304 stainless steel, TIG-welded, measured off your car — and road-legal
We build complete exhaust systems in the workshop rather than ordering them out of a catalogue. Cat-back systems, downpipes, valved systems and repairs — with the catalytic converter and the particulate filter left exactly where the manufacturer put them.
An off-the-shelf system is designed for an average example of your model. Yours is not average: it has been lowered, or it has a tow bar, or the suspension has been changed, or thirty years of Spanish sun have moved something by a centimetre. That is why we measure the car itself — the space, the mounting points, the movement of the suspension through its travel, the parts that must not get hot — before anything is cut.
From there we decide, with you, what the system should be: pipe diameter, how many silencers and where, the shape of the bends, and the tailpipe. Those decisions are made against your engine and how you actually use the car, not against what looked good on someone else's.
This is the service that brings people to Pedreguer from further afield — Denia and Xàbia regularly, and often Moraira, Teulada, Benissa and Calpe as well, because bespoke fabrication is not something every garage on the coast still does in-house.
This is the point where a lot of workshops go quiet, so we will be blunt. We do not remove catalytic converters and we do not remove diesel particulate filters. We do not fit decat pipes or straight-through sections for road cars, and we will not build a system whose only purpose is to be louder than the law permits.
The reasons are practical rather than moral. A car without its catalytic converter fails the ITV outright, sits outside its own type approval, and exposes the registered keeper to a penalty. Nobody mentions any of that at the point of sale. The ITV tester mentions it later.
What we will do is everything the rules leave open, and that is a great deal more than people expect: diameters, bend radii, pipe lengths, silencer design and placement, and valves. You can have a system with real character, a noticeably better response and a finish that has nothing in common with the original, without the car ever leaving the right side of the law. We tell you before we start whether what you are asking for can be documented. If it cannot, we say so, and we will not build it for use on the open road.
In Spain, a replacement exhaust has to be covered by its own homologation, or the modification has to be recorded on the vehicle's ficha técnica through a formal reforma. On top of that, the ITV station can put the car through a noise test to confirm it does not exceed the level declared for your vehicle — at Ondara that test is charged separately, at 9,30 €.
There is no grey area in that sentence. Either the work is documented or it is not. When you order a system from us, the conversation therefore starts with use: is this a daily car that has to pass the ITV, a weekend car, or a track project that travels on a trailer and never uses public roads? Each allows different things, and keeping them separate is most of what distinguishes a proper job from a problem on wheels. Where paperwork is needed, we tell you which documents you will need and hand over the invoice and a technical description of what we have fitted.
If the ITV side of this is what worries you, our English guide to the Spanish ITV test covers the test itself, what it costs and what happens if a car fails.
Living on the coast decides the material. AISI 304 stainless steel copes with salt air and humidity far better than the aluminised steel most factory exhausts are made from — and here in the Marina Alta, aluminised systems start pitting well before they should. A well-made stainless system is a part you fit once and forget about, not a consumable that fails again in three winters.
TIG welding is not a stylistic preference either. It is what produces a clean weld, without porosity and without spatter inside the pipe, in a material that distorts with heat. A poor weld loses its seal through repeated heat cycles and eventually whistles at the joint. And inside an exhaust, the things you cannot see — dirty welds, burrs, strangled bends — are exactly what spoils the flow.
How an exhaust sounds depends on the engine, the diameter, the length, the type of silencer and where it sits. A four-cylinder turbo and a naturally aspirated six do not sound remotely alike through the same system, which is why we are wary of fixed recipes.
So tell us what you like, and — more usefully — what you cannot live with. For a lot of customers the deal-breaker is drone at motorway speed, and that is a design problem we can solve at the specification stage rather than an unfortunate surprise afterwards.
If you want to choose according to the day, a valved system is the sensible answer: a discreet setting for the commute and a more open one for when you fancy it, switched from inside the car. The same rule applies as everywhere else on this page, though — a valve shapes the character of the sound, it is not a way around a noise limit.
Any of those usually means a blowing gasket, a broken mount or a section eaten by salt. We repair and replace sections on everyday cars, vans and classics, not only on projects — in fact a good share of the work is fabricating sections that are no longer available for cars with a few years on them. It is normally far cheaper than you fear, and always cheaper than replacing a whole system that did not need replacing.
It depends on the car, on how the system has to be routed, on the number of silencers and on whether it has valves — so we do not quote figures into thin air. Send us the model and what you are after on WhatsApp, or bring the car in. We will look at it and give you a fixed quote before anything is cut.
The full Spanish page, with more detail on the fabrication side, is at Escapes artesanales a medida.
“If you got a problem (car related) and no one else can help you! Go here! … best service for a fair price”
“Nice friendly chap who speaks good English”
Real Google reviews, quoted as they were written.
Tell us the car and the sound you are after. We will tell you what is possible, what is legal, and what it will cost.
Mon – Fri · 8:30 – 18:00 · No midday closing. Av. Jaume I, 46 · 03750 Pedreguer.