muffler issues

[MikeDutsa]

we are running a hindle titanium muffler(18x4in round). it was susposed to be one of the quieter ones available. it was pretty quiet for a while but at some point in our tuning it got hot, real hot, hot enough to turn the fiber glass packing in to chunks of ceramic. twice. so we are saving our last paking rebuild for right before california. has anyone else seen these kind of problems? or had any other muffler issues?

[MikeDutsa]

we are running a hindle titanium muffler(18x4in round). it was susposed to be one of the quieter ones available. it was pretty quiet for a while but at some point in our tuning it got hot, real hot, hot enough to turn the fiber glass packing in to chunks of ceramic. twice. so we are saving our last paking rebuild for right before california. has anyone else seen these kind of problems? or had any other muffler issues?

[V2 - Italy]

If you can , check the exhaust gas temperature.

May be it's too high.
Anyway replace the fiberglass before the noise test. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif

[MikeDutsa]

it only tends to happen when we are on a dyno tuning a new engine. we had an old engine that we ran for a while then we threw the race motor in and had to retune it. i think once we get it tuned properly it will quit toasting mufflers.

[Bill Kunst]

Mike,
If you are using a inertia dyno, it shouldn't be a problem. If you are using an eddy current dyno and holding rpms, you will see some pretty intense heat everywhere. Keep that in mind. I personally wouldn't run my finished muffler on the dyno, as we had an aluminum muffler that fell to pieces from too much heat. I dont know how much the titanium can handle, but risking a $500 muffler is probably not a worthwhile risk.

[MikeDutsa]

I think we are done tuning on dynos all together. We never had very good results at all on a dyno, however using the data logger and a big parking lot we were very succesfull in tuning our engine. Get in start it up, make a full throttle pass, turn around do it again, bring it back in and check the numbers. It's probably a lot easier on the car as well. In a few hours of testing we pulled our cars hp from ~40 to 85. then something happend to the wideband so we had to call it a day.