Well, I decided to swap all my stuff over to my 99 Nishiki Bravo mountain bike. it's got an all-steel frame, better brakes, and is just more sturdy than my old Schwinn Moab. It is a little bit bigger though. Same length, but a couple inches higher. I kind of prefer the shortness of the Moab, but I think this will be just fine. Rode to work this morning, and it's nice and stable and all that jazz.
Here's the overall bike. You can see that I extended the muffler all the way back. I was going to extend the muffler on the other bike anyway, plus the stocker wouldn't fit this bike.
Unfortunately I really lack the tools to get that job done properly. I used some 3/4" conduit I found in my backyard. I didn't have a bender, so I had to use my foot and muscle strength, and then for the smaller bends a hammer and the sidewalk. So unfortunately that means it's all beat to heck.
Connecting it to the stock pieces was a nightmare. originally I was going to use some silicone hose pieces to connect them. Well, none of the parts places had any, so I just grabbed a freebie piece of normal heater hose and hoped for the best. Then I realized I didn't have enough hose clamps. So I started slotting the conduit and trying to cram the stock pieces inside it. Worked on the muffler side, but not the motor side. After breaking a few hose clamps and going and getting more, I have the heater hose connecting off the motor, and the muffler is clamped in fairly well just by slotting the conduit and cramming the muffler in there and clamping it down. I was looking for heavy duty clamps, but couldn't find any big enough.
The heater hose works ok. It only starts smoking and stinking when I stop for a bit
I'm going to run to Napa today and see if they have some silicone hose. Checker/Advance/Autozone all had no idea what I was talking about haha. The guy at checker was trying to tell me that their heater hose was made by Goodyear and could withstand higher temps than silicone. Riiiiight. Luckily he gave me a scrap 1' piece for free.
Oh, more funny exhaust things...so the first time I rode it I had a crappy mount made, and the hose clamp was only connected to the motor side of the exhaust. it seemed like it was snug enough to stay together. Well, about 1/4 mi from home the whole exhaust fell off, lol. So I had to remove a sock from my foot, and pedal home holding the exhaust. Talk about failure haha.
Also, I had a heck of a time cutting the conduit. Was using my jigsaw with a metal blade, but the blade is really dull. The dremel with a cutoff wheel made quick work of it, but then my last cutoff wheel broke. The dull hacksaw just wasn't cutting it. What a pain
So here is a photo of my mount to keep the muffler steady. My CDI wouldn't fit on my bottom tube with the stock clamping system, so I had to use zipties instead. So I took the metal clamp thing from my good and bad CDI's and made this little mount, and hold it to the muffler with a hose clamp. Seems to work well.
You can see the "convincing" I had to do on the exhaust pipe.
Overall it probably took me a good 6-7 hours or so to get everything put together. I didn't have to put the sprocket on the wheel, since I just used the wheels off of the old bike. I was going to use the original wheels on this bike because it has a solid axle, not a quick release, but When I pulled the wheel off I saw that the axle was bent. Not only that but the bearings looked terrible. I'll have to rebuild those wheels one of these days.
Made new gaskets from the gasket material stuff (the cardboard-ish stuff)...blew the exhaust gasket on my way to work today. The bike is pretty obnoxiously loud with a blown gasket, lol.
Ok, sorry for the book, I think I'll stop now.
