When you lack the knowledge, tools, and skills, you can accomplish anything

If you can honestly answer in the affirmative when asking yourself if you as a kid would like who you are as a person now, you're doing something wrong.  This is an indisputable fact, backed up by another universal truth: you were an idiot when you were a kid.  We all were.  Many of us still are.

For instance, if I were to tell my younger self that there would come a day where he would look back and seen some potential use in not dropping out of school before taking a trig course (or at least to put some measure of effort into remembering more than the most basic elements of geometry), I probably wouldn't make it through half a breath before he was walking off to go do something dumb.

Pie cuts.  That's where I'm heading with this.  Today I made pie cuts using strips of paper and without the aid of a miter, chop saw, or even a protractor worth a damn.  It wasn't too easy at first, basically because I lacked some knowledge that required a visit to internet academy.  I don't think they turned out too awful, either.  Here's a look:

I know they aren't the thin cuts you see people making for headers and turbo plumbing and all that mess.  That's because I'm not making a performance exhaust for a track car.  I'm just trying to save money because fittings that are worth buying set off my penny pincers.  Here they are tacked in place and ready for welding tomorrow:

Like I said, I didn't have the protractor at the shop.  What I ended up having to do was draw out X+Y lines on a piece of graph paper, then center the angle finder I was using for checking my pinion angle over it.  That let me mark the 7.5° point, then plot the line from the center.

I cut the paper out into a strip with the desired angle at the end, marked the lengths for each piece I'd be cutting from the pipe (first batch was 3" lengths, second was 1-1/2").  Then I marked the center down the length of the pipe on each side (so, opposite or 180° of one another).  Then I lined up the paper strip and the marks I'd made, like so (but straight).

That left me with this when I was done.

These longer ones from the first attempt were cut using my angle grinder, mainly because I've been having a hell of a time cutting tubing straight through with the portable bandsaw.  

I wasn't too impressed with the results with the grinder.  The next batch was done with the bandsaw, which actually did what I wanted it to for a change.  All of the pieces ended up being usable when I crawled under the Gremlin and started test fitting them to the downpipes.  Actually, I'm one piece short to make both of the pipes totally done and ready for final welding.  

When that's all out of the way, 75% of the exhaust work will be done.  I'm in kind of a state of disbelief, because doing the exhaust has been looming over me since I realized I wasn't going to be able to farm it out.  Can't say I mind it, though.