Kermit’s Janspeed Back Box

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T was my intention to treat Kermit to a stainless steel exhaust system and now that he’s wearing his PowerFlow system, the Janspeed has been removed. But you know, an interim back box was never really something that we had considered for the lad until one turned up at an extremely attractive price.

I had originally been expecting the exhaust to go at around and about the 30,000 mile point, primarily because we do quite a bit of time in the city with a cold engine, and this is hard on exhausts.

Physically, the Janspeed back box has a marginally larger rear pipe compared with the standard chrome tail pipe trim that the LuxuryKa comes with. It didn’t look all that much different on the Ka after the chance.

It did sound different, though!

We did have some problems when fitting the back box, primarily because we didn’t have the correct adapter, but after a little bit of welding it was looking great, but as you can see from these two shots, the difference was worth it.

Noise wise, well the Janspeed is just what I was looking for. It’s not excessively noisy – it is louder, and it has that lovely burble that most standard exhausts are designed to eliminate, however it’s only present when working the engine reasonably hard. At a cruise of under 60 mph, you’re very hard pushed to hear it. Indeed, you only really hear it with the windows down in built up areas.

One thing that we have noticed is that the hotter the back box gets, the louder the exhaust! Thus first thing in the morning when everything is cold, the exhaust sounded just like any other exhaust. It’s quiet. However, work the Ka hard at slow speeds and the exhaust soon hots up and the noise increases.