No kidding!! Some nice pics though.

 

yeah I need to take some more.

 

hey guys so im looking in to getting a new exhaust and i cant decide whether to get a turbo back and just deal with switching it out when i do smog checks or going with a cat back that i can leave on, any suggestions? will a tbe make that big of a difference also any suggestions on which exhaust to get at the moment im leaning towards the greddy evo 2 but i am definitely still looking around.

Thanks

 

if you get TBE its highly recommend that you get a tune with it. if you want to just do axle back you will be fine. Also Im quite fond of my cobb exhaust. quite on trips and around town. but when you open it up it nice and loud.

 

hey john do you remember this drive?

 

Definitely a turboback and a tune. As for brands, it's all preference in sound and price.

 

lol...how could i forget?

 

Coming from a guy that went back to stock!! Haha.. j/k John.

 

Haha, i know, i know.

 

ok well either way i am going to be putting the exhaust on my self with some help from a friend but for the tuning is that something i can do myself with help from reading stuff online or do i pretty much have to have the shop do it

 

Redils16:

things to note
make sure you buy an aftermarket/sti uppipe with you exhaust setup to remove that catalytic converter as well. its a pain in the ****, but its worth the spool and power. upipe is cheap, usually like 100~200 bucks.

you can get a quick-n-easy but not exactly the best tune by getting a cobb accessport. this is somewhat of a DIY reflash. costs about 690 new and 450~500 new.

as with any exhaust system install, make sure you buy all necessary gaskets.

header to uppipe
uppipe to turbo
turbo to downpipe
downpipe to catback
and any others i "might" have missed.

Dustin/John:
that was skaggs yeah?

 

Yup, skaggs. The first time i met Dustin.

 

I love Skaggs. One of my top 5 favs in the area

 

Redils16,

Alex(sauuce) made some good points, and i'll try to add a few more things since my last post was very vague at best.

A catback, like you said, won't affect the emission part of smog, so it's problem free, but you get little to no performance gain.
A turboback is more work, but if you've got some mechanical experience, it's not difficult. A turboback alone won't give any performance gains, and in fact it's bad for your car without a proper tune.
Alex mentioned doing the uppipe as well as the turboback. The price of an uppipe is cheap, but annoying to put on. It's very much doable, but will take quite some time, depending on your experience. Again, this is bad without proper tune.

As for tuning, you'll have to look into what you want to do, but i'll name a few common ways.

Accessport-One of the more common/popular tuning method. It's a small plug and play device you can install yourself, and after reflashing your car with it, you'll be good to go. You'll gain noticeable power. There are excellent tuners in norcal that can further tune your car once you have an accessport, called protunes. This tune is more personal, and tailored to your car, giving you more performance and a smoother powerband that an off the shelf map on the accessport is not capable of.

OpenECU-If you search for this, you'll find plenty of great articles that can explain it in details. To put it simply, there's no device to buy, just need a cable and a laptop. You can learn to tune yourself, or pay someone knowledgeable to make you a personal map. It's more personal than the off the shelf map that comes on the accessport, but most well known tuners in our area will not deal with this type of tuning. So this is cheaper, but less local support.

Standalone- unless you've got complicated set ups, no point in spending $$$$.

Ecutek- you need to pay a license fee of like ~$600, no device, and an additional ~$300 for every tune you get after that. This used to be popular a while back, but now i hardly hear about this. This is done at authorized tuners.


For your purpose, look into both accessport and openecu. I used to use an accessport, so i'm partial to that. If you've got more questions, feel free to ask. It's probably better than me rambling about stuff you don't care about. Anyone can feel free to add/correct, but lets keep it simple.

 

You and Dustin both left so early last time Near the end, i was stuck with having Ed following me so close to my rear