[CJ428CJ]

My car is (was) really loud. I've had it on the road since 2003 and I have about 35,000 miles on it. I never had a problem until recently when a local cop in my hometown pulled me over and "warned" me that it was too loud. He said I needed to quiet it down and if I didn't he'd pull me over and ticket me the next time he saw me.

I did a little research after that and came to the conclusion that he could probably ticket me, but that it probably wouldn't hold up in court if I chose to fight it. After all, he had no sound measuring equipment and even if he did, the standards for measuring the loudness of a vehicle are very complex. It's not something that you can just do on the side of the road. I also found a CHP document that basically instructed CHP officers not to ticket someone for noise unless their vehicle had no mufflers on whatsoever. It basically said if it has something that looks like a muffler assume it's a muffler don't ticket them.

In the end, I decided that the cop could make my life difficult even if he couldn't legitimately ticket me for noise, so I took my sidepipes off and had different mufflers welded in. Overall, I'm glad I did it. It still sounds good and I can drive around town without earplugs and I don't feel like I'm going to blow out an eardrum every time I jump on it.

Chris