Having vacation time and a welder leads to nonsense...

I think that most will agree the stock muffler looks like a small oil tanker hanging out in the back. It also does not emit the most sonorous of noises. PsychoCupcake agreed to let me have at the LZ 129 Hindenburg affixed to her JK with reckless abandon.

After removing the muffler, I cut in two access panels to see how it was put together.


It is a pretty simple 3-pass design with 3 chambers, 2 baffles, and Hemholtz balancing ports.



I decided that I could profile/flat-bottom the muffler w/ some sheet steel. I ended up using 16GA because that was all that the big box store had handy. 18-20 GA would have been a better match. Before sealing it up I enlarged several of the ports (which act as air springs / Hemholtz resonators) with a unibit knowing that the flat bottom was going to block some flow. A "proper" fix would have been to add as many same sized Hemholtz ports as I blocked. seeing as they would have been in the wrong place anyways, I chose the lazy route.


Then I welded on a 16GA bottom and plug welded along the internal pipes to stop any rattling. (Spoiler alert... I failed).


More in next post...

 

A little grinding to clean things up before paint.



high temp black paint (dried w/ a blowtorch )


Result:

eh....
Sound - pretty close to stock... maybe a bit more raspy. --And a huge rattle! I think one of the baffles is bouncing around against the uncut side. I need to fiddle with it.
Visual - You can't see it anymore with it installed(win)
Clearance - Much Better (win)
Total cost - $40 including consumables and kWh

Worth it for you? Maybe? I was looking at it as a welding project for the practice on sheet metals. A new, better sounding muffler can be had for much less headache and about the same cost.

I will try to fix the rattle since I started this mess. If I can't fix it I will be buying PsychoCupcake a new exhaust. I'll try to snap an installed photo when there is a little light outside.

 

cool experiment! interesting to see the inside of the stock muffler

 

Interesting experiment. Thanks for sharing write-up and pics.

 

Nice to see the inside of the muffler. Great write up

 

Thanks!

Here is a pic of the muffler after the install and a ~1min video clip of the before and after sounds.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhm4L1FA13s&feature=youtu.be

 

This was cool, I've always wondered what the guts looked like.

 

doesnt sound bad at all after the hack.. A for creativity.