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Posts Tagged ‘U Turn’

Tuning the exhaust for a car can make a big difference on how your car performs. The normal exhaust fitted by the car manufactures are normally a compromise between performance and production costs. The standard exhaust system is made to a budget and to keep the exhaust quiet which also makes the exhaust fairly restrictive.

By changing the system for a less restrictive type of exhaust should give you some gain in your cars performance. One of the first things to look at is the the manifold section of the exhaust. These are normally made of cast iron or even if they are made of steel will tend to have quite sharp bends in them. This can restrict the gas flow quite a lot. Checking that the ports of the exhaust match up with the cylinder head ports can make quite a difference to performance. If you are intending to keep the original manifold, then the simple use of a small grinding stone on a drill to match the two ports up can make a big advantage.

The design of the manifold already fitted to your car also makes a difference as well. The four-into-one or four-into-two-into-one makes, are generally a better design than the other types. So if your car is fitted with one of the first two types you might not have to change them.

The next stage is to look at the silencers on the car. The normal silencers will tend to be pretty restrictive as they tend to push the gases through a U-turn to get more silencing from the silencer baffles to make the car quiet.

Fitting a straight through silencer instead with maybe a slightly larger bore, can help eliminate some of these restrictions. Beware about going too large though, as some back pressure is needed to help with the performance. If you loose all of the back pressure, you could actually loose power rather than gain it. The exhaust has to be tuned for the car and having some back pressure going back towards the engine actually helps to pull the rest of the exhaust gases from the engine. That is why you will find cars with no exhausts do not perform well at all. You may have been in a position in the past where your exhaust has broken when you have been driving and you can tell how much power is suddenly lost.

You will also have to check that the new silencer is road legal as these silencers tend to make more noise than the standard boxes. Expect to loose some cabin comfort because of the increased noise as well. Some people like to look at this noise as just a sporting or throaty sound but on long journeys this sound can get a little tiresome.

For greater improvement still you may want to change the manifold to a free flow tubular type. For normal road use it is best to try and aim for a system that will improve the cars’ mid range power for better acceleration and overtaking capacity rather than the top end power.