Motors whats a glasspack?

whats a glassspack? i read olot of stephen king, and there always seems to be a kid with a glasspack muffler. kinda like his easter egg i guess. like in "needful things" Ace had one, and you always have the comments of the surroundings and "some kid with a glasspack roared in the distance"

so what is a glasspack made of?
are they street legal?
are they better than Dynaflows?
do they make them for 1950's Dodge Royals or 1960's GT350's?

thank ya much... post any other instances of SK mentioning glasspacks... like a scanvenger hunt... fun... i need friends...

 

I'm sure he mentions it in "From A Buick 8"

 

http://www.google.com/search?q=glasspack+muffler&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0

*n

 

Glasspacks are basically 2 steel pipes over each other. The inner pipe has a bunch of holes in it and is wraped in fiberglass. (i think this is right...)

Basically is just makes the car sound loader and crackles on certain vehicles. You can most likely find them for anyvehicle, but i don't think they are street legal cause they are basically a straight pipe.

 

That's pretty much it. There are different styles for different sounds, but the basics are what you describe. They're not as popular as they were back "in my day" as you really need a beefy engine to get a good sound out of them. If you've ever been next to a "real" muscle car like a Boss 302, GTO, Roadrunner or the like and at idle all you hear is a VERY low pitched "blub...... blub..... blub....." and roars when it's reved then as was described, a cracking sound when coming back down to idle, that's a glasspack. They produce a sound that gets the testosterone flowing in us gear-heads...

 

I absolutely love that sound, its great. Ive heard similar sound on idling harleys also, just blubbing away

 

Before I sold my old chevette, I had installed a glasspack, gave it a nice sound. But it wasn't quite loud enough, so eventualy I cut the muffler off alltogether, and ran it straight pipe (good thing airdrie cops are so friggin lax). Though, I don't think the people on my paper route enjoyed my car at 2AM, every morning



When it was straight pipe, my little chevette would set off car alarms two blocks away

 

Chevette! Havn't seen one of those in YEARS! Was yours the model with the funky radio that was mounted vertically?

 

Nah, just the standard normaly mounted am only radio Had preatty good sound though.

 

Pix?

 

glass packs are what i run on my pickup as it gives it the sound of what the engine is.....

one of the reasons i have to be careful when i drive my truck around because they're a bit iffy as far as noise level... fortunately connecticut goes by the year of the block and not the year of the body or i'd have to conform to emissions standards... (which is fortunate because with the glass packs i'd never make it)


it gives it a lovely roar when i jam on the pedal... one that you can feel in your chest...

sign of a true power car...

 

my gramps used to have a nova that he ran dual exhaust on....
a glasspack on one pipe, and a cherry bomb on the other. loudest damn vehicle i think i've ever heard

 

Cherry bomb! Closest thing you can get to running without a muffler I used to have a 1988 Ranger XLT Extended Cab with a 2.9l inline-6 which I threw a cherry bomb on... Vroom vroom!

 

A Cherry Bomb is simply a brand name of a glasspack muffler, which is also slightly misleading since most mufflers are packed with glass fiber. Glasspacks are also terrible for performance. A Flowmaster or even a decent turbo muffler is much better and sound MUCH better. I had dual glasspacks and full exhaust on my first car, a '77 Chevy Caprice with a 4-barrel Q-jet on a 350 in high school. Thought it was the coolest thing then. Now I hate glasspacks. Argh. I have another '77 Caprice 2 door now and I had dual Flowmasters on 2-1/2 inch exhaust. It sounded really good but was too loud inside the car, so I swapped them for some Dynomax-style turbo mufflers. Then it sounded soooo sweet. Smooth and bassy, with more than a little snarl when you open it up. Fairly quiet idle, but you can definitely tell something's there. It's also got headers, tuned port injection and a few other goodies.

 

yeah, flowmasters sound SO cool. such deep bass. talking about flowmasters always puts me in this kind of mood

 

Paper round? By Car? at 2AM??? that's insane! When do people read these papers where you live???

 

Well, techincaly speaking, the papers here need to be delivered by 6:30AM, but because at the time I was staying up till all hours of the morning, I picked up the papers directly from the regional manager (the person who goes to the factory and delivers the papers to all the businesses and carriers). So, typicaly, I would get the papers at arround 12:30-1:30 (not allways at the same time) and finish up at about 6:45AM, I had roughly 500+ papers a night. Let me put it this way, the shocks in my little chevette wore out in less than two months

 

oh, right, this was a proper job, not just some schoolboy delivery thing, fair enough. Besides if the weather got cold i'd want a car too...

 

I could hear you all the way in California... daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn!

hey we don't have a "raise the roof" smilie! we need one!

 

I've got a cherry bomb Vortech muffler on my 2000 BMW Z3. It sounds pretty good but noticed some loss in the low end torque. My engine is only a 2.5l so there isn't a whole lot there to roar but its got a nice sound at around 1900rpm.