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lots of discussion over hooker sidepipe mufflers! my experience is as follows. bought sidepipes from mid-america. came with hooker glasspaks. installed pipes and found the glasspaks to sound like the car had an exhaust leak and very restrictive to performance. ordered hooker maxflows. installed and they sounded great but very loud inside car. vast improvement in performance. didn't care for them being so loud, but that's just me! next step in this progression was spiral turbo baffles. seat of the pants feel in performance was no comparison to both previous mufflers. car runs very strong and quieted it down a considerable amount. to me the baffles sound like a vette with chambered exhaust sounds. long story short, the baffles are the way to go for performance and sound. when you get on it they talk to ya!
Great to hear. I haven't ordered my side exhaust yet, but I was planning on going with the sprial turbo baffles based on what I have heard other forum members mention.
Do any of you guys have a sound clip or what they sound like?
That's good info. There's talk of how great the spiral baffles are but not many real comparisons like you did. Too bad you didn't have some dyno info to go along with it. I'm sure you'd have to travel a long ways from Big Pine to find one. BTW, good luck this hurricane season. Wish me luck for our place in Key Colony too.
i should have asked earlier, are you running the sts spiral baffles in your comparison? how do they sound during freeway speeds? currently i'm running the sweet thunders and starting to not to care for them being so loud too. thanks for sharing your experience capt.t!
thanks for sharing your experience. I'm currently running the 2 1/4" sweet thunder inserts and I think they're too restrictive once my 383 is built. I thought about buying the maxflows but you're saying they are too loud ???
i'm not saying they are to loud but ,they are for me.
I don't want to spend $350 for the baffles if I don't have to... how much do you ask for your Maxflows (if you still have them and if you want to sell) ???
$350.00 seems high to me too. Wonder if I could make something simmilar? They don't look like a complicated welding project. Anyone tried? Better yet would be to somehow use a set of these http://www.mccordcg.com/mpp/mpp.htm and be able to tune the sound to your mood from the drivers seat while driving!
Last edited by builderdarin; Jul 13, 2006 at 10:35 PM.
I've been trying to find inserts for the Hooker sidepipes on my wife's '82, not being sure which direction to take. I also thought the stock set-up sounded totally asthmatic. I lucked onto this thread and this looks to be the answer I've been looking for. Thanks for the posts.
probably very similar as far as sound. maybe a little louder. great performance though!
Ah...thanks. No, I'm looking for something quieter so I can park in the parking garage at school...the way it is I can set off all the alarms in the entire garage when I start it up.
Capt.t, thanks for posting this. This has been a hotly debated topic here recently. I was one of the early dyno mules for the STS baffles and currently run them in cut and uncapped form on my 600+ horse 502. The Hooker max flows were not out yet, but I did test against a similar muffler made by Loback and the baffles beat this muffler handily. I think we can put to bed the fact that the STS baffles are most free flowing muffler available for a side exhaust application. I currently have my engine out of the car and it will be going back on the engine dyno in a couple of weeks so if anyone has a set of Max Flows they want to lend me for testing I would be glad to test them. I wanted to buy Capt.t's but he already sold them.