Thought I'd post up a few updated pictures of my bike along with a couple new mods. Nothing real major, but thought you guys might like to check it out. Anyhow, the Michelin AC10's that I've always had on the bike since new finally wore out (got over 2600 miles of mostly street riding on those knobbies!) and decided I'd through my stock Deathwings on. Now I know they get a bad rep for off road riding and I agree 100%, but I mainly just purely ride on the street now and these work just fine for that. My original plan was to install an E model ss head pipe to my stock muffler to keep noise and so forth down, but finally decided and thought, why not just go all the way and get a full ss system and save a little weight and get a nice sounding system. I have really liked the look of the Yoshi RS3and since Yoshi no longer makes the full system, I bought the slip on and planned to install a larger ss head pipe to it. I ended up going with a Pro Circuit head pipe. I could have gone with an FMF hi-flow, but literally everywhere I tried to buy one, they were out of since they are discontinued. The Powerbomb really wasn't an option for me since my bigger engine guards would cause fitment issues where the "bomb" portion of the header wraps around them and I didn't feel like taking a dremel and grinding them down. The way I had planned to join the larger head pipe to the RS3, was to trim down the slip joint gasket just until it would fit around the larger header. When I did this and fired up the bike for the first time, you could here and feel a pretty bad leak coming from the join. I think when I installed it, the gasket was just too weak and brittle from being trimmed down, and just crumbled and broke apart when I installed it. In the end, I ended up doing what this fellow did (http://www.thumpertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=435944&highlight=fmf+rs3+drz) and run a sleeve in there. I found the PC head pipe to be too large to fit slide in there, so I took it to a muffler shop and they opened it up just enough for it slide in. Works great, no leaks. As I knew before I bought the PC head pipe, you had to take the stud out of the head because the flange is thicker than other aftermarket and stock DRZ head pipes. Anyhow, two nuts jammed together got it out without any issues other than cleaning the threads after, but found it to be a bit strange as to why PC made it this way, otherwise nice pipe. In the end, there is a noticeable improvement over stock. About the same in the low end, but mid range on up is where I noticed it the most. It's certainly no MRD or Yoshi ti system, but like I said, I've always liked the looks of the RS3, wanted a SS system, improvement over stock and works just fine for me. Since the PC head pipe did not come with a mount like the Yoshi did to mount up the stock heat shield, I bought a mount (very similar to the stock oem one, only ss) and had a muffler shop line it up and weld it on as I wanted to still retain using the stock heat shield. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" /><o></o> Installed a TT mcct last year. <o></o> On a side note, I ended up pulling the Dual Star mirrors I had on it off. They’re great mirrors and look awesome on the bike, but I just didn’t feel safe riding with them in traffic as they I just couldn’t see in my blind spots as much as I’d like to while changing lanes, so I put my stock mirrors back on. All in all, as always, real happy with the bike and thought you guys might like to check out a couple of the mods I recently did. <o></o> <o></o>
Nice. I'm looking to get an S or SM this March. I've had one E, and one SM. I've missed the SM very much so I going to go full circle.
Thanks guys. Yeah, I actually wrote it up in Microsoft Word and copied and pasted it and didn't realize it made so hard to read.
