I worked in Aviation...Heavy Riveting with numerous other industrial processes contributing from Machining to Drop Hammering...with ear protection of course...The Hotrod has been 4 years with mixed protection...It is a music to our ears love the sound but its something we should be more mindful of...
This 55 chev that I bought at age 12 for 40 bucks and after attending the '82 KKOA show became a mild custom. It had a 56 265 with a duntov solid cam and a 4 speed. I ran dual strait pipes that exited at the rear bumper. It sounded awesome and when it idled it had the sound of an old Chris Craft boat.....
We can all download Sound DB apps for the Stupid phones and sit them beside us and see what's hitting your eardrums...perhaps straight pipes right out the back doesn't translate into 85db at the ears but mine sure does but my pipes angle down just past the rear end towards the road...that itself may contribute to more dbs as well...
I just got back from a 300 mile trip to pickup a c60 chevy that had duals but only one side had a muffler. Man was I glad to get home. My first car cured me for loud exhaust. Loud exhaust signaled every cop around look at me I need a ticket. Quite car they had to be looking at you.
My new car has loud exhaust... I just roll up the windows and that muffles the sound a little bit..... Cranking up the jams helps also....
There is unquestionably a love of Harmony to the raw power exiting an engine that makes muffling and tuning out a choice but it is again a choice of tolerance and when the engines are revving at the events I'm heading away not closer...
Every time I see an open header/straight pipe thread I remember seeing the couple in the coupe cruising Congress during Roundup with the gal wearing a huge pair of yellow hearing protection ear muffs. I think he is a Hamber. Years ago I got into my nephews Camaro and he had a pair of ear plugs hanging from the mirror, when I asked what they were for he said because he played his sound system loud. Exhaust or sound system if it is so loud you need hearing protection to drive on the road it is too damned loud. I'll agree on one thing though, where the exhaust exits from the car has a lot to do with the sound you deal with inside no matter if you have a muffler or not. Same truck that was loud as hell inside the cab with glass packs and the pipes bent at a 45 and exiting just past the sides of the bed became real livable with tail pipes that exited at the corners of the back bumper. I got a hell of a lot of compliments from how it sounded from other guys after I put real tail pipes on it too. When it drove past you it wasn't really any quieter it just sounded better. I think a lot of guys miss the whole point these days though. In the 50's and 60's it was all about the sound your car made, not being the loudest in town but being the best sounding and sounding the best when you got in a little contest of rapping off the pipes somewhere. Then somewhere along the line it just became a deal of "Mine's louder than your" with no attention paid to actual tone of the pipes.
When I was in my teens I gutted the glass packs and that probably damaged my hearing I also got more than my fair share of citations for excessive noise which contributed to the City Of Anderson coffers. HRP
Had custom '54 Chevy that had old glasspacks with the packing blown out - it was called " La Bomba " -see on TV that fairly common to have electric cutouts that open/close with push of a button Sent from my SM-G930V using The H.A.M.B. mobile app
I run a 2.5in strait oupe on my turbo Corvair. It makes its presence heard but it's not ridiculous. The turbo acts as a muffler as well. THIS FLAT 6 SOUNDS GOOD!!!
I like the QUALITY of an exhaust note and not the QUANTITY nearly so much. Let me say it another way. Loudness does not equate to sweetness. I can appreciate the sound of other vehicle's exhaust 'tone'. I can't tell you how many times I rolled down my window in my daily to hear the 'tone' of someone's car better. But occasionally I can go the other way and roll up my windows because someone's exhaust is too over the top and the sweetness has left the building. I don't have a set DB level that I prefer because there do exist some pipes that idle mellow, cruise mellow, and still make music at WOT. Not many, but a few. Don't get me started if you have subwoofers the size of manhole covers and you want your neighbors to know it. ..
I repaired a wrecked Ferrari. Exhaust was damaged. Had to crank it up without the mufflers. Oh my. Some engines can sound great, some are just loud train wrecks without some type of muffler. loud to be loud is usually associated with youthfulness. My students think everything needs straight piped. Some things never change.
The story is interesting and it's about guys enjoying their cars, right or wrong, they just got caught but again it has nothing to do with loud pipes. And I too don't get the connection, come on this is a hot rod site, hot rods are notoriously loud, they are edgy and usually fast. HRP
A few may relate this. But it doesn't get much better than getting in the old Hot Rod late at night. Finding a long stretch of country road, and listening to the cackle of the exhast. The light from the gages glowing on the dash. Then stopping along the desolate road, and walking away from the Rod. Turning around, and looking back at it. Watching and listening to the little Rod with a rough idle going rump, rump, rump. Getting back in and giving her a little punch. You feel the little car jump, and then your pushed back againt the seat. You hear the mill winding out as you go through the gears. I pull the little Jalopy back into the garage. Turn off the lights and feel that life is good being a Hot Rodder.
When I was in High school worked at the local Esso station/repair shop. Customer bought his son a mustang. Within a week the kid had installed headers and dual exhaust with glasspacks. The next week the father brought the car in to have a stock exhaust installed, seems the son got a noise ticket when he decided to rev the engine at a stop sign in front of a cop. Another buddy of mine had a 68 mustang we installed a 428 in. Headers and straight pipes with gutted mufflers. He got a speeding ticket for doing 56 in a 55 zone as well as a noise ticket! Cop really had a hard on for loud cars.
I guess I never grew up because at 70 yrs. old I still like straight pipes occasionally. Not a steady diet of straight pipes, but I do uncap occasionally just to hear the open pipes sound.
Bangers and flatheads sound great going down the road with straight pipes but once they return to idle and start that "pockety, pockety, pockety" or blub, blub, blub crap they just sound like tractors with broken manifolds. Same goes for mild small block Chevys, Buicks, Olds and stuff. Don't like sixes with straight pipes at all. The best sounding street car I've heard with open exhaust in the last few years was SamIam's BBC powered RPU at Eagle Field. Just bitchin. The best with mufflers was Augie's (Delgado?) silver, mechanical injected Nova at Bakersfield. Quietly bitchin. I had a '50 Stude pickup with a BBC, big Isky cam and headers with a 3" exhaust system and four mufflers - a Flowmaster and a DynoMax bullet on each side. On the way to Bakersfield we stopped and bought ear plugs. It sounded pretty damn good driving around town but on the road it got real old, real fast. Fun setting off all the yuppie car car alarms though. No straight pipes for me. I like compression, a big cam and big mufflers so you can hear the pinging in the headers.
For me, it’s more the quality of the sound, not how much of it there is. A set of open headers at wot sounds great at the drag strip, on the street, not so much. And I never cared for straight exhaust with cast iron manifolds, it just doesn’t have that same tonal quality as tube headers. Sounds more like a log truck than a race car. I’ve ran glass packs and turbo mufflers depending on the vehicle, both quieted down the exhaust enough to stay out of trouble, and added a smoothness to the sound that a open pipe doesn’t have. Tail pipe length and dump location can make or break the sound, too. Too short and it’s too loud or will have a drone at certain RPM’s and speeds. I have the ringing ears deal, too. I think they call it tinnitus. Too many years of running equipment and trucks with loud exhaust as well as running too much and too long with the windows down, buffeting the ears. Take too many aspirin and it will aggravate it. Mine comes and goes. So no open exhaust for me anymore, put a muffler on it of some kind...
My 36 FORD had fender well headers and a minimal exhaust system running under the boards and dumped in front of the rear tires, got tired off that after awhile but didn't change it, just sold it to someone else. One evening I decided to uncork the headers an spin it around the block, kinda really load, so much so that the neighbor across the street called the fuzz. Mind you his son's were drunken deviates that always caused trouble but we NEVER called on them , oh well. Also rode a iron head Sportster and a shovel head Wide Glide for many years with drag pipes, now I really like my vehicles to be as quite as possible, not so much as getting older, just smarter / deafer. Mitch
I DROVE THE SHORT BUS FROM BAMA TO NC. HEADERS AND THE SMALLEST GLASS PACKS MADE. LOUD!!!!!! We broke the engine in on this trip. The headers glowed from Birmingham to the other side of Atlanta. The exhaust stopped just behind the seat. Didn’t have time to finish it. The noise echoed throughout the bus. We didn’t have the trans cover built yet either. So that was wide open as well. The glass packs were burnt up by the time we got there. I was stuffing toilet paper in my ears by the time we got to SC. that ended my super loud exhaust, students loved it.
In my early 20s l bought a early 60's C10 with a 327, 4 speed, headers, thrush mufflers and 4 feet of exhaust pipe on each side. The first night i had it I took it down to the local cruise street and got stopped 3 times in 6 blocks, no tickets but it still wasn't any fun. The next day I got the biggest set of station wagon mufflers I could find and put them on. It didn't sound as cool but it was more fun to drive than sitting at the side of the road talking to the cops. When I was doing the muffler exchange I fired it up with the open headers just to see what it was like, it was quieter than with the thrushes. Phil
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