The XS400 RatRacer (part 4) - exhaust building

What goes in must come out somewhere... and as we already dealt with the what-goes-in-part (i.e. the carbs) it's now time to face the other end.

There were two main contributing factors for building a high-up exhaust for the XS400. The first one was ground clearance and the second one was that I seemed to have just the right amount of bends left over in stock from previous builds for a high-up system and would have ended up being forced to buy some new tubing, if I wanted to do anything else.

 So a quick bit of welding resulted in these two beauties

So far so good. Normally I used some spun rings to center exhaust pipes in the ports. This has the benefit of providing a very proper seal and it centers the pipes nicely in the port, which isn't exactly detrimental to performance. Now I've seen some other (i.e. dodgier) ways of doing by other people and to be fair I wanted to give it a shot and as all of this was just a matter of using up leftovers...

That's a bit of tubing split in half, clamped onto the exhaust tube and then welded to it. Well, it does work - kind of - but it's not the level of sophistication I want in my work, so this is a one off, I tried it and won't ever do it again.

Just for comparision, that's how I normally do it - looks a lot more proper, I think.

Now with this out of the way, that's what the pipes fitted to the head look like.

An extra bend and we're pretty much sailing...

And truth be told the rest was rather minimal (the final exhaust holders are still missing in the pictures, the angle iron was only meant for holding on the silencers to position the tube for welding...)

(Sorry for the blurry pix, they were taken at a time, when my old camera was about to finally give in...)