I just got my first car an 03 Neon Se(Simple edition or Sucky edition) no power anything. It was my sisters and she treated it like complete crap, drove it for months without knowing her rear bearing was out. Anyway i was looking on craigslist and found a stock srt-4 exhaust, will it work on my neon fine and improve its power or no? I also found some used pacesetter headers, will these be fine used?

I tried searching for this but couldnt really find anything so sorry if its been posted before.

 

It will bolt right up to your Neon, but the tips will melt holes into the rear bumper since you don't have cutouts for them. I did that, then took the tips back off and cleaned the melted plastic off of the tips and cleaned up the "custom cutouts" and reinstalled everything. Improve power? It's negligible (you won't feel it in your seat). As for a header, that'll probably help improve things more, but it'll also be super loud with the SRT exhaust.

 

my tip did the same thing but where can you get the cut outs? doen't the se still have the 2.0 sohc just like any other neon except the srt. i would a CAI in with the header and the srt exhaust and you should be able to feel the power increase at least a little i know i did

 

"where can you get the cutouts?" an SRT bumper should have them, but, the standard bumper (@ least the one on my '05 SXT) has the lines showing where to cut. just hit your bumper w/ a dremel or somesuch, and boom, SRT bumper.
now i Never noticed the lines, untill i got close up to the bumper putting a cheap stainless tip on my standard exhaust, there was a light semicircle as part of the bumper mold, so the factory guys could just cut out the openings, instead of having to mold 2 different bumpers.

 

The SRT and R/T exhaust (what is usually installed on a non-SRT, and, what your cutout lines are probably for) tips exit at different spots in the rear bumper. If you cut those holes for SRT tips, I don't think they'll line up correctly.

 

Point taken, i often forget the alphabet of variants there were in the 5 yrs of these cars.
but, same basic idea applies,with a bit of a tweak,
1) Bolt up new exhaust
2)"trace" with some spacer of some sort around the tips
3)cut along your tracings, then sand,paint,polish,Etc.

yes? no?

 

I'd think the only problem with cutting before they melt into the bumper is that you cut too low or high. The latter you can't really fix easily.

 

aren't there inserts in the holes or are they just holes molded into the bumper

 

There is some insert thing on the Mopar lip kit IIRC. R/Ts and SRTs have the holes molded.