|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Activities
Nor'easter News
Car Care
Membership
Other Cool Stuff
Sponsors & Advertisers
|
Porsche
Club of America
Four
Speeds & Drum Brakes
|
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
When it comes to cars owners spend a lot of time making them their own. I’m not talking about making the payments on time, I mean making the ride different than everyone else’s. For some people that shows up as a row of baseball caps in the back window or some sort of stuffed toy collection on the dashboard. Years ago we used to hang things off the inside rear view mirror. Remember when all your buddies had their high school graduation tassel hanging there? Of course, when that summer was over and we were off to jobs or college the first thing that went into the glove box was that tassel. We didn’t want anyone to think that we had just gotten out of high school. How childish! The real supplier of choice (and cost) was J.C. Whitney. Somewhere out in the Midwest was a huge warehouse just full of all sorts of things that could be put on a car to make it look different. Besides the practical things like floor mats and outside mirrors were parts like chrome plated oil caps, fake white sidewalls, blue buttons for taillights, and spotlights for scaring your friends. It wasn’t really necessary to buy the stuff. Like a Sears catalogue, it was enough to just page through the ‘wish book’ and imagine how cool you would be with those Olds flipper hubcaps on your Chevy. They even had skirts for VW Beetles. It wasn’t until years later that they came out with a catalogue devoted to just imported cars so that Porsche owners could have a book of their own. Even then we had to wade through a lot of Austin Healey key fobs to find the extractor exhaust systems for our 356’s/ Growing up in central Florida, none of us had enough money for gas (at 32 cents per gallon) let alone to buy things by mail order. Besides there was a suspicion in the south that those companies up north would just take the money and never ship the parts. The answer was to just do it yourself as best you could. If you couldn’t get what you needed from Western Auto in the center of town then you just made it yourself. I didn’t have my used ’58 VW two days before I drove it down to the local youth center to meet the other guy in town with a VW who was going to show me how to customize the stock muffler. In less than two minutes he had loosened the clamps that held the chrome tailpipes in place and handed them to me. I thought that was pretty impressive since I had never taken anything other than a flat tire off a car. He showed me how to bend the tabs back so that the inside tube and al the fiberglass packing material would come out and fall on the ground. A twist of the pliers and tightening of the clamps and I had a custom exhaust system. My new car suddenly had a sound of authority about it and we were both convinced that we had added at least 5 horsepower. Remember this was a 36 hp VW. I’ve been doing those little things on cars I’ve owned ever since. After the VW came a 356 Porsche that got an Abarth exhaust with four chrome pipes on it, a Volvo 544 that had its rear muffler replaced with a straight pipe so that on deceleration it sounded like a ’49 Ford with a set of lake pipes. Most cars that I’ve had over the years have given up at least one muffler or at least part of a muffler. Something about that sound of authority that makes it different than everyone else’s. Even a new ’88 Minivan gave up part of its tailpipe in that search for individualism. By far, my best work was done just recently on the Audi. The Audi S4 is a V6 with twin turbos that quiet the exhaust note to the point that you have to look at the tack to see if it’s running. By the time the noise goes through the turbochargers, through the catalytic converters, through the two mufflers and enough pipes to plumb your bathroom, there’s barely a sound to be heard. I guess that’s the way the Feds want it but it leaves me wanting to page through that old J.C.Whitney catalogue. Of course I could just order an aftermarket stainless steel exhaust system from one of the tuner shops but that would take all the fun out of the job. Besides it would cast about the same as a used car. The most obvious solution is to eliminate on of the two mufflers. These aren’t just metal tubes with holes in the ends anymore. These are containers the size of trash cans and weigh more than when it’s time to go to the dump. I really didn’t want to ruin a perfectly good exhaust (worth about $1100) so when I went to EBay and bought a used one that some gearhead had replaced with an even more expensive stainless system. These cars haven’t been around long enough to wear out a muffler so there was not a market for his two-month old system. The freight cost was more than I paid for the part. At least I wouldn’t feel bad if it didn’t work. A local shop cut out the center muffler and welded in a length of 3” pipe and it dropped into place like it had never been off the car. The sound was perfect, sorta like one of those VW R32’s that came out a couple of years ago with the internal door in the muffler. When the exhaust flow got high enough (as in high rpm) the pressure would open up a door built inside the muffler that would just about double the noise that it put out. Nice and quiet around town or with the spouse riding shotgun, but almost a V* sound when you jump on the loud pedal. A friend that knew I was looking for a way to bring Pearl to life called about a month late with a suggestion. Turns out that Audi offers a sport exhaust system from the factory that, with his connections, could be shipped in from the fatherland. I asked and received a photo of the $1300 system to discover that it looked exactly like the original exhaust system without the center muffler. And the factory said it saved about 40 lbs too. Imagine that! I knew that I had done the right thing. The new sound was great but two things bothered me. One, there was a nearly new exhaust system for Pearly standing up in the corner of the garage, and that two, tailpipes came out of just the left side of the car. Sort of like the look of a BMW 328, but with the heart of an M3. Pearl needed dual exhaust with four pipes out the rear just like the big boys. Maybe it’s my engineering background, but I really like things to be symmetrical, especially when it comes to cars. That doesn’t work so well when my wife asks my opinion of her new single sided curtains but she should know better than to ask me about things that aren’t automotive. With a quick trip to Rick’s Custom, my hot rod buddy, it was clear that Pearl was not built to handle dual exhaust. There were tire wells and gas tanks in the space need for a second exhaust pipe. I didn’t want to give up the spare or reduce the size of the tank so we decided to just cut the end off the spare muffler and weld it to the chassis. After cutting a hole in the rear valance panel and realigning the two pipes it looked perfect. The only Audi S4 (B5 model) on the planet that has dual exhaust coming out the back. I must say that now it sounds great and looks terrific. I was even more excited about the modification when I was told last week that Porsche has incorporated the same sort of maneuver on the new Cayman. At the rear of the car a single exhaust pipe on each side is attached to a Y fitting that then comes out of the back of the car on each side through four chrome tips. So the factory really did what I did, that is they put four pipes on the rear of a car that was actually designed for two. But we all know that it looks better with four. Now that I think of it, there was a Y exhaust tip in the J.C. Whitney that you could bolt onto the end of a Pontiac Tempest exhaust system that make it look like a GTO. Maybe they still have one of those old wish books in Stuttgart. KTF. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright
1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,
2006 PCA/NER
Year 2000 Web Site Design by www.sitesofboston.com |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
