Most vehicle owners out there only come to understand what their muffler does once it breaks down. But what does a muffler really do when it’s working well? Can it improve the performance of your car. Do you need a muffler inspection?
The truth is that your vehicle’s muffler serves two main functions – it works to reduce the noise that your engine makes and to increase the performance of your vehicle. To understand how that all works, you have to look at the design of your vehicle’s muffler.
Muffler’s and Noise-reducing Construction
Your engine creates thousands of pulsating sound bursts a minute when your exhaust valves release very pressurized gas. That’s not a problem. It’s essential for the engine to do its job.
The thing to do is find some way of muting, or muffling, the sound. Your muffler is mounted and aligned with your exhaust pipes. Mufflers feature many interior perforated tubes and sound-silencing baffle chambers that cut down on the amount of engine noise that you (and the neighbors!) should experience as you drive your vehicle.
If you’re experiencing a lot of annoying engine noise, then you might need a muffler inspection. When your muffler is working as it should, the sound waves from your engine reach the muffler, at which point the noise hits the baffle chambers in your muffler.
Nearly instantaneously, the sound waves are cancelled out as the sound bounces back and forth in that part of your muffler. There’s actually a lot of auditory science that goes into a muffler, and engineers work to ensure that your muffler, which you probably don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about otherwise, is actually tuned in to the right sonic frequency.
When you take your vehicle in for a muffler inspection at All Around Auto Repair, you can get exactly what you’re looking for. Perhaps that even includes a new muffler.
You see, some mufflers these days that have been calibrated with sound reduction exclusively in mind; other mufflers are designed to produce a particular growl. Just let All Around Auto Repair’s certified mechanics know what you’re after!
Newer Mufflers Improve Performance
One thing that people are surprised to find out about their mufflers, though, is that they can expect improved vehicle performance from a muffler inspection. How? Well, for starters, mufflers indirectly deal with your vehicle’s engine. Anything that helps your engine, even indirectly, will improve vehicle performance.
With mufflers, the more efficiently your engine can expel exhaust gases, the more quickly it can get oxygen and, in turn, give you more power as you punch down on the accelerator. It might be tempting, therefore, to get rid of mufflers altogether for maximum power!
The reason you might want to rethink that one is that local laws and the state of California have rules governing how much noise your vehicle can make. The fact that actual racecars have mufflers when they’re not necessarily required to tells you that muffler design has come a long way and shouldn’t hurt your vehicle’s performance.
So, with today’s mufflers you’re getting noise reduction, an improved exhaust system, and even better performance out of your vehicle. In fact, smaller cars may uniquely benefit from a muffler inspection or more efficient muffler more because a smaller four-cylinder engine, for instance, might need help to overcome an overly restrictive muffler.
No matter the size of your vehicle, though, you need a muffler inspection and look at your entire exhaust system to pass your emissions test and get the most out of your vehicle. Head in to All Around Auto Repair today.
