Like I said, JHM exhaust with full downpipes and test pipes ran me $4400, but this was also the first exhaust of this configuration, so it may have eventually been less costly.
Without the test pipes, with one piece downpipes, it was listed as $3500, I got the whole setup initially before I dropped more to get the test pipes for $4000 including the tune, cut me a bit of a deal there and saved me about $200.
There are several reasons I buy an exhaust, in order of importance:
1: Power
2: Configuration (can I swap cats for test pipes?)
3: Sound
4: Fit
5: Finish (looks good at the tips)
6: Noise (different from sound in that its how loud it is, not the quality of the sound)
As you can see for me, fit is less of a concern, but thats within reason. I don;t expect shit to be hanging down to scrape everywhere i go, and I don;t expect twisted mufflers, etc. But given stock, i expect fit to be as good as that. JHM is as good as stock in terms of fit. I scraped my flexes on the stock setup. I don’t scrape flexes on the JHM setup, but I do scrape the V band on the JHM when going over a really large speed bump or into a nasty driveway. But I woudl have scraped stock there too.
Ben’s is a bit more tucked away than the JHM, so it will be an improvement, but its not that critical to me. Power is tops.
On my JHM setup, the places where I think Ben is referencing me touching in 3 places are as follows:
#1: Passenger side V band scraped the ground a couple times on nasty driveway in Hood River at the condo.
#2: Right and left muffler slightly rub up inside on the bottom of the heat shield either during startup or other modes that give low frequency vibration and large amounts of displacement. Very very minor. Nothing to do with scraping the ground.
#3: Near the large bend where the cross brace spacers out the two exhaust pipes, there is a small rub on the upper outside where it has slightly touched the heat shield at one time, but it it not touching now. It was again a very slight contact, just a bit of a rub. Again nothing to do with scraping the ground.