Car/Truck mufflers do amazing work muffling noise. A car is nearly silent when running with a muffler, compared to what it would sound like with open manifolds. When I fire up my Honda push mower, the whole neighborhood knows about it, and it’s actually kinda quiet as mowers go. So eli5 : Why can’t lawnmower mufflers work like automotive mufflers?
In: 29
Because a good muffler is the same size and cost as a lawn mower. Nobody is going to pay 2x the cost for a quiet mower, especially when battery mowers are taking over anyways.
Your car has 10 feet or more of exhaust pipe, a catalytic converter, a muffler, and likely a resonator all in its exhaust system. A lawn mower has a tiny muffler bolted to the cylinder head.
You need to have time (pipe length) for the exhaust gas to cool down, and chambers to allow the gas to expand and contract (resonator, muffler), and ideally, internal baffling or packing in those chambers to slow the exhaust gas further, giving it more time to cool to achieve a quiet system.
You can build a quiet exhaust system for your mower, but you’re going to lose a lot of power, and you’ll have a pipe array that is 5 or more feet long.
Latest Answers