I'm trying to just get to my stock plug wires on my 96 Z28 so I can swap them for a new set of AC Delco wires. Car is very low mileage (39,000 approx), but age has taken its toll on the wires and I am getting intermittent misses. I see no way to get at the wires unless I take the Y pipe off, which involves battling heavily rusted manifold-to-cat nuts & bolts, which I am sure will break, which will then lead to taking off the driver's side manifold to get the broken bolts removed. I'm ready to put it back together and throw in the towel on this car. Been working on it and barely driving it for the last couple of years. I've owned it since new, so there is a bit of sentimental value there, but I'm eyeing Corvettes for sale now.

BTW, somebody on here or maybe one of the other forums said he could do stock routed plug wires in an hour on an LT1. No way on a dual cat car unless you have really long skinny arms or a second wrist in the middle of your forearm!

Just venting, I guess. Unless someone has any bright ideas.

 

I faced the same dilemma when I replaced the plugs/wires on my car (mine is a 94 so single cat). I had visions of breaking a stud trying to remove the y-pipe, then breaking a bolt trying to remove an exhaust manifold to fix that, then having to remove a head to fix that - and so on until the car lay in a million peices and I ended up having to sell it on Craiglist for $500. But none of that happened.

In the end the Y-pipe came off easily and without drama and made the plug and wire job SO much easier.

 

The Y-pipe studs can go either way. My single-cat Formula was only 2 years old, less than 20,000 miles when I removed the Y-pipe for my header install. At least 3 of the 6 studs in the exhaust manifolds broke off. Fortunately, didn’t matter because I wasn’t reusing the Y-pipe. And all of the exhaust manifold bolts came out of the heads wth no problems.