Mustang3GT07

Better power numbers. Shorties are a waste. The stock exhaust manifolds flow just as good as shorties. Putting headers on is not that easy, so if your going to go thru the trouble of doing it, you might as well go with longtubes.

RedHousePainter

Is your car dropped? I hear longtubes scrape alot and knock exhaust connect points loose. I'm looking for longevity as well as performance, and I'm not gonna mess with the hassle of putting in headers if they have a good chance of scraping and getting damaged easily. Headers are kinda low on my priority list, but what I am looking for now is a cat-back.

I want flowmasters because I know they will always sound the same, since they use no muffling material--only chambers. What exhaust do you have and what do you think sounds the best?

ericmuscle

my car makes a ticking noise also at idle after warming up. this motor is noisy but way quieter than the 2007 gt i had.

RedHousePainter

That's good to know. The engine is actually pretty quiet. I can just hear a little click-click when it's idling. It idle's very well for a V-8 I think. My 2008 Sentra before was louder actually.

Mustang3GT07

Kooks and ARH are going to be your 2 best. You said you want to go with longetivity then go with ARH or Kooks. Both are high grade 304 stainless steel so they will never rust on you. I went with ARH over kooks because ARH tuck under the car better and are a solid 1 piece design, where as the kooks use a slip fit so kooks can leak at the collector.

The Catback I have on my car now is a steeda catback. Pretty quiet at idle and cruise but screams when you get on it. IMO chamber mufflers do not sound good on cobras and machs. Our cars sound the best from a straght thru muffler design such as: Borla, Steeda, Bassani, Magnaflow & Dynomax. Your best bet would be go on youtube and listen to different exhaust combos on cobras. Here is a pic of how low my car sits and I have the ARH Longtubes and ARH midpipe. I actually gained ground clearance with this setup over the stock catted H.

Timspony

Jon you forgot Flowmasters ^^^^

Mustang3GT07

I refuse to include flowmasters lol

RedHousePainter

Haha. Well Flowmasters have sounded good on my other vehicles, I might try them out, found some cheap on craigslist. But the straight-thru's sound hot I'll admit. Just don't like the whole fiberglass-is-gonna-wear-out-eventually thing.

RedHousePainter

"The design downfall of C heads, and their larger (5.4L Navigator) cousins, is the relatively flat floor and utter lack of a short turn radius in the throat of the intake port. As such, the incoming air tends to overshoot the valves, making the port think the valves are smaller than they actually are. Some ‘99/’01 Cobra owners reported a “ticking/pinging” noise coming from the drivers side head of their cars. This is due to insufficient cooling around the #6, 7, and 8 cylinders that allowed the valves to overheat and therefore seat improperly. Ford remedied the situation by issuing a TSB to remove and replace the affected heads with a version that featured altered coolant flow."

^^^Well lookey here, in this very section I found my answer. I'm gonna have to check up on that.

RedHousePainter

ATTENTION ALL SVT OWNERS WITH NON-MODIFIED C HEADS

FORD DOES NOT HONOR THE HEAD SWAP ANYMORE (unless you have super low miles and a super good warranty I suppose)

The tick is the valves in the said cylinders in the above post not seating properly due to overheating.

EvenFlow sells kits to re-route coolant flow to the left side cylinder head to properly cool with little modification. The kit is around $120.

If you hear this ticking at idle after warm-up, you have this problem and are urged to not drive the car very hard (no race weekends) if you want your car to last awhile.

Hope this helps