My bike came with a beat-up little slip-on muffler which had never been adequate for the size of its engine and had in any case long moved past its prime. I looked into replacing it, and the custom 4-1 header, with stock parts from eBay, but costs were daunting. I finally bought a muffler up at Bent Bike, stock part from a wrecked ’94 FZR 600; same size engine and reasonably similar geometry, so I figured it ought to work.

This weekend I finally made time to drop the bike off at Felony Flyers; three hours later, Steg had fabricated a pipe adapter, welded it on, bent and cut some flat stock into a bracket, and bolted everything on. Steg is great like that.

Now that it’s done I wish I’d made this project more of a priority. It had never occurred to me that the distinctly frustrating dead spot in the bike’s power curve right around 6000 rpm was not some flaw in the carburetor tuning or some consequence of the engine’s age, but simply caused by the bad muffler! Why did I put up with this for so long? Same bike, same engine, now with smooth, quiet, powerful acceleration all the way up the range. No more need for all this jackrabbitting up to high RPMs just so I can downshift without bogging down…

What’s more, I hadn’t realized just how awesomely noisy my bike was. I am embarrassed, now, to have subjected friends and neighbors to that racket for so long – I simply hadn’t realized there was anything out of the ordinary.