mufflers or not?

If you are going to run without mufflers make sure that you have the carb jetted properly.

While at Daytona last year my exhaust pipe broke and rather than get it welded, I decided to remove the tail pipes and run it. Bad move!!! After 1.5 laps there was alot of smoke comming out the rear. I had burned a piston. The sound was great and you knew where I was on the track. A great learning experience.

Mark

interesting. I've read that was a myth but guess not.
Decisions, decisions....

My car is a daily driver so I built the cherry bomb exhaust after the example from MidengineMike. I couldn't be happier, the car runs great, sounds great and I beat up people w/the car all the time. It's a real gas

You got a link to Mike's?

Info regarding Mike's exhaust system is found in the exhaust system "sticky"

-G

> When I took the cat back exhaust off my 5.0 mustang years back, it was
> actually louder with the new flow master than when nothing was there.

With your Mustang, the four catalytic convertors were doing quite a bit of
muffling. I have a Ford Motorsport off-road H-pipe without the catalytic
convertors and can confirm it is much louder without mufflers. However, you
can generally find a particular RPM (and it's harmonic) where it will be
fairly quiet but once off that RPM it will get very loud.

> Do these mufflers such as ansa, pim, mindtrain, etc. actually make the car
> louder?

No. An open header Pantera will be much louder than a muffled one.
If the mufflers have fiberglass packing and the packing burns out, it will
get quite loud. I've seen that with Hall big bores. Note than many of the
Pantera mufflers I've tested have been real power killers. For instance,
the ANSA Euro GTS mufflers lost 50 HP on a 400+ HP 351C. I've got a set
of Wilkinson's new stainless Euro GTS mufflers to test. Magnaflows (both
2 1/2" dual outlet and 3" single outlet) have performed quite well (zero
loss on the 400 HP engine and only a few HP loss on a 569 HP 403C).

> For some reason I have this idea to create some tailpipes that are similar
> to these from PIM, except that they would only be tailpipe, no muffler,
> glasspack, etc....

Depending upon the design, the muffler can change the apparent collector
dimensions. Some will appear as a wave termination, others as an collector
extension. With our very short collector length, this can effect the optimal
cam timing.

Dan Jones

Steve Wilkinson claims he has fixed the flaw in the original Pantera Mufflers with his stainless repros and has dyno documentation to prove it.

I don't remember his saying anything about the sound levels of them though.

I'd like to see the results of the testing.