe Rock Basher Single Exhaust system with the Rear Exit, for all 2020 and later Jeep Gladiators. Of course, for all things Gladiator, keep it right here at extremeterrain.com.
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Features, Description, Reviews, Q&A, Specs & Installation
Brand | AFE |
Exhaust System Type | Cat-Back System |
Exhaust Tip Finish | No Tips |
Exhaust Tubing Diameter | 3.00 Inch |
Exhaust Material | Stainless Steel |
Exhaust Exit Location | Turn Down |
Exhaust Loudness | Medium |
Mild Baritone Drone. If you're looking to give your Jeep Wrangler an upgrade, this AFE Rock Basher Rear Exit Single Exhaust System would be the perfect first addition to your automotive overhaul. With lower tones and a reduced kick when throttling, this single exhaust muffler makes mountain terrain feel like a suburban drive.
Stainless Steel Structure. TIG-Welded Stainless alloy composes the parts of the AFE Rock Basher Rear Exit Single Exhaust System. It's designed to boost your torque and throttle power without you having to worry about heat stress and engine damage. Its high-tuck structure also protects it from off-road ruble and protrusions in the terrain.
Clamped Installation. This AFE Rock Basher Rear Exit Single Exhaust System perfectly fits OEM factory-measured installation points and only requires you to clap it on for you to enjoy all of the benefits it offers.
Application. This AFE Rock Basher Rear Exit Single Exhaust System is molded to fit all 2020-2023 6L Jeep Gladiator JT models.
Fitment:
AFE 49-48082
CA Residents: WARNING: Cancer and Reproductive Harm - www.P65Warnings.ca.gov
Installation Info
Installation Time
(approx) 1 Hour
Difficulty Level:
Light to Moderate mechanical skill required.
What's in the Box
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