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When they say that things were simpler in the old days they really aren't kidding. I'm sure that there are reasons why mechanical parts are more complicated but the explanation is lost on me. As an example take exhaust systems or mufflers. My Dad had a Studebaker President (great name for a car don't you think?) back in the fifties that had a dual exhaust system. He had taken off the stock mufflers and put on a set of mufflers called glass packs. They were nothing more than a wide spot in a straight pipe that was reported to have fiberglass material inside to lower the noise. They didn't work well at all. And that was why my Dad put them on, because when he got off the gas at 50 mph that thing backed down with a pop pop pop that sounded like a deck gun on the USS Missouri. I guess that it was from that point on that I always thought louder was better. My first ride was actually a Lambretta motor scoter that was bought used after it spend a week as a courier bike at the Sebring Sports Car Races in 1959. I think that it had 200 miles on it. At the time I had a two hundred and twenty stop paper route (some numbers you just never forget) and my bicycle was really showing its mileage. The first thing that I did was to remove the muffler and have a piece of threaded pipe welded into the side of it. A threaded plug from the plumbing department at the hardware store was in place for the early morning paper runs but it was open exhaust all the rest of the time. Of course 150 cc’s of a single cylinder two stroke engine wouldn't exactly peg the db meter but it sure seemed loud at the time. My first real car was a '58 VW Beetle with a stock muffler that came with two chrome tailpipes out the back. The first night I was out with the car I drove by the local Youth Center where everyone hung out. An older guy (I think he was twenty) who had a VW came out to take a look and immediately pointed at the two shiny tailpipes. He said that it would sound a lot better if I took out the packing material that was restricting the exhaust flow. He went over to his car and returned with a pair of pliers. With the pliers he bent back two little tabs that were on the inside of the tailpipe and pulled out a tube that was punched full of holes and wrapped in what looked like attic insulation. A quick turn of the key and I practically had a racecar. The sound was just a little louder but with a lot more authority. Looking back, I'm not really sure how much authority can be credited to a 36 hp engine but it was certainly an improvement. Over the years I had side exhausts on Volvos, Cherry Bombs on Datsuns, extractors on Porsches and stainless on BMW's. They were always just bolt on affairs until the last few years. After a while I noticed that the local auto parts store no longer carried mufflers for anything that I was driving. The words "dealer item only" began to mean higher prices. In all fairness it does seem that exhaust systems last a lot longer now than they did years ago. I'm not sure if it's because of the unleaded gas or not but they seem to last at least seven or eight years before the tiny wormholes appear. An exception to that was the two-piece system on the old ice racer, the Audi 4000CS Quattro. In seven years I went through three complete exhausts systems for that rat. It just seemed to eat them alive from the inside out. I even painted the outside with high temperature paint on the last two and it didn’t slow down the failure one bit. It did look better as it was blowing holes through the pipes. I guess that part of the problem was that the system was actually two pieces and their failures were not synchronized. That is, they didn't both fail at the same time so it seemed that every few months I had an exhaust problem of some sort, either the front resonator or the rear muffler. Maybe it's just me, but when a muffler starts to go bad it sounds real ragged, not at all like healthy open exhaust. When we ventilated my Dad's glass pack with a screwdriver to get more volume it sounded great. Like we had added more horsepower. When the rear muffler fell off the Quattro on Rt 128 at rush hour it just sounded like another car on it's way to the boneyard. I could always remember that Midas commercial from years ago where the guy yells out at the passing noise offender " your muffler ... fix it!". The last couple of years I've used a stinger or straight pipe (or pea shooter or dump pipe) on the Speedster between inspections. I use an eighteen-inch long glass pack with two bends in it to lower the noise enough to pass inspection. With three bolts that I can reach under the bumper, R &R takes about ten minutes. With the stinger on it's really loud if you're standing behind it but of course I’m never back there when driving. It's not as loud as Rob's 911 Carrera with his B&B stainless exhaust but then it is an open car and you don't get that steel drum effect that an uninsulated 911 has built into it. The Speedster exhaust pipes go from four into one within two feet of the exhaust valve and that three inch pipe out the back will melt the bumper covers off any car that pulls up too close at a stop light. The noise keeps cars back in traffic because they can't talk on the cell phone even with the windows closed. So all in all it's a defensive system. I'm still waiting to get pulled over because of the noise but so far no lights have flashed. Remember when they used to pull you over for that? If a cop was spotted we used to dump the clutch and just roll by so as not to attract any unwanted attention. Now I figure that I can just tell the officer that that's the way these cars were built fifty years ago. After all they weren't even born yet, what do they know? Do you think they teach that stuff at the Academy? Not a chance. The problem with modern exhaust systems is that they don't have any character. If you can even see the tailpipe it looks like it's coming out of a storage tank of some sort. The mufflers have ribs on them like an oil tank and are so effective that it's hard to tell if the car is even running. That takes all the fun out of it for me. I've heard some say the cars aren't supposed to be fun; they're supposed to get you from A to B. If you believe that you're reading the wrong magazine. KTF |
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