The greats all had sweet pipes. Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Buddy Holly, to name but a few, could belt a tune like nobody's business. Crooners who made the opposite sex swoon, they commanded the stage with talent, charisma, and those melodious pipes. We idolized them and wanted to be them, if only for a moment.
Think of all the cars you've owned, hobby and otherwise. The ones you liked the most probably sounded even better than they went. Tubular headers, large-diameter stainless pipes, mufflers that had little restriction but deep, throaty resonance, and polished tips out the back or in front of the rear wheels-the car had to sound right to be cool. The opposite sex couldn't notice you if your ride made sewing machine noises, or at least that's not the first impression you wanted to make.
As the sign says, Warner's Muffler has been around since 1974.
The Steve's Auto Restorations Real Steel '34 Ford roadster pickup that Dad and I are building has an engine that produces 555 hp and 557 lb-ft of torque. Naturally, we want this SBF 427 stroker to sing as well as she's built. So when it came time to get her some custom pipes, we contacted JBA Performance Exhaust Company in San Diego, California, and Magnaflow Performance Exhaust in Rancho Santa Margarita, California. We first discussed our engine's power output and the configuration of the roadster pickup's all-independent chassis with Mark Mathews at JBA. He recommended we go with JBA's Shorty headers for the small-block Ford and mentioned Warner's Muffler in our hometown of Oceanside for the custom installation. Mark also said we should phone Magnaflow for the mufflers.
JBA supplied its Shorty headers for the Ford small-block V-8 and included all the fasteners and collector gaskets.
From talking to Warner's Muffler owner Jim Warner, we learned that it'd be best to go with 2.5-inch-diameter stainless steel pipes and 18-inch-long stainless Magnaflow mufflers. Jim went on to say that the exhaust system would work most efficiently and last forever if we had the pipes and mufflers ceramic coated. JBA's Shorty headers were shipped to us with the bright ceramic-coated covering. Warner's Muffler recommended we contact Olympic Coatings in Escondido, California, to coat the pipes and mufflers in ceramic.
When we first arrived on the scene at Warner's Muffler, we noticed the roadster pickup we'd towed there the day before was already on a rack. Every other lift was occupied, with Warner's technicians working most expeditiously under each car.
After our half-day of witnessing Warner's at work on the '34 Ford roadster pickup and other customers' daily drivers, Dad was so impressed he compared the crew's efficiency to the way Hemingway used to write so sparingly and specifically-not using too many words to describe something, but just the best ones to get the point across the most effectively and artfully. There's no wasted motion at Warner's Muffler, but there's plenty of prowess in fabbing sweet pipes.
