But the polished cans look soooooo damn sexy!!!!!

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I have a black car and dislike the high polish as well. I inquired about not polishing and AWE stated they can do it if requested. You just had to wait for a new run to be started and they pull one from the polish portion of fabrication. I did not ask about a price break for not polishing.

I would think this may affect resale (non polish) if you want to remove the exhaust for any reason. Is there anything besides coating the exhaust that you can apply that will dull or tarnish the exhaust without damaging the polish?

Just found this old thread and would like to comment. If you don't like the polished metal, and would like something softer, but still looking like metal, I might recommend a brushed finish. This can be easily accomplished at home with some coarse scotch brite, or even some 180-220 grit sandpaper. This will of course kill the polished finish, but it's not that hard to repolish it. I bet you could find a shop in your area that could repolish it if you wanted to, and because of the shape of the AWE mufflers, they wouldn't be hard to repolish so it shouldn't cost a lot, especially if you only brushed the back and bottom (the visible parts).

On a dark car, the most stealth look would come from high temp black paint. Once again, the beauty of stainless steel is that you can always sand off the paint and polish the thing to a mirror finish.

I regard to resale, even the polished finish will look pretty grungy after 10,000 miles or so.

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This system looks as if it flows into one exhaust pipe just before splitting to exit thru the tips. If so it is not a true dual exhaust like some others. Does anyone know if the chambers in the exit pipe are separated or not?

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I guess you might be right, but there may be benefits to the design. See this post: AWE Tuning Catback Exhaust (2nd generation)

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What's sandblasting? Can you sandblast the exhaust to a mirror finish?

Sand blasting is a method in which sand is propelled by compressed air at an object. No, it will not provide a mirror finish. It will provide a nice soft matte finish without machine marks (like sanding will leave), depending on the grade of sand you use, but it will most definitely not be anywhere near a mirror finish.

To achieve a mirror finish you need to spend some time with a buffing wheel. You could sand blast as part of the preparation, but then you would need to add 1 or 2 more steps of buffing.

Usually you start with a coarse step using a grease-less abrasive compound like Lea grade C (180 grit), then a coloring step using a hard green stainless compound on a soft cloth wheel. For a real mirror finish, adding a medium compound in between those two (brown) would help remove all machine marks.

It sounds Greek if you haven't seen it done, but it's actually pretty easy, just time comsuming. One of these days when I find some time (maybe over the winter) I'm going to author up a nice article on buffing metal.

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