HELP (exhaust I think)
 

All righty

My car starts with a raspy sound in the morning and starts to mellow a bit as the idle drops when it warms up.

When I accelerate. I have this loud noise as i step on the pedal. Actually it sounds like I have a custom exhaust setup with all straight pipes (like a straightpiped honda hatch). I can hear the noise from the front.

So, as I go toward high speeds, the noise does settles down at 60 as i hit the higher gears and stay at 2000 rpm.

The noise does create vibration as My steering column panels starts to make the plastic-vibra noise.

The tranny still rides smooth, i do suspect something fell from my exhaust (but i may be wrong) or is loose somewhere. No codes are being thrown.

Thanks

Put the car on ramps and visually check underneath. Check the Y-section, usually that's where the exhaust cracks. You can either see the crack by moving the cold pipes, or put you hand over the pipes without touching it to feel for a leak while the car is running. Good luck.

Hmm.....

Is this one of the few possible sounds. My fear is that it is anything else than the exhaust (like er... maybe tranny).

Is there a possibility its the manifold. /?\

Thanks :)

I had a leak at the egr pipe on my manifold once. I couldn't repair it so I got a used to replace, but it was caused by the pipe rusting out, not anything actually happening to the manifold. I think you'd have to really abuse the manifold to hurt em.

I've even drilled out the studs on my driver side one and put in new ones. I'm pretty sure I put them in a few turns tighter than it needed to be and still no issues. :)

I'd look at the donut gaskets in your exhaust, if a bolt rusts good enough the spring can break it off if you hit a good bump. It would make it loose enough for a good size leak and still look like it is together.

Er.... what are donut gaskets?

If you change your exhaust is there a gasket from the manifold that i have to replace?

Thanks

BTW the sound is a droning roar that gets louder as i step on the gas

A Donut gasket is a slang term for an exhaust flange gasket....Hope this helps! ;)

Yup! Sortof...
A normal exhaust gasket is layers of aluminum that sandwich betweenthe two flat flanges. The only gasket in an svx that looks like this is the exhaust manifold gasket that goes on the engine side. There are three "donut" gaskets that allow the exhaust system to "flex". On most cars that use a normal flange gasket a flex pipe would allow this "flexing"

The "donut" gasket looks like a big donut with a large center, it is sandwiched between two pipes which are held together with bolts that have springs in them (to keep them straight an pulling towards eachother onto the "donut".

The SVX has 3 of these, all of them are on the 3rd (main) Cat converter. 2 conecting the head pipes (with the small pre cats on them) in and 1 on the end going out to the res and muffler. Where the head pipes connect to the headers, there is a metal ring that acts as a gasket. They are likely good, but if you break that seal for what ever reason, you might as well pull the ring off and put on a new one.