You’re driving down the road thinking about how nice it will be to drop your son off at your folks so you and your husband can finally have that overdue romantic weekend getaway you’ve planned for … how long has it been? Suddenly, you notice a piece of lumber in the road that probably fell off a truck. Unfortunately, you don’t have time to avoid it so you go right over it, gritting your teeth and hoping it doesn’t damage the car somehow.

You feel the jolt as the right-front tire passes over the wood. You feel it again when the rear tire takes its turn. You think, “That wasn’t so bad,” and you’re about to go back to those happy thoughts when you hear this loud rumble. For a moment, you think that, whatever it is, it will go away but it doesn’t. It slowly dawns on you, “That’s my car making that noise.”

There is a good chance that, what happened is that, as you went over the piece of lumber, one of the tires kicked it up into the air – only it couldn’t go too high because the bottom of the car was there to break its trajectory. Instead, it slammed against your car’s exhaust system. It slammed and broke the exhaust system.

It’s quite possible that rust had weakened the exhaust system before it met up with that flying piece of wood. A new exhaust system is a fairly robust mechanical assembly. A block of wood flying up from the road might dent a new exhaust system but it’s less likely to break it.

Rust is particularly prevalent here in the Midwest, including McHenry County. Winter snow and ice, compounded by road salt, conspire to eat away at the metal that an exhaust system is made of. The thickness of the metal degenerates until, in some cases, it’s almost paper thin. A good thump by something in the road can easily puncture the metal. When that happens, the first thing you notice is that your nice, quiet car isn’t so quiet anymore.

One of the roles of an exhaust system is quieting the sound of the engine when it runs. The muffler is a major component for this job. But, the exhaust system does more than that. With its catalytic converter, an exhaust system also reduces the emissions that are produced by an engine. These include:

• Hydrocarbons
• Carbon Dioxide 
• Nitrogen Oxide
• Sulfur Dioxide Phosphorus
• Lead
• Other metal elements

While we don’t want to pass those emissions into the atmosphere, we also don’t want them to seep into the car’s cabin where it can make you and the cute little toddler sleeping in back sick. A proper exhaust system safely carries those elements, after they pass through the muffler and catalytic converter, to the back of the car and away from the operator and passengers in the car.

A healthy exhaust system also helps a car to run properly. The exhaust system creates a certain amount of backpressure that engines today are designed to expect. In other words, they run properly with the correct amount of backpressure. But, if you reduce that backpressure by puncturing the muffler, catalytic converter or exhaust pipe, the car won’t run as efficiently.