wow you guys are getting into some complicated stuff...so im hoping by cutting my cat out, which im gonna do tomorrow morning, i will get a loud sound and my car will sound like it has some balls. so lets say i take the cat off and i find its to loud, how could i get a sound like those tuners. deep sound. idk how they do it. are 4 cylinders like louder then a v8? caus my brother has a 4 banger and when he cut the muffler off, thing got really loud and i think it sounds good. why is it when i cut mine off, i dont notice a difference. that is a tad weird. so what exactly is the difference from a muffler and a resonator. i thought they both are suppose to make your exhaust quieter

hey norm,

figure A in your little picture there are the Helmholtz resonators. They dont make anything louder, they just control the sound of the exhaust.

He doesn't have headers.

The following probably led to the confusion.


Waste of money. They will not be any louder than the original head pipe.

Norm

When you hear one you like, ask the owner what muffler he is using.


Number of cylinders has little, if anything, to do with it.

Total displacement, compression, and cam timing, have a lot to do with it.


Maybe, because the following,


is another 91buickman BS statement.


They are.

In the '50s, luxury car manufacturers started using resonators to finish what the mufflers did not.

Norm

Yes. They make it quieter (opposite of louder) which is not what the OP is looking for.

Thanks for making my point.


Yes. They make it quieter by adding to that famous Flowmaster restriction.

Norm

yeah so i took the cat off and i got a much better sound. i just need to hold the exhuast up there a little better. its draggin right now and thats no good. gonna pick up another strap to put on in the back. i didnt have to time to make it go all the way back yet. still working on that. the cat was basically acting like a muffler. which is dumb. probally plugged up a tad or something. looks pretty old. i got a nice collection of cats going now. cant wait to take them in and get some money. i heard the older ones are worth a lot at the scrap yard

At least get the right person.

anyways.....back to the header comment....Ive installed long tubes on a couple of cars before, and ive heard manifolds....Headers are louder than manifolds, the exact reason..im not sure of but they were louder. Also to the op, have you checked your local sound level laws to make sure you wont get a ticket for this?

This might be a good topic for another thread- I'll start it up here






I don't think he cares if he is.

Hi all-

This thread really took off-



I did not realize that they went back that far, that is sorta neat.

The resonators that I have seen on cars (Mostly late-model FWD stuff) have all been installed before the muffler. The way I read the above quote is that they used to install them after the muffler? Does it matter or affect the exhaust to have it one way or the other?



How do they relate to each other? For instance, a typical chain saw has about 13:1 compression, but only about 25cc displacement. They'll deafen you. A lawnmower, with 900cc's of displacement, roughly 11:1 compression is not nearly as loud. That would lead me to believe the larger the engine, the quieter the exhaust, but I know that there are large displacement engines that are very loud-

I am certain there is more to it than that- could you explain?

When did Flowmaster start putting liquid in their mufflers? Can you tune them by adding or removing fluid to these resonators?

I dont think flowmaster ever used liquid to tune, more or less The amount of "wave" guides in the chambers is what i always thought they used to tune the sound. However the resonance produced from the flowmasters is quite irritating especially on highway trips

well on my 85 the resonator was after the muffler which i thought was pretty weird. i always thought it would be before.

would it be hard if they put water in there to keep it in there?

That was my point. Sometimes my humor doesn't work I guess.

It was my subtle attempt to get the poster of the information to clarify his statement, so I didn't have to, but he hasn't been back to post yet. Oh well.

While a Helmholtz resonator traditionally uses fluid to change the "pitch" of the sound coming off of it, Flowmaster mufflers do not. It would be more accurate, in the context of this thread, to say that different sized chambers make different sounds, rather than paraphrase wikipedia into this thread, where it doesn't make much sense without further explanation, which was not provided at the time.

The chambers in a Flowmaster muffler work off the principle of a Helmholtz resonator, they do not operate like them in the traditional sense.

It may be semantics, but I believe it is a point worth making. If the mufflers were just a Helmholtz resonator, and operated as such, they would be much more efficient than they are.

yeah i know it was your point. i brought it up again because i thought it was a valid question and i really wanted to know the answer to. my resonator had water in it. but i dont think it was put there.

Good guess.

Norm