I welded the cracks up on my 05 and got another 70k out of them before the cats finally started failing at 270k, but the welds held up just fine. I patched up a set of junk aftermarket manifolds, and put them on to get it through one more inspection. So far so good. But I'm doing it all myself, mine's a 2wd like yours, which makes it doable, 4wd might be a different story.