| Author | Message | ||
     Oopezoo |
I picked this '98 S1 up a few weeks ago and have begun to get things sorted out on it. It has a Forcewinder intake and a 2" inlet Borla CF exhaust on it. So far I have rebuilt both braking systems, rejetted the carb, added turn signals (they were removed), and sorted out a few other odds and ends. It runs great.....its a little loud for me, but a hell of a lot of fun. On to my latest issue. I took it out for a nice long shakedown run before the weather went to shit, and basically the muffler fell off. The front muffler tab broke right were it is welded to the tube. To make matters worse, the PO had some shoddy hardware store bracket on the rear of the muffler that broke also. Luckily, the header pipes were wrapped, so the wrap actually prevented the muffler from falling completely off. I wired it back in place with some random roadside wire I found and limped home. So this morning I decided to rip the whole system off and see what I was dealing with. I pulled the muffler, removed the header, and then unwrapped it. Here is what I found By looking at the parts catalog, there is supposed to be a mounting tab here for a tie bar.  It looks like it had been ripped off at some point and the PO decided to put a small piece of metal over it (sitting on the floor), hose clamp it down, and then use the header wrap to cover the mess. The rest of the header looks to be in good shape besides the discoloring. On to the muffler. Front tab broken  Rear tab in tact.....luckily the hardware store strap was much weaker than the muffler tab  The rear muffler tab had that cheapy strap connected to a pretty nice beefy bracket. I don't know if its home made, or something that was bought. I've never seen one like it, but it looks too nice to be the PO's hand work. Its in good shape and sturdy enough that I would trust reusing it if needed. Some pics   OK, so on to what to do. The bike still has the old style L shaped front muffler mount, so I know I need to replace that with the Y shaped dogbone style before anything else. As far as what I have sitting here......do you think any of it is worth salvaging, or should I just cut my losses and start shopping for a complete new system? I'm not a skilled enough welder to tackle anything like this, but I do have guys at work that can. Is it worth the trouble to attempt to fabricate a fix on that header and/or muffler? If its all a lost cause.......is there any reason not to replace the current 2" header/muffler with a 2.5" setup if thats what I end up finding? I know I need an over the tube header, but I was curious if there were any other differences between the 2" and 2.5" systems on the early tubers? I've done a LOT of reading since this happened, so I know what to do to make sure it doesn't happen again. I guess I'm just checking if I would be wasting my time/money on trying to band-aid what I have. I don't need it to be perfect, I just don't want to start dealing with bigger issues down the road if I can't get it right (broken header bolts and such). Any direction would be greatly appreciated. |
