Borla ATAK Cat-Back Exhaust with Polished Tips (99-04 Mustang GT, Mach 1)

Video Review & Installation

Justin: If you're after one of the loudest and most unruly systems available for your '99 to '04 GT Bullitt or Mach 1, the Borla ATAK here is certainly worth some serious consideration. Now, the Borla is gonna combine a quality stainless build with absolutely ear piercing tone, all for around 800 bucks, while the install will involve some cutting in order to remove that factory exhaust system. So, therefore, we will nudge this one up to a two out of three wrenches on the difficulty meter with a detailed walkthrough to come later in the video.Now, when shopping for exhaust systems, you're going to encounter roughly three big options when it comes to sound: those systems that will barely turn things up over your factory exhaust, some that will give you a noticeable amount of volume, and then finally, the systems that will turn every head and set off every alarm on your block. And as you guys heard with our sound clips, the ATAK from Borla is definitely going to fall into that last category. In fact, going to my patented one to five or one to wake the neighbor scale, the ATAK might just be one of the easiest systems I've ever ranked at a full blown five out of five, as you will no doubt be waking all of the neighbors with the Borla in place. Now, inside the car, the ATAK does manage to fight off some of the drone and noise. But listen, guys, when things are this aggressive on the outside, it's really hard to keep things totally quiet on the inside. However, with that said, Borla is gonna be one of your better options out there in this regard.So how does the ATAK get all of its volume? Well, for starters, let's take a closer look at that name, ATAK. Now, that it's actually going to stand for acoustically tuned applied kinetics and that's Borla's super technical way of saying yes, expect this sucker to be loud, but without some of the distortion that can sometimes come along with the more aggressive systems out there. Now, I will say that the ATAK is not only going to be much louder than the Stinger or S-Type also from Borla, but it will also be a little higher pitched as well which some people might like, others might prefer that slightly deeper tone of Borla's middle of the road offering. The point being make sure to listen to both sound clips before making your decision for your new edge. But getting back to the ATAK here and let's talk construction. And listen guys, it's Borla, expect a rock-solid build and very high quality materials throughout. This does include your full stainless steel two-and-a-half inch mandrel bent tubing throughout leading into and out of those straight through ATAK mufflers before exiting out of the large four-inch tips here embossed with that Borla logo.But let's switch gears and get into the installation. And as we mentioned earlier, if you have a factory system installed on your new edge, there will be some minor cutting involved, but the rest of the install will be very, very straightforward. And to give you a better idea of what's involved for this job, here is a detailed walkthrough along with a tool breakdown.Man: All right, first thing we're gonna do is cut our over the axle pipes out. You have two choices here, you can either cut them like we're gonna do if your exhaust isn't salvageable, or you can disconnect your lower shocks here and drop the rear down, that's gonna help you take your stock cat-back out in one piece.Next, we're gonna remove our tailpipes out of the rubber hangers. Use a little bit of WD-40 on the rubber part, it will help it slide out a little bit easier. And we should be able to slide our tailpipe right out of here. We're gonna do the same thing on the right side, spray our rubbers here. If you guys don't have an exhaust hangar tool, you can use a pry bar. I should do the same, makes it a little bit easier. Now we just slide our tailpipe out of the hanger, fish it over the rear and it's out. All right, we're moving up to the mid pipe bolts here. They are a nine-sixteenths. I've had them soaking in PB B'laster for quite some time now. I got lucky and I was able to break them loose. If you guys have rusted bolts off, you can cut these off, put new bolts in. I'm gonna try and salvage the old bolts here, so let's see if we can get them off.Now, that we got our nuts off of the mid pipe, we can come back to the rear muffler hanger, gonna do the same thing as before. We're gonna spray the hanger with some WD-40, it's gonna help get it out of place. All right, same thing for the left side. Spray your hanger with WD-40, pop it off the rubber here, and we can pull our muffler down .First thing we're gonna do to start our install off is to put our flared front pipes up into place. We're not gonna bolt them up tight, we're just gonna hand-tighten the two nuts.All right, next thing we're gonna do is put our over axle pipe into place. Wanna don't forget to put a clamp on the end of your pipe here. Let's get it up over the axle. All right, Borla tells you to bolt these up firsthand tight. I tried to do that and it's a little tough to get this pipe lined up with your over axle pipe, so I unbolted it and I inserted into the over axle pipe and now we're able to slide this in much easier. So whatever works for you. This is how we're gonna do it.All right, now, moving back we can try and get both of these hangers into the rubber isolators. You can now, put your tailpipe in place. Again, don't forget to put a clamp at the end of the pipe. So we'll slide this up in here into the hanger, and make the connection to the over axle pipe. And we'll go to the other side and do the same thing. And then bolt our flange pipe up. Now, we can move back and get our hangers in place.All right, now for the last piece here is the tailpipe. Again, don't forget to put your clamp on. We'll go up and into the hanger first, and then we can connect our over axle pipe to our tailpipe. Once you've got all your pipes on, you can now start to tighten all your clamps down. We're gonna start right up front here at the flange connection and work our way back.That's gonna wrap up our install and review. Be sure to check out more at americanmuscle.com.