Ms. Braaaaaap - gets a new exhaust

To (incorrectly) quote Mark Twain: Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. Or in the case of Ms. Braaaaaap, I did toy with the idea of selling her, but as there were no (serious) takers, I guess she'll stay around a bit longer.

She suffered from a few (smaller) issues like the tail-light not working correctly, which by now all have been remedied (more or less, but more on that in another post). Except for a very, very, very noisy exhaust. And those who know me, are aware that I am not exactly very girlish in such matters.

So here we have the (old) offender, which was the very first exhaust I made, back then with a stainless steel electrode.

As I normally don't have the sidecover off the next two photos show my homegrown airbox-lid and a modified MZ TS250 inlet rubber (no pre-silencer on this one anymore) to make getting the carb in and out much easier!

As it was MOT-time, I though, well I still have that old beaten up Sebring, which I could "just" slap on and that's it. So I took the old exhaust and wanted to fit the Sebring, but nope... won't go over the seal on the stainless downpipe.

While I was at it, it seemed rude not to extract the broke bolt that was stuck in there.

So as that clearly didn't work, I decided to say f*ck it, I'll build a new exhaust straight away. These universal 1.75" silencers are a sort of personal favourite and I had an old waterjet cut mounting plate left over.

Test fitting a 90 degree bend behind the rear shock, following the idea, that some sharper bends would slow down the exhaust gas and thereby reduce the exhaust-crackle notably. 

The bracket was only partially useful and needed some tweaking with the bandsaw. 

After a bit of drilling I welded the cut-off-part onto the silencer...

... and there you go. Might be a bit long for the taste of some, but it's quiet (enough) and doesn't hamper performance, which means I can use the bike regularly again. 

That's what the exhaust looks like, when taken off the bike.

And after a nicely spirited ride to the MOT man, who failed me again, as he thinks no exhausts without "E"-markings are allowed anymore. (Which is wrong, but no amount of arguing with him could convince him. So I guess, I'll do a few more modifications, including re-installing the diskbrake-frontend and then get all those mods added to the paperwork, so I can enjoy the XT without remorse.)

Before you ask, there's nothing substantially wrong with the drum-brake frontend, it actually stops quite well, for a drumbrake (running some rather soft Ferodo shoes) and even when compared with the stock XT600 diskbrake, but I didn't forget the amount of maintenance work involved to keep it that way, if you actually use the XT regularly.