Back when I was a kid, there was this old genius guy that could do just about anything.
One of his many talents was that he built custom big truck mufflers.
I have never since heard the same deep quiet throaty rumble that he was able to achieve.
Around this neck of the woods, you just were not in style if you did not have one of his custom mufflers on your log-truck or dump-truck or milk-truck or cattle-truck or whatever.
The engines equipped with his shop-made mufflers were not loud at all, but they had this deep powerful-sounding quality about them.
Even an old 292 inline-six sounded like an ALCO.
Maybe you should find one if any remain and reverse engineer it.
Alas, scrap-iron is too high and people around here too poor for there to be much chance in finding one.
I think the worst thing to happen to older and restorable classic vehicles is for scrap-iron to be so high.
Load after load passes each day with many restorable classic trucks and cars loaded on trailers, with the interiors stacked plumb full of every imaginable piece of short-iron, old swing-sets, dilipidated hay-feeders, Maytag wringer-washers, bicycles, etc.
People can't even afford to put gas in the car that takes them to work, so they for sure can't afford to hang on to an old 1964 Bonneville that's missing an engine, so it goes to the crushers for some over $200-a-ton.
