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Back pressure helps with valve cooling and if you remove back pressure you'll cook the heads , take the stock exhaust off a harley and put straight pipes on it and you have to add torque cones into the exhaust tubes or it won't run worth sh*t , on a car all you need to do is increase fuel your really dealing with velocity and the small amount of reduced pressure when the valve is closed would help clear the exhaust gases when it opens , if you take away some sort of exhaust you lose velocity and thats why your civic didn't get any benefit
This tread has taken a turn from the original posters question. I do not know where to go with this as a result. Perhaps someone can move it. Grump, there are many intricacies to the internal combustion engine. When you put pipes on a motor cycle or a car, you've messed with the factory settings of its fuel/air ratio. Because you've freed up the exhaust, you've allowed more air to come in on the intake side. Now if you don't do one of two things (for a cycle anyway), you are going to run lean and lean ( more air) is going to produce higher combustion temps. You need to either induce reversion (torque cones) or rejet the carbs for more fuel to keep the original air/fuel ratio to keep things cooler. Reversion cones can still make for a hot engine but at least you've created a 180 degree pulse change and maybe balanced out the system. This method is hit or miss depending on the engine and the drag pipe manufacturer. Having pipe connectors on the drag pipes can also work. If eventually you do nothing to compensate for the disturbance in air/fuel delivery, you are going to create hot spots on the valves and eventually lead to valve failure. This problem is not so much due to back pressure as it is more to do with exhaust increased velocities altering fuel/air ratios.
When I altered my V twin by putting pipes on, I had to rejet the carbs 3 times before I got it right as pipes were getting yellow from the excess heat.
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