Last week my new 3″ Flowmaster 40-series delta flow mufflers came in, as well as the Summit universal X pipe kit (and some hedman X-tensions). Over the weekend, I got the parts halfway welded up and hung under the truck. I still need to make some new tailpipes and finish welding the seams, but I couldn’t resist driving it in to work anyway. Wow it sounds good. It’s a relatively low compression 454, but any big block running through dual Flowmaster 40s and a full 3″ mandrel-bent exhaust sounds awesome. I recommend them. They’re surprisingly quiet, actually – I think the X junction and fairly large pipe make a difference there (as well as the delta flow technology). With full tailpipes, I expect it to actually be a lot quieter than I originally anticipated. Well, as long as I can keep my foot out of the throttle… :)
Archive for December 21st, 2009
I’ve had some troubles with carburetors for the last few weeks. Since I had an extra HEI ignition laying around, I thought I’d see if maybe my old Super Coil and plain Accel electronic distributor might actually be at fault. So, after about an hour’s worth of making some new plug wires to use the new male-terminal HEI distributor (as opposed to the old socket-style cap on the current distrib), and about 1/2 hour of cranking the engine over and over to finally get the stupid timing mark to line up :) it was running with a stock HEI.
Somewhat surprisingly, it ran way better. I could actually get the carb dialed in properly. I think the old (15+ years) Super Coil had just gotten weak – probably from sitting with the key on too long a variety of times. Now to rebuild the Hei with a performance module instead of the stocker. Oh, and to get the carb linkage set up properly so that I actually get full throttle with the gas pedal mashed instead of the roughtly 3/4 throttle I get now – I’m sure that will improve acceleration. ;)
