Loud Lederhosen Saves Lives

There is an old hot rod saying, 'Loud Pipes Saves Lives'.   About 9 years ago while my first cross country trip to the 912 Rendezvous, I met John Benton of Benton Performance.

John is always ahead of the curve, pushing the limits and is all about maxing maximum horsepower for 912s.  His 912 at the time was a single plug hot rod, with a loud mean exhaust note.  A few years later i found that this was caused by a custom exhaust system he made, using half of a Flow master exhaust for a v8 application. 

Jeff Trask, another prominent 912er had John make him another exhaust.  After a few rides with Jeff at one of the other Rendezvous, I knew i had to have one.   When Jeff sold his exhaust, I jumped at the chance to get it.

This was shortly after my engine was rebuilt by the late great 356 and 912 engine expert Duane Spencer of Shasta Design Engineering.  Duane had John make a custom cam grind (now known as the Benton cam), for more torque, high end power while still being very streetable.  This coupled with a light weight pully, aluminum oil cooler, full flow oil filter, Beaker manufactured solexes  and a few other goodies made for a pretty darn good prime mover.

Anyways, I had purchased the exhaust, knowing it would work as Jeff and I had almost identical engine set ups.  I put it on and it sounded like magic.  Deep.  Throaty.  Mean.  With this exhaust I felt i could stand tall, puff my chest out and say: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for I am the baddest mother fucker in the God damn valley.

 

When I drove it though I noticed some issues.. like now low end power at all.  It stumbled and starved and lugged.  I could not get the damned thing up to speed.   I called John and he said the pipe was too fat for my carburation set up, and that my best bet was to have it rejetted and dinotuned so that i didnt burn a valve.  Needless to say I removed it and put the Bursch back on.  That was probably 4 or 5 years ago.   I have not found anyone locally that i can trust to dinotune my car (hell i cant find anyone locally i can even trust to tune my car the old fashioned way).

One of these days I need to get that muffler back on there.  I miss that sound..