It's a joke that things rust so bad that they just fall off, right? Well not anymore. I fired up the MR2 and one of the exhaust tips fell right off. It was perhaps the only metal thing that was still original to the 1985 build date, so I guess it was due. Looks like I will be muffler shopping before she goes on the block to make room for baby.
I had the exhaust fall off one of my cars twice. First just the muffler rotted away and fell off over a speed bump. By the time I turned around to get it someone had run it over for me.
The second time my mid pipe fell away from the catalytic converter after one too many trips down a rough dirt road.
Wierd, my Scirocco exhaust is circa 1987 and still looks very good and this car was never pampered. Stainless steel is neat stuff.
why bother with the muffler? My geo's muffler fell off - at an autocross - and I never replaced it. I welded two bits of straight and one elbow together. The exhaust came out at the stock location and it was not much louder than running a muffler
The left muffler rusted off of my RX-7 two years ago while pulling into work. It rotted away at the pipe and jammed the heat shield against the back of the left-rear wheel. Thank goodness I was already pulling into work or otherwise the scraping may have punctured the sidewall. It took me 20 minutes to hammer the heat shield out of the way with a tire iron and to yank that rusty piece of crap off of the car. I drove with one muffler for a few months (rotaries aren't THAT loud, officer!) before replacing it with a Racing Beat cat-back.
the one on my late 900s broke right in front of work.. wound up dragging the tailpipe right by the front of Harrah's Atlantic City as all the beautiful people were busy getting their cars out of valet.
The worst was my old Hyundai Excel. I had it break in Virginia.. the mid pipe rotted out at the seam at the bottom.. by the time I got back to NJ I was sure my ears were bleeding
Exhaust tips rusting and falling off are a minor problem; it's gonna happen eventually. And the good part is you can get creative with the replacement.
A problem is having the exhaust rust through and break in downtown Harper's Ferry, WV. That's a place where a really loud Fiat 128 makes for a spectacle, especially when the pipe-ends are bouncing off the cobblestone street. A pair of tin snips, an aluminum can and some wire made the trip home to NJ a bit more bearable.
Doesn't a turbo make an excellent muffler?
Fair. I have a friend with a turbo'd VWac, no muffler.
Pfft. When you hit a pothole and a large piece of the unibody drops off and leaves a hole in your floor, you've experienced rust.
Last night I saw a car drive across in front of me with the exhaust unhooked from the back of the cat. Front lip of the whole system was about 1" off the ground and bouncing. I was waiting for it to catch on an expansion joint and launch the whole cat-back out the rear of the car like a javelin. 
I was driving the tow truck from Ft.Lauderdale to Watkins Glen, a Chevy box truck, with a brand new, unlettered, IMSA GTO class "Camaro" on an open trailer. I-95. Right side exhaust dropped. LOUD! Pulled into a little town in South Carolina , Santee, to find a shop that could fix it. Every shop in town was Nascar fans, they all came over to have a look at this Real Live Racey Car. Had to go to 3 different shops before we found one with a suitable pit, as nobody had a lift that would handle the box truck. Had really nice conversations with a bunch of people, the guy that did the repair only wanted 20.00 for the job. I gave him 40.00 and a 6 pack. A very interesting and pleasant 2 hours. Could have been MUCH worse!
Back in high school I had a Jetta and one day when I was driving a few (4) of my friends to lunch with me I kept hearing a scraping noise every time I hit a bump. I said "hmm, maybe we should get some of the weight out of the back!" to which the fat guy (all the rest of them were freakishly skinny, i can't figure that one out...) yelled back "Berkley you!" turns out the muffler was barely hanging on to what little rust was still attatched to the car...
Story 2- I was driving my old van from WI to NY a couple years ago for a nice month of archaeological field work. After entering NY, I collided with a dead raccoon on the interstate at roughly 75 mph. Here I thought roadkill on the interstate should be flattened, turns out it wasn't. I got blood all over my van (and the car next to me) and it bent the muffler. I bent it back and kept going. Fast forward a bit more than one month to when I'm driving back to WI. Around Pennsylvania, I start hearing noise like a large something is loose below the car, and for some reason the van sounds a lot louder... Turns out the giant dead raccoon had loosened the rust holding the muffler to the catalytic converters, which came dislodged forcing me to coat hanger the exhaust to the frame so it wouldn't fall off. Of course this wasn't attatched to the cats, so i also had to drive 600 miles with an entirely unmuffled 302. good times.
My 70 Impala backfired once and literally blew the muffler off the pipe. It was puffed up like baloon too. Hi-larious!
I recall driving my old Buick Century around for what had to be six months before finding out, via a tire change, that the muffler had simply vanished. I'd never noticed if it'd fallen off, and the car didn't sound louder.
no good muffler falling off stories... but I can tell a fun story of my idiot bro-in-law... his truck started overheating... apparently he missed when the mechanical fan fell off...
how he did that we still don't know...
In Texas we have dry rot of the hangers and armadillos to tear our mufflers off.
No body damage to either car.
I was heading back from Toronto last July and the pipe on my tercel blew out just after the cat, something struck me as a bit louder, but it wasn't until a week later that the pipe REALLY blew out, she got 2x louder right then!
oldsaw wrote: A problem is having the exhaust rust through and break in downtown Harper's Ferry, WV. That's a place where a really loud Fiat 128 makes for a spectacle, especially when the pipe-ends are bouncing off the cobblestone street.
I have ridden thru downtown Harpers Ferry in and on various vehicles and motorcycles many times. The buildings and streets seem to make anything sound twice as loud as it is any place else. I can only imagine how loud it was and how much attention it attracted. 
Appleseed wrote:
That's smooth. Real smooth....
No muffler on my '91 MR2. Daily driver- it's surprisingly reasonable.
You'll need to log in to post.
