Faisal Mohammed Naim
Fast and loud is the latest motto with mean machine lovers. However, making your ride scream louder requires more than just putting ripped pipes, explains
Okay, so everybody loves roaring sound when it comes to cars and bikes. And not just any sound, but the one that comes growling out of the exhaust pipes. This is especially true for bikers — they say half the money in a bike is in its sound.
While most know pretty well about Akrapovics, Cobras, and Vanes & Hines, they are unaware of a crucial fact: By merely installing the louder aftermarket exhausts (or debaffling one’s stock exhaust), rather than freeing a few more ponies, you are in fact seriously damaging your engine. Yes, you heard it right; installing aftermarket exhausts can seriously destroy your engine — if it is not tuned accordingly.
The ignorance around this issue may stem from a big myth among the circles of automobile lovers, that exhausts are just vents to release the burnt gas out of the vehicle, which is not at all true. Exhausts control the compression of the engine. The more restricted the pipes, the more silent they are, and more compact the air-flow, and vice-versa.
Tweaking your exhaust tweaks the whole combustion cycle of the engine, and not just the sound (they are exhausts, and not speakers after all), and once the exhausts are changed, the air and fuel settings need to be remapped accordingly.
To comply with the latest emission norms, the factory fitted exhausts on modern, road-legal vehicles, are fully restricted, requiring lesser amount of fuel and air for optimal combustion cycle. Once you replace the stock pipes with the semi or fully unrestricted ones, the engine requires more air and fuel for combustion.
Most of the modern vehicles are ECU (Electronic Control Unit) governed, which have pre-installed fixed values of fuel and air ratio, in compatibility with the stock pipes. Once the pipes are changed, these values need to be modified as well; else you run the risk of running your engine lean, damaging its power-house, the combustion chamber.
The ECU needs to be reflashed with modified air and fuel values. This, however, can prove quite a difficult task, as most brands keep the ECU locked.
To over-ride the stock values uploaded in the ECU, there are many fuel and air management systems available in the market, like the Dynojet Power Commander, Fuel Pak, Juice Box Pro and many more. These devices automatically detect and modify the fuel-air values according to the engine requirements, by overriding the original ECU mappings. Most of them come with preloaded dyno-tuned and tested maps for the specific brand and make of exhaust installed on the vehicle.
Another very important component which needs to be upgraded is the air filter. As the flow of air increases with unrestricted pipes, increased intake of air is to be supplicated with high performance air filters like K&N, BMC, else the engine might choke on air and run rich, leading to power loss and decreased fuel efficiency.
And you thought it was a child’s play to get that ride of yours roaring and running, huh? See you next Monday with more on motoring. Ride Safe.