I was driving home when i came up to a flooding intersection... that i couldn't see. i plowed right into it. the entire front end was under water. (i'm just thankful that i have one of those open bumpers that not only scoop up the water, but allow the direct ingestion of it as well, just to finish me off.) so my engine cut off. d@mn!!!

i called the wife on the cell phone to help me push it out of the way. while i was waiting, car after car after car drove by creating waves and waves of water pouring into my exhaust. when she arrived, she helped me get out of the 16" deep flood and pushed it onto an incline (to try and drain some of the water). anyway, let it sit until i couldn't see any water dripping, and attempted to crank it... fired right up!!! (i only did that because i honestly thought i locked it up, and thought 'how much worse can it get?'

but.... it also shot a stream of water out of my tailpipe about 5 feet long. it sounds horrible, like my cats fell off. i sound like i'm running straight pipes, raspy as can be. i didn't notice a loss of power. can anyone help me figure out what i should look at first?

 

Not to be disrespectful but, in my opinion, pure luck saved your engine.

 

....agreed. but... i still have that crappy sounding engine. and i am sort of convinced that because of the bypass valve, i did not suck water up into my engine.

but that rasp... horrible!!! i think because the water that went up my exhaust my have cooled the exhaust too fast, and some how messed up a component. i only have three components:
1) crawford cats (could have collapsed because of the rapid cooling after being at an extremely hot temp)
2) magnaflow resonator (only a series of baffles)
3) blitz rear section (again just more baffles).
i'm really leaning towards the cats, but i don't want to replace the $500 component, i wish it was something else (cheaper). am i way off?

 

I think your car caught a cold

Is the engine firing smoothly? If the engine (not exhaust) sounds OK, I think it is safe to run it. You should run it for a while to evaporate the water out of your exhaust and out of your oil. If the sound does not get better, I'm not sure what to do next. You should probably change the oil too.

 

definitely change the oil...because it's probably bad now. my friend hydrolocked his wrx because of his cai and took it into his cousin's shop. and his cousin sat there and kept cranking the engine for like 2 hours and it fired up. they changed the motor oil and did a few other things. I'll let you know.

 

man, that's exactly what it sounds like. i've run it for a while, the engine sounds smooth (especially now because i can hear it better). i know that there something wrong with my exhaust. but i'm probably going to change the oil, start there and move on.

 

latest news... cars sound is back to normal. it fixed itself???... getting oil changed tomorrow.
p diddy, mbq62 - thanks for your help.