I have to rebuild the exhaust system for my s2000 and I am likely going to up it to 3 inch however I am tired of the muffler packing burning out and the exhaust is going to be loud enough anyway.

Corsa offers a massive 3inch stainless steel muffler now and they do not utilize packing but sound cancellation chambers and all of the vehicles I have heard have sounded nice and if necessary I could add a pre muffler to lower db - currently I am using a 18 inch magnaflow muffler in 2.5 inches but it makes that horrid buzzing noise at high rpms

 

instead of adding more weight and adding a "pre" muffler, why not look into a test pipe baffle?
Car Chemistry offers several baffles that go into your cat delete section and from my testing of the 2.5 inch there was no loss in hp, but it sure did quiet the car down for the noise police.

www.carchemistry.com

 

^^What he said. I also used one that came with my Redshift LCA dump exhaust. No cat, no muffler, only 2 resonators and the car chemistry baffle and I still avoided a black flag from the sound ****'s.

FWIW, I had a Corsa cat-back on my WS6 TransAm and loved how it sounded.

 

The PNW sound ****'s aren't that bad. The REAL test is Mission Raceways in BC where the DB limit is like 89. PR, PIR, comparatively are pretty high.

 

I used to have a baffled test pipe and it didnt work very well. Since it's not a dedicated track only car the next revision will have a cat as well, the magnaflow spun cell I was using did a good job dampening the resonance and I will be incorporating one again. After adding the megapower header it just got alot louder and to go 3 inches from that I am cutting it at the collector and using a burns megaphone to neck it up. It's really easy for an s2000 with a single exhaust to get up over 125db+ so it's a challenge for sure.

As far as the weight I always wanted to trim the car down to 2300 pounds and now it looks like 2200 is possible so I don't mind adding some weight to make the car more livable since I have done 600 mile days out in bfe cruising. And a loud exhaust is a huge contributor to reduced endurance for drivers.

Anywho as long as no one says that they tend to fall apart internally I guess I will just have to bite that bullet.

 

Tell us about that baffled test pipe?
Where did it come from?