Will changing my 4" exhaust tip for something bigger effect the longevity of my 107k 2008 mazdaspeed3? The rest of the exhaust system is stock, I want something to make it look nice and a little louder without hurting my engine overtime. Or should I just delete one of the silencers?
Changing a tip will do absolutely nothing but waste your money & look goofy.
An exhaust tip is just that, a tip...ornamental at best.
The exhaust tip does nothing to alter exhaust flow characteristics. Deleting the silencer will change how it performs, because it's putting backpressure on the engine to slow the exhaust down and give it more time to cool, which lessens noise. No backpressure from that changes engine performance. Some cars' PCMs will throw a fit if you remove things that provide backpressure because they were programmed to expect it.
Providing you can find a professional tuning guy who knows how to tune your model, you can delete those parts and have them tell the PCM to "forget" about those data points, but that is technically illegal due to EPA emissions regulations.
I need to find one of those guys in ct so I can actually do some upgrades without it being a code machine.
Pretty sure you can do it with forscan but I don't want to accidentally cook anything.
I use BAMA Performance for my Mustang tunes, they do other vehicles as well. They got it up to around 330 horsepower out of the V6 with the few mods I've done. I thought about tuning my Ranger a few times but it doesn't have really anything worth tuning, lol. Valve timing is fixed.