Welcome to the forum!
California may have changed it since I lived there, but aren't a lot of these pipes going to get spotted on the smog check?
You generally don't want to do any flow/power mods without re-tuning. If the ECU doesn't know what it is working with, it will make poor decisions more often. And it will repeat them with robotic precision until something melts. Hire somebody to tune it and you avoid that outcome, possibly indefinitely. I recommend Ed at XRT. He tunes via remote- you supply a laptop, car interface & internet connection. You record logs and upload them to him, then he sends you a new program for the car and then repeat the process through a few refinements.
The tune you get via this method is precisely set for your car, as-built, as-aged and as-driven. Compare that to the Cobb system: you get a tune which is optimized for the average XT as it was fresh off the showroom floor. It's good, but it can't account for any individual differences between your car and their hypothetical average car. One advantage is self-service. It's an appliance, do it all yourself in the middle of the night on the side of the road if you want.
As always- get your maintenance up-to-date before commencing power mods or tuning. These engines are pretty sensitive to vacuum leaks and they're good at getting them in the four miles of hose in there.
California may have changed it since I lived there, but aren't a lot of these pipes going to get spotted on the smog check?
You generally don't want to do any flow/power mods without re-tuning. If the ECU doesn't know what it is working with, it will make poor decisions more often. And it will repeat them with robotic precision until something melts. Hire somebody to tune it and you avoid that outcome, possibly indefinitely. I recommend Ed at XRT. He tunes via remote- you supply a laptop, car interface & internet connection. You record logs and upload them to him, then he sends you a new program for the car and then repeat the process through a few refinements.
The tune you get via this method is precisely set for your car, as-built, as-aged and as-driven. Compare that to the Cobb system: you get a tune which is optimized for the average XT as it was fresh off the showroom floor. It's good, but it can't account for any individual differences between your car and their hypothetical average car. One advantage is self-service. It's an appliance, do it all yourself in the middle of the night on the side of the road if you want.
As always- get your maintenance up-to-date before commencing power mods or tuning. These engines are pretty sensitive to vacuum leaks and they're good at getting them in the four miles of hose in there.
