If you think your ATV or SXS is way too loud for hunting season, maybe it is. However, stuffing an extra section of exhaust pipe on it won’t always tone down the noise and in the long run might actually hurt the engine’s performance.
Add-on exhaust systems are great when used properly to silence a noisy engine, but if left on too long you can see things like a fouled spark plug or sluggish performance because they actually restrict the flow of the exhaust in order to silence it.
I recently added one of these items to a 2013 Polaris Ranger Crew 700 and to my semi-trained ear it really didn’t make much difference. The exhaust was already pretty quiet.
Think about it this way, you have an explosion happening right between the fenders of the machine. Choking the exhaust is not going to make it as quiet as an electric machine. No Way!
Squeaks and rattles drive me crazy, but so does when someone throws money at a problem without figuring out what the actual problem really is.
Things like the CVT, exhaust header guards, worn out bearings and even the steel hook latch for the dump bed can be the loudest things on your side-x-side.
Simply shaking the machine as it sits still can reveal loud noises or things that need tightening and save you time in narrowing down the culprit. Fix these items first and you just might end up with a quieter machine without robbing its performance.
