Ok, my mufflers are junk, I can hear the rusted out innards rattling at idle, and the metal is so thin they’re like tin foil. The rest of the piping appears good so what would be a good replacement? besides $400 Borla’s.
LSR Mike
With mufflers, the two things you need to worry about are size and tone. Size is easy: make sure it fits the pipes you’ve got. If you want it quieter, get a bigger, longer version. If you want it obnoxious, small is the way to go.
So that leaves tone.
Glasspacks are the cheapest mufflers you can get. Cherry Bombs and Thrush are iconic for musclecars. They have a savage snarl, and cackle on decel. They do tend to be annoying out on the freeway. They use a perforated pipe inside, wrapped with sound damping materials like steel wool and fiberglass mat.
Chambered mufflers like Flowmaster have no materials inside to get caked with soot and degrade over time. Instead, they have baffles that attenuate the pulses, and quiet the sound. While very popular since the 80s, they have a dull, hollow, echoing sound, much like firecrackers in a culvert. They are even more infamous for drone than glasspacks.
Turbo mufflers, especially good ones like the Walker Super Turbo (sold by Dynomax now I think?) are quieter than glasspacks or chambered mufflers, and they have a fairly mild tone to them, while still delivering good performance.
Magnaflow’s mufflers are often classed as turbo mufflers, but they are in fact more similar to oversized glasspacks with extra sound absorptive materials. They have a quieter and more mellow tone than most glasspacks, but still retain much of that primal “musclecar” sound.
If you just want ‘quiet’, there are plenty of plain jane non-performance-oriented mufflers that would work great too.
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Thanks for the rundown, really looking for a good fitment stock sounding replacement for the old girl.
Something like this would make sense. However, your existing mufflers have hangers welded to them, and these probably don’t.
My dad told me he had a set of turbo mufflers on my car before the glass packs, and he actually liked the sound of the turbo’s more. My only turbo muffler experience is a Thrush I had on a jeep Cherokee, and the sound was mellow, yet it still got loud at higher rpm. They’re affordable, too.
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