Here is the deal. If you take a stock muffler and tear all the guts out and dont put the end cap on, you will have a straight pipe. it will put out more power for a little while, but eventually it will screw up your port timing and you will lose power. After that it will just burn up your rings. However, if you take the guts out and put the end cap back on, you basically have a poor man's expansion chamber. The reason why they call it an expansion chamber is because at the wider part, the gases expand. Then they bounce off the cones and return to the engine. Well, in a gutted stock muffler, the gases bounce off the end cap. I used to run a pipe like that till I modded a pocketbike pipe. It worked pretty good, and wasnt that much louder. I didnt retune my carb when I had that pipe, so I dont know what my air/fuel mixture was like. Had I retuned my carb, Im sure I could have gotten it right. Since I modded the pocketbike pipe, I have retuned my carb, so my air/fuel mix is right. But there is nothing wrong with modding a stock pipe if you do it right. it isnt that much louder, and it wont hurt your engine at all.