High Performance Exhaust Mufflers

You know that your engine produces a great deal of pressure and heat. There is also a great deal of pressure coming OFF of the engine. When the noise and a gases stream out, they make a lot of noise.

To help you understand why you should upgrade your stock muffler, this is a brief breakdown of what happens in your engine's combustion chamber:

1. Intake stroke:

The piston first starts at the top of the cylinder. The intake valve opens to let the air into the cylinder. The piston moves down, creating a vacuum that lets the cylinder get filled with the mixture of air and fuel.

2. Compression stroke:

The piston then moves up again. This compresses the mixture of air and fuel. This compression is necessary to make the next stroke, the combustion stroke, more potent.

3. Combustion stroke:

While the piston is at the top of the cylinder, the spark plug gives off a spark. This spark ignites the air and fuel mixture and creates an explosion. This explosion is what drives the piston back down.

4. Exhaust stroke:

When the piston gets to the bottom of the cylinder, the exhaust valve opens. This sucks the exhaust out of the cylinder to exit out of the exhaust piping.

As you know, exhaust mufflers were originally intended to keep cars from sounding like a semi truck or an army tank.

Exhaust mufflers usually accomplish this by containing a maze of twists, turns, and noise dampening material. This is fine, unless you are into increasing your car's horsepower.

After the exhaust stroke, the gases from all of your cylinders are passed into your exhaust manifold, into one pipe, through the catalytic converter, and out of the muffler. However, your cylinders are not firing at the same time. This means that your exhaust is being passed out of the cylinders and arrives in the exhaust manifold at different times.

These variations causes the exhaust gases to build up and become turbulent, thus creating backpressure.

Backpressure keeps the exhaust from flowing freely out of your cylinders, into the exhaust manifold, through the
catalytic converter, and out of the muffler. Those exhaust gases get caught in the the twists and turns of the stock
exhaust muffler and creates turbulence and backpressure.

How does the high performance exhaust muffler fit into this equation?

The glass pack or cherry bomb type of performance exhaust muffler is popular with aftermarket tuners. Instead of the
twists and turns, it uses absorption material to control the sound.

The pipe, which contains many perforations or holes, allows the exhaust to go straight through. There is a layer of steel-wrapped fiberglass around the pipe, acting as an insulator.

This type of straight through muffler design greatly decreases backpressure and increases horsepower. You want as little backpressure as possible because it robs you of power!

2003-2006 Import Rival