exhaust mod advice
 

Hi all:

I have looked through the threads and would like to hear from those who have done there mods. I guess I am looking for a conservative gain. I find the car to quiet yet I miss the "sound". What I am looking for is a nice burble ( if you can call it that ) on idle. And a nice loudish sound when you get on the gas. I do not want to scare children, pets or get noticed by the local law enforcement.

The options I was looking at was

a) get rid of central muffler and put in a x pipe ( as a start )
b) just start at the back and replace by section with Adamesh

Any advice would be appreciated

Tks

Howard

Dear Howard,

There are many threads mentioning this, try looking for them.

I recently bought a quicksilver exhaust and must say im very satisfied with it.
It does cost a bit of money, but it is worth every single penny.

On youtube you can find the sounds of all exhausts and/or mods mentioned in this forum.

Good luck!

Julian

Start at the back. Remove two mufflers.

The 97MY 4.0NA sounded alright removing the center muffler and putting an H pipe. My 05MY 4.2Sc had a lot of issues with it. Too much under cabin noise, sound output wildly varies during hard acceleration, and not very pleasant sounding.

Aftermarket high flow cats re-introduces quite a bit of sound. The factory cats appear to muffle more noise than the center muffler.


The factory exhaust system appears to have been tuned specifically for sound dampening. You should replace the cats and the squished over the rear axle exhaust bends first, I think.

I'm not an exhaust pro, but these are my observations from modification of both of my XK's.


EDIT: And if my post sounds a bit confusing, it is, because you can do so many different things to affect sound output.

I have the 4.2 NA, and this is exactly what I did to gain what you seek - I am looking for is a nice burble ( if you can call it that ) on idle. And a nice loudish sound when you get on the gas.

I'm not sure why xenophobe's 05 didn't like that, maybe the X vs the H was the only difference, or perhaps where it was installed in the empty section.

It didn't really sound bad, but it didn't really sound all that great either. When I added the NP cats, the sound volume increased at least 3x and really sounded horrible. It was too loud, too much under cabin noise and fluctuating volume levels through the rpm range. Re-adding a center muffler and putting the Mina kit on made it perfect. You can't really hear it in my vid, but there is decent 'burble' when decelerating with the pedal.

Either way, the OEM Jaguar exhaust was not designed to sound awesome, it was designed to run quietly, so when I altered it, it became pretty apparent, at least to me, for my tastes.

I wanted my Jag to sound like a million bucks. Maybe it doesn't, but the guy who did my exhaust honestly believes it sounds as good or better than a Ferarri. I dunno if I could even say that, but when I reved it, their eyes lit up and you know that doesn't happen to exhaust guys all the time.

Xeno-

You only have the Nameless 200-cell cats on your XKR, and not your XK8...is that correct? BTW, for some reason all of your signature info is gone.

Yeah, I was in the middle of changing my sig and just left it blank for now.

My XK8 has a completely stock exhaust minus center muffler, with a H-pipe added.

It sounds pretty ok. It does get noticeable volume it didn't have before and does sound better than stock. The XKR with the same setup sounded worse... I'm not completely sure why. I know there are a few differences between the 97 NA and 05 SC exhaust systems, I didn't think it would be that much of a difference.

It may just because the XKR has more HP and pushes more volume out that the inadequacies of the stock exhaust are more noticeable... that's purely conjecture though.

The XKR really did sound horrible with just the H-pipe and stock rear 4 mufflers when I added the NP cats. It was horribly raspy and over the top loud as well as inconsistent. It was so bad I just created a cat-back system. I looked for the best center muffler I could find, that was the Borla 2x2 with internal x-pipe and added the Mina exhaust. It went from horribly inconsistent to a thing of absolute beauty.

oh mine is a 99 4.0 liter normally asp
 

Should of mentioned this at the beginning
x pipe
h pipe

whats the diff ????

As you said, Xeno, there are many variables at work in regard to the exhaust note.

I've just taken delivery of new 200-cell Nameless cats, and at first I had planned to replace the entire system from the headers back...all at the same time. But then there's really no way to isolate where the good or bad sounds might be coming from.

So I think I'll install the Nameless cats only, at first, and leave the cat-back sections stock to see what the sound change is. Then I can make more intelligent decisions about what sections of the stock exhaust to replace.

Yeah, you should notice a nice change adding the NP cats. The factory cats are just so huge and heavy, cast iron with horrible shapes for airflow and sound transmission.

I think the cats modified (or actually unrestricted) the sound and opened the pleasantness of the tone/engine growl up.

If you have the ability to take video, you should do a before and after. I didn't have that capability before as I just got my new phone and I didn't own my canon 5D2 then...

fwiw, I'm not an exhaust pro, but I am a half-arsed musician, so my ears are probably a little more picky than anyone else.

The X blends the exhaust gases better. As a result, less raspy and lower in overall volume than the H.

+1 - Sound advice! (pardon the pun)