One more for the cheap seats....Scram-ster!

Yeah , the cartridge kit has been great but it HURT to hand over that kind of dough.. Champagne tastes and a beer budget.

I do have a write up over on "the other" forum. I have also heard great things about YSS and they seemed to be priced well.



By the way, I REALLY would love to have an old XR/L 600 or 500 !! You are lucky to have owned one. It was my dream bike as a kid!! I did get to ride an inmates 500 and it was hard to give it back.

Well now, it seems that my thread has , ummm... Changed topics.

Hmmmmm....Something needs to go in this hole...





Maybe I will just put this here....



Chop, chop mother F*&#%!R!!!

So basically what needed to be done was to take this...




and build an exhaust similar to this...




The front part of the header was fairly straight forward. Let me add that this is the first full exhaust that I have ever built. I knew what I wanted to build but wasn't sure how to do it.



Getting the rear head pipe to line up and fit the front pipe took some work. I started by figuring out which radius would blend smoothly with the front so that the angles would match and then had to cut the pipe and "fish mouth" it so that it would flow decently.





I had to cut it, grind it a bit and then beat on it with a hammer to shape it properly.




I then had to cut a hole in the straight section of the front head pipe and it had to match my now elongated radius bend....But how?



Tiny cutting wheel to the rescue.




Test fit...



All cleaned up and tacked in place.

The hard part was yet to come...I had to clear the oil tank and the rear shock all the while having enough room for the tire . All that while trying to maintain the proper lines so that the exhaust would have the look that I wanted.

This would require some extensive shaping...And bleeding..



This tail section of the exhaust would wind up taking twice as long as the front.




Finally got the exact shape that I wanted so I tacked everything together.




A test fit with the muffler in place..






Everything seemed to be playing nicely together so it was off to my buddy Eric's shop for finish welding. I decided to have him do this part because 1) He has better equipment and 2) He can actually lay down a weld that won't have my exhaust pissing hot air on my shin.

He sent me this pick while the metal was still red hot...Thank you Eric!!!

Thank you very much. I have pictures of the exhaust completed that I will post up tonight.

glad you like it Rod. I'm really digging this dueling Sportster build thread thing that is going on. I'm finding a lot of extra motivation and inspiration by watching your thread. the exhaust is mild steel. I may wind up redoing it in stainless at some point but for now it's serving its purpose. I needed something that I could practice welding on.

Randy, I say go for it!! I'm no expert fabricator , just some dude with an idea and a bit of patience. Hell, if it weren't for you I would still be riding on the stock brake on my other bike.

One last thing that my exhaust needed was a heat shield. My first idea was to cut one of my MSR bottles down in order to use the aluminum because it was already curved but I just couldn't bring myself to cut a perfectly good bottle...Plus I'm a glutton for punishment and really wanted to try and build the shield from scratch.

I started with a piece of aluminum flat stock. The issue was that I needed it to have a radius that would wrap around the exhaust. Since I don't have "proper" equipment I decided to do a type of scoring but without the cuts. Not sure what else to call it but that is what we call it when cutting thin lined down the length of a piece of plywood in order to shape it when build a half pipe...For this I would simply trace lines down the length of the flat stock, put it in a vice and then hammer along the lines...Inch by feckin' inch!! :huh



It took me quite a while to get the shape that I wanted..





After the bending I had to sand off the imperfections.




Once done I needed some stand offs to weld to the header that would allow me to mount the shield without transferring too much heat. I used a piece of tubing and cut a hole in it. Then I cut that in half...











I then cut those down then welded some nuts inside and made them into bungs.




After sanding.




Welded onto the exhaust and a quick test fit of the shield..




I also painted the exhaust in high temp Rustoleum and then wrapped the whole thing in Titanium exhaust wrap.




All of those years wrapping bike handlebars is really paying off!!




And here it is all wrapped, painted and mounted...






You will notice that the wrap ends right at the shock...This is what a wrap job looks like when you have 25ft and apparently you need 27!!