A friend of mine just bought a 96 Ranger with the 4.0 V6 OHV engine and is ordering a set of Pacesetter headers. He is doing a custom set up and he asked me a couple questions which seemed to be legitimate to me

1. Can the location of a muffler in the system benefit low rpm power, right off the Y pipe vs. stock location?

2. Does tail pipe diameter past the muffler have an effect on power? I told him I didn't think it would be much different than dumping the exhaust but I really didn't know.

3. The collector is 3" on the Y pipe, would 3" to the muffler be too big? He'll be towing a bass boat with it so he wants as much low end grunt as he can get. He asked because he is ordering the muffler when he orders the headers so if it is, he can order a smaller inlet for the muffler, 2.5" etc.

The 4.0 should do much better than his old 2.3L Ranger did. He asked me this but I really don't know, but told him I was a member on the forum and I would get the down low from you fine folk

Thanks

 

My last exhaust set up was my stock manifolds stock y-pipe and then about a foot of intermediate pipe stock 3'' then a flowmaster super 10. This was a temporary set up because my catalytic converter got plugged and i removed it until i my hi flow cat got here. and i will tell you my truck had no low end grunt at all. it was completely gutless to turn my 35s and that's a 5.4l. So i would recommend running as small as diameter intermediate pipe as possible (whatever the y pipe is) then having the muffler be a good distance back in the system to have less cab drone. then you could either dump it or run tail pipes. i don't really think it matters to much.

 

1. Yes, the further back, in theory anyway, it will shift the power curve lower.
2. Not enough to worry about. Some mufflers do need a tailpipe and may have issues if it's too big. If you were going to run something psychotically huge I would run a short section of smaller pipe - 12-18" out of the muffler then increase to what ever huge size, 4, 5, 6" etc.
3. I plan on running a 3" single on a 396ci engine... I'm a touch on the small side. 3" might be a touch too big for a 4.0 however. 2.25 or 2.5" would be better IMO. 2" would probably work as well. Sometimes however the larger pipes don't effect HP that much.