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Last week I received a call from my friend Geoff Peters. "I want to you to do some surgery on my exhaust's" He had just been reading David Bell's story on the Space city Panteras website on how to cut the guts out of a GTS exhaust. Geoff was never happy with the sound of the standard system and his car does have a 427 DART windsor, so would certainly benefit from a free flowing exhaust.

Until I saw David Bell's pictures, I had no idea quite how restrictive the GTS exhaust boxes where.
My own Pantera has factory group 3 exhausts. These where on the car when I bought it in 1994.
They look identical externally, but on the inside the inlet pipe simply branches into two, and flows straight through with no restriction. I can see this by sticking a probe torch down the tail pipe. This is basically what I have done to Geoff's exhaust, with the exception that I used straight pipe without all the holes.

In the summer of 2002 my friend Tommy Todak (Orange County CA) and I drove my old 1981 Alfa Spider over to France for the Le mans 24 hour. After the race we spent the next 2 weeks driving up over the Alps through Switzerland and down into Italy. On the way back we stopped in at the De Tomaso factory so that Tom could pick up some new exhausts. The men in the spares department where trying to explain the difference between the two types of exhaust box. At that time we didn't know the group 3 exhaust existed (even though I had them on my car)! We spoke no Italian, and they spoke no English. Tom ended up buying the GTS boxes, not realising the other ones where group 3, and much more free flowing and louder..
We should have known what Boom Boom meant, that's the same in any language.

Johnny

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Johnny,

Have you got your exhaust back on yet? If so, How does it sound compared to before the mod? Do you think there will be a significant difference between your "straight pipe" method and Dave Bell's "gutting the inside" method? I know that both of these will be louder than the stock GTS. I'm trying to determine which method of gutting I will do.

thanx,

John (soon to start gutting) Maffeo
#2647
I did a slightly different modification to a set of GTS mufflers. They actually are pretty quiet. On a supercharged 4.6, they flow pretty good and make power where we let off at 7000 rpm on the dyno with no drop. Would like to try this same modification to mufflers on a cleveland to test. Anyone want to send me a set of mufflers?
Johnny in England,

I was asking about the gutting of STOCK 1972 Pre L exhaust mufflers. I have studied the posts mentioned and reviewed the pictures and understand the concept. The articles discuss GTS exhaust. My question is pretaining to stock exhaust. Anyone have any thoughts or direct experience regarding stock exhaust with resonators in the tips?

Thanks, Dave # 3463
John, my modification is hard to explain. all I did was cut some holes in various places. With a good high resoultion pic of the inside of a muffler, I could mark out what I did. I was a dumb a$$ for not taking pictures. I really didnt remove much but opened up some passages to try and make the dampening chambers work without restriction. I will try and describe.

The two baffle plates have an area with about 8 3/8 holes on each side. I cut out these 3 areas in a circle to make about a 2 inch hole in each side of each baffle. Two front and one rear. The second rear baffle area I cut a half moon hole. This was in hopes of prevent resonance between the two tips by change the tuning frequency on each side of the muffler. These cuts will help air flow out better from between the baffles.

The second modification involves cutting two 1 by 2 inch slots in the perferated pipe on the inlet. Between the two baffles I cut one of these rectangular holes on each side. These holes should reduce the back pressure wave from reflecting back up the inlet from the end of the muffler and allow additional flow.

On the 4,6 this modified muffler was amazingly quiet.
I installed the gutted, or rather bypassed exhaust cans on my mate Geoff's car this weekend. It sounds fantastic. Huge improvement over the original GTS cans, but not too loud. I think the resonators in the tail pipes must do something because there is not much holy pipe left inside the cans with my Y piece installed.

We took the car out for a drive and found it to be no noisier inside the car at all. In fact Geoff said that the uncomfortable resonating drone at 1800RPM (427 Windsor) had been reduced considerably.

I did take some video clips with my camera, but failed to really capture the sound. I wanted to stand behind the car and record Geoff accelerating away under full power, but the bloody roads around Surrey (just outside London) are so busy, we couldn't find a quiet road anywhere.
I found that rather frustrating coming from sleepy old Devon where the roads are quiet and I can drive around like Mad Max..most of the time.

I dont know how to upload video clips, so I am going to send them to Garth and ask him to upload them. He's better at this than me. One of the video clips is my car (351C) accelerating away on an air field. My exhausts are factory group 3 so almost identical to the modified cans on Geoff's car (red GT5) I manage to change from 1st to 4th but it still sounds great!

To summarise: If you do the same as I have in this story, it will sound great. Not as loud as you might think.

Johnny
quote:
Originally posted by JohnnyAlki:
Johnny,

thanks for the update. I'm going to gut them myself, but have a muffler shop do the welding and fab of the "Y" pipe since I do not have a welder.

thanks again,

Welders are pretty cheap now. You may be better off buying one than spending the money on paying the shop to do a one time job. Buying my welder is one of my best investments I've made. Taught myself to use it and it's done a lot of auto and home projects since.
John
Ron,

I used 2"OD tube for the Y piece. This is the same diameter as the holed pipe that I cut out.
The pipe going into the box is 2,3/8"OD and it reduces down to 2"OD at the entrance of the box. With a lot of work it would be possible to reconfigure it so that the 2,3/8"OD pipe continues right into the box. But this would mean you would have to make a jig to get the inlet pipe back in the right place as you would have to remove it entirely to open it out.

Johnny Alki, buy a welder you will love it. You will find yourself using it all the time and wonder how you ever managed without. Mig welding is easy to learn. You just need to watch someone else do it. My favourite is Miller, but Lincoln is also excellent. Dont buy a brand you have never heard of, it would be a waste of money. 160amp would be fine for car stuff.

Johnny
Johnny Alki,

I've got a 110v Lincoln Weld Pak 100 Mig welder. It came with an instruction video and book. I had already learned to use a mig at a community college auto body course. Mig welding is easier than gas or arc. If I was to buy again, I would step up to a 220v mig. I used a fellow Pantera owners 220v Miller and it's nice.

Dan
quote:
Originally posted by Johnny Woods:
Ron,

I used 2"OD tube for the Y piece. This is the same diameter as the holed pipe that I cut out.
The pipe going into the box is 2,3/8"OD and it reduces down to 2"OD at the entrance of the box. With a lot of work it would be possible to reconfigure it so that the 2,3/8"OD pipe continues right into the box. But this would mean you would have to make a jig to get the inlet pipe back in the right place as you would have to remove it entirely to open it out.


Johnny



Thanks!!!
OK boys and Girls... I dropped the exhaust on # 3463 this a.m. Monday it will be at my friends muffler shop for the gutting and v-diverter fix. I have elected to not do the V-pipe as I have had gutted, empty exhaust on one of my Sting Rays (from Classsic Stainless > Long out of business) and really liked the hollow & deep and free flow sound. Since I am not tracking or dynoing my car and since this is an experiment before my headers and 3" pipe to the exhaust "we'll see." Keep you all posted on the outcome...

Dave # 3463
I’ve been messing around with my ANSA mufflers too and have had some success by drilling out the baffles. Too expensive of an item for me to cut open! I don’t have access to the main pipe that has all the holes in it but it looks like it has around 320 1/8” holes. The holes could be 3/16” or larger but I cannot tell for sure. This is what I’ve done so far http://www.panteraplace.com/page200.htm

From my calculation each 1/8” hole would have an area of .0127 sq in X 320 = 4.06 sq in total open area for the center pipe and that’s a lot larger area than the inlet pipe that has 2.4 sq in on my system. Is it possible that the restriction is caused more by the limited number of holes in the baffles and not necessarily the center pipe? I realize that a total area made up of many small holes does not equal the same flow rate as one large hole of the same area.

Mike
I've been thinking (and that's the problem) about the V-diverter (the angle iron set between the tailpipes) effectiveness. I can't see that it would really make much of a difference. As the pulse comes out of the entry pipe, it slows down and radiates outward. However, the added pressure starts to squeeze the contents of the can out of the tailpipes way before the pulse reaches the tailpipes. Furthermore, the tailpipes are not that big since they have that fiberglass stuff in them, maybe an inch in diameter. So the expanding pulse would not really got through them cleanly anyway. In fact the pulse would cause a lot of turbulence by the tailpipes restricting it even more.

Besides, wouldn't torque be better with a little back pressure?
My 2 cents...

David Berman has a 540 bhp motor (engine dyno tested) that dropped exactly 20% when installed in his GT5 and measured on a chassis dyno. This is pretty typical of every Pantera I have ever read of that has data for both the chassis dyno & engine dyno (19% to be exact).

David's exhaust system includes the stock GTS/GT5/GT5-S mufflers. I am confident in writing that these mufflers "unmodified" inhibit performance no worse than any muffler for a 550 bhp or less motor.

cowboy from hell
Last edited by George P
The exhausts I modified in this post now emit 112dB at 3000 RPM. My friend recently had it tested at Goodwood circuit.
A few years ago I had my car tested (with the factory group 3 exhausts) and found it to be exactly the same 112dB. So it would seem having all the holes in the Y piece makes no difference to the volume at all. I certainly wouldn't want it any quieter.

Johnny
Interesting! I kind of thought that with the center inlet pipe with all the holes having 4.06 sq. in. of open area that it would not be muffling anything and might not be restricting the flow very much. For those that do not want to cut open the muffler adding a lot of holes in the front and back baffle could be an easy solution. If loud equates to free flowing exhaust, then I’m making good progress!

Mike
Are there any flow dynamics engineers following our forum that know how to calculate flow restriction in a perforated pipe? I’ve been researching how flow is calculated through perforated pipes and it is really complicated including the impact of the hole size on the Reynolds numbers! I’m trying to calculate the flow restriction on the main perforated pipe.

My latest modification effort can be seen at that bottom of this page http://www.panteraplace.com/page200.htm

Mike
Last edited by pantera1887

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