...that sometimes can drive you nutz!

Ever have a time where you get your car straightened out and she sounds AMAZING!....except....you hear this metallic rattling like something is loose or banging against the exhaust? You've got your ride sounding MEAN! as you cruise thru the car show looking for a spot to park so someone come over and tell you how badass your ride sounds as it shakes the pavement below you only to have someone say, "hey whats that rattle?" You just want to hide under your dash.

So a month or so ago I added an H pipe and some 40 series Flowmasters and the sound was as sexy as a big block V8 can purr, BUT a very loud rattle developed and it would cause a slow burn in the pit of my stomach as I searched and searched and scoured the underside of the car with no andwer to be found.....until today!

As you may know on long tube headers, the four primary tubes flow down the side of the block towards the back of the engine and "collect" together into one single pipe that connects to the rest of the exhaust going back. Well it seems at some time in this cars life, someone dropped an allen wrench from the top of the engine never to be found until today. there it lay in between the four collected pipes and had wedged itself in silence until a month ago when a simple change was made to ultimately improve the sound of the GTO only to drive me batty for the last 30 days.. A butter knife was used to dislodge the wrench and it has been added to the garage "WTF" drawer in the tool box. THIS is the stuff that starts as frustration and ends in a chuckle and a good story to share with all.

Good find.  Tracking down squeeks N rattles can be frustrating.

Rattles have been known to drive me beyond crazy. I took my whole dash apart just to fix one at my brother-in-law's

I had a squeek somewhere behind the dash in my '76 GP ever since I bought it about 4 years ago, that only showed up during the colder winter months. This past November, I pretty much took the whole dash apart trying to find the source of the noise. Still couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Put everything back together, and lucky me... I haven't heard the squeeking sound ever since. Keeping my fingers crossed.

I got really pissed at my truck one day because I dropped a socket and it landed in the middle of the headers like that.  I tried for 20 min to get it out and that was a day that I failed at everything except I laid a perfect weld in to ensure that the socket never moved again.

I suppose you picked up the original socket at Canadian Tire and then had to use your pull at Lowe's to get a new socket and some more filler rod on the cheap?

Edited May 26, 201610 yr by Frosty