Kenny Price, founder of Samson Motorcycle Products Inc, located in Brea, California, is the inventor and leading innovator of numerous patented and high-performance exhaust systems for Harley-Davidson and Metric Cruiser motorcycles. From his humble beginnings as a teenager in the early ’60s, Kenny’s aspiration was to tweak more power out of his ’56 Vespa. He graduated to a 650 Triumph Bonneville a couple years later. 
Then in 1969 he bought his first Harley, a ’65 Panhead, which he still owns today. After Kenny’s friends saw how well his 1965 Panhead looked and performed with its newly fabricated pipes, they had him make pipes for their bikes. This was done with raw tubing welded together with an acetylene torch and coat hangers for cheap rod, then he stepped up to welding wire. It was not long before Kenny was making pipes for many of his friends and their friend’s motorcycles.
While working at Cheetah Choppers in 1969 he was nicknamed “The Fabricator” which was followed by “The Godfather of Pipes” soon after.
I rode with Kenny in the ’70s. We survived that era and Kenny went on to work as a prototype machinist, making very intricate and precision products. For a while, he ran a company building stretched limousines.
“But you can’t open a manufacturing plant next to a strip joint,” Kenny said. “The employees lose motivation, if the boss plays all the time.”
Kenny started buying and selling cars and hung out with Chris Dello, who worked for Cheetah as a road rep, and made pipes in the ’70s under the Fubar name until Harley-Davidson attempted to put them out of business. One day while running out for lunch, Chris told Kenny to pull off the freeway. A pipe making company faced Chapter 11 and needed to downsize quick. Chris introduced Kenny to the shop and he bought a tremendous amount of equipment and a pipe bender for 10 cents on the dollar.
It was 1990 and suddenly Kenny found himself making pipes with his own machine shop, and trying to repair the old tube bender. “I learned how to bend pipe, and it was easy compared to prototype machining,” Kenny said, “but it allowed me to build pipes for custom bikes. What could be better?”
The new H-D Dyna Glide came out in 1991 and Kenny started to make pipes for the new model. With each new pipe he created a flier and mailed it to all the dealers mentioned in ThunderPress, then he bought a dealer mailing list from Flanders for five cent per dealer. Every time he developed a new pipe, he printed and mailed a new flier. 
Too soon afterwards, he started to over grow his shop. “Every night we packed all our inventory, bikes, and spare materials in the shop before we left,” Kenny said. “Every morning we drug all the stock, the bikes, and material out of the shop so we could go to work.”
Three times the Samson Exhaust Company moved as they over-grew another facility, and took on more customers such as Drag Specialties. Kenny was one of the first exhaust manufacturers to develop true duals, cross-overs and S-pipes.
Today, Samson Motorcycle Products, Inc. continues to design and manufacture innovative exhaust products and Kenny is involved in every aspect of pipes made at Samson. Kenny is a long distance rider and Samson still exists as a family owned business that has an enthusiast mindset and genuine passion and connection in the motorcycle industry. Kenny’s son, a recent middle east veteran, is now one of the bosses and his daughter, Rachael, has worked for the business for over a decade.
“From the very beginning we set out to build the very best motorcycle exhaust systems. We designed every aspect of our company to do just that,” said Kenny. “Our belief is simple. Our customers want a company that puts quality before quantity. And here we are still doing what we do best.”
Their latest pipe, the Powerflow III, is the third generation of his high performance 2-into-1 systems available for all big twin models. “Our first generation was a hot rod performance system,” Kenny said, “but it was loud. Do you want power or quiet.” This new system blends sound and performance.
