New house, new problems Options

[The Iron Goat]

So the wife and I just closed on a house about two weeks ago, and the DSL just now got hooked up, so I'm a little behind on things. But allow me to get to the core issue at hand. Our niftly little house has a niftly little 2.5 car garage in the back - a luxury that we weren't afforded in the apartment.

Now, my little grease monkey hands wants to do all kinds of fun stuff with my car in the garage, but there is a small problem. There's a whopping 8-9ft between our house and the next, and my baby is just a LITTLE too loud to drive between them. I don't just mean a little irritating. It shakes the plates in our kitchen cabinets. Cool as that may be, this is a sure fire way to kill any good relations we have with our neighbors.

I would ignore this, but the loudness of the exhaust has been bothering me a lot lately. It's just too much noise for a daily driver. So my question it this: is there a good way to tone it down 20-30 notches without robbing a lot of power? I remember akamiami saying he had installed two resonators in his car with good results, but I don't remember the details or the cost. I've thought about plumbing in a conventional muffler in place of the test pipe, and swapping out when I want to have some fun. Let me know your ideas.

[akamiami]

definately congrats on the house. I hope you love your garage because I'm about to be in the same boat and I'm REALLY looking forward to having the extra space.

so you're worried about your exhaust because of the drive up the driveway to get the car into the garage or you plan on keeping it running for extended periods of time in the garage? I don't quite get it.

As far as toning down your exhaust I'd take a three way approach involving a highflow cat, resonator and chambered muffler. If you get good stuff you'll probably be adding 3-5 psi of backpressure to the exhuast system total, but you'll drastically cut down on the noise factor. I know that the resonators I put in analube lowered the tone considerably and there's nothing like chambered mufflers to effectively baffle sound and cancel the waves. The problem is that most of us are initally only concerned with performance and so we opt with the straight through turbo mufflers. Only later do we realize that maybe it's worth the sacrifice of a few hp in order to really enjoy the car more. Those companies that make mufflers put serious r&d into their designs and it's not like they make mufflers for the purpose of limiting Hp, they try to get the best balance. once analube is back on the streets I plan on putting a more restrictive and quieter muffler in place.