ST1 - Beat barrel sounds so good

In my continuing quest to prove the benefits of brains over brawn, I will continue to provide you with the info you need to be fast for less cash. In previous installments I explained the ins of one of the first basic mods that your average performance dude or dudett installs; the air intake. In this installment I will talk about the outs of another popular basic mod; the performance exhaust, and no we don't have room or the patience to talk about the very badly termed beat barrels.

The exhaust system is the piece of piping that directs the cars exhaust stream from the exhaust manifold (the branched collector that gets the exhaust from each individual exhaust port in the cylinder head and brings it into one pipe) to the tailpipe. To get there it must first pass through the catalytic converter (the emissions device that magically converts poisonous exhaust emissions to H20 vapour and CO2), through the muffler and out the back of the car.

The purpose of the exhaust system is to contain the noisy, hot, and toxic exhaust stream and direct it away from where it could harm the car or you while cleaning it up and quietening it down. With no exhaust system, a car would be incredibly loud while spewing lots of potentially deadly fumes and poisoning our atmosphere. To prevent these two anti-social phenomena from bugging mankind, the exhaust system must primarily quiet the engine's noise and remove its combustion by-products before discharging the exhaust stream into the general air that is shared by us all.

The exhaust system that comes stock on your car was not designed by the clever engineers at their respective car companies with power production, cool looks, and sound first on the priority list. The goal of the engineers who designed your cars exhaust was to make the engine quiet; so as not to piss off your parents, be 100% durable inside the cars warranty period, and to be as cheap as possible to mass-produce. These are the attributes that the majority of the motoring public, AKA, cash paying customers deem important. The goals of the OEM engineer are not necessarily in line with yours; the performance phreak. To you, the roar of a tuned engine is music to your ears. Since your car is designed to appeal to what most customers want, your exhaust ends up getting optimized (stuffed up) on the quiet scale and compromised on the performance end of things by design.

The key part of your exhaust system is the muffler. The muffler is the can at the end of your exhaust whose main purpose in life is to make the engine noise quiet. To be the whisper quiet like most car owners demand. A typical stock muffler must have an intricate and labyrinth-like internal flow path to help slow and cool the hot vibrating exhaust gas. It contains baffles that cause the exhaust flow to reverse direction and intermix. These are great for reducing noise but are not so great for having power unleashing flow. This is mostly because all the twists and turns that the exhaust must endure in a stock muffler are a restriction that causes excess backpressure. You can run in a straight line faster than you can run in a tight maze in a fun house right? The same goes for your exhaust gas.

Well that's it for this episode I will be adding more to this in the next installment so make sure you tune in! Feel free to e-mail me with your questions on plasmaim@yahoo.com and I will do my very best to answer your queries.