Exhaust system

[SleeperGT]

Here's my experience with gears. I've got 3.73's and love them. Car is very responsive in all gears and the rpm's on the high way I consider to be down right low. I turn about 2400 rpm's or so at 75 mph. Many folks say that 3.73's are for strip/street application and 4.10's are more for if you are a hard core drag strip person. Also if you plan to go nitrous or supercharger one day, 3.73's are recommended over 4.10, as you will just melt the tires even more with the 4.10's. If your plan is NOT to go nitrous or supercharger than many folks say 4.10's are great. As you can see, not a real cut and dry answer. For me I find my 3.73's perfect, plenty of performance and not too much rpm's. However I do have to say if I had gone with 4.10's I would not have been unhappy, as I've driven cars with 4.10's and they did not bother me at all in terms of rpm level. The stock gears are 3.27 on a 2000 GT. In terms of installing gears from all I've read if you are a decent weekend mechanic, and most importantly have the exact tools, gears are not too hard to do. I have a few friends who are pretty serious weekend mechanics and they won't do gears because they don't have the tools, and if you screw up the gear install they will wine and drive you insane, plus potentially tear the gear to shreds. So I'd say definitely a shop job.

Here's the deal on mufflers and X-pipe vs H-pipe. H-pipes and FlowMaster (2 chamber) will give you that standard 1960's muscle car sound, a little lumpiness if you know what I mean. Definitely can't go wrong there. Sounds great. The X-pipes and a flow through muffler, say MagnaFlow mufflers, will give you what some describe as a European 8 cyl sound (not quite sure what that means). I actually have that setup and love it. Car sounds wicked, and it turns heads all the time because nobody knows what the heck is coming, or going, which is usually my case (I passed a woman in my office one day when we were all coming back from lunch, she's a real muscle car freak, drives a Camaro SS, and she said the hairs on the back of her neck stood up from the sound of my car, now if that isn't a compliment on my car's sound, I don't know what is!). I wanted mufflers that had no highway drone, and were fairly quiet, unless I got on it. MagnaFlow has filled that bill nicely. My car is exactly that, no highway drone, sounds good just motoring around town, very throaty, and great, very loud music when I stand on it (in fact I just freaking got kicked out of midnight drags in Jax, FL because my car was too loud, WTF!!, anyways, that's another post). I've also heard that X-pipes give more upper end hp than H-pipe setup, however H-pipe gives a little more low end torque.

Hope that helps, and sorry for the long post. Anything else let us know.