Ok, so I’d worked out that an engine swap was needed, and that a full respray was also on the cards even if I had no idea who would do it, and a bunch of other stuff that really was needed as well, so there only seemed like one logical plan of action – buy some bling.
I can remember back in the nineties there were a few ‘must have’ upgrades to these bikes, which can be summed up as follows:
- Aftermarket exhaust
- Dynojet kit
- Progressive fork springs to replace the pogo-stick originals and greatly improve the front-end feel and handling
- Upgraded air filter, typically a K&N
- If one’s pockets were truly too deep, a new rear shock to replace the truly awful stock one
It seemed like a good time to take definitive steps to the most outwardly obvious of these – put on an aftermarket exhaust.
Back in the day, exhausts for these bikes were not hard to come by. It was a different world. Yoshimura was the brand to have on a Japanese sportsbike. End-cans where long, round and either in stainless steel or carbon fibre, and looked more like a proper exhaust than some weird, stumpy thing carved into a triangular prism as they seem to be today.
What are the benefits of getting an aftermarket pipe? Better sound, better looks, a big weight reduction and a marginal improvement in power output if matched with decent carburetor rejetting (hence the Dynojet kit). The original pipe on the FZR is a perfect candidate to be turned into a boat anchor – it’s ugly, heavy, restrictive and truly the first thing that needs to go on one of these. I was surprised that none of the previous owners hadn’t already done it.
Finding one turned out to be quite a challenge however.
Searching the broader interwebs tended to draw blanks. What was once a common bike was now quite rare, and quite old, and it seemed that nobody was really making pipes for them any more. The Facebook community tried to be helpful, with lots of ‘mine has a Such-And-Such on it’, rather than ‘I bought one last week from Such-And-Such’. Turns out a lot of people had pipes on their FZRs from makers who simply weren’t in business any more, or if they were had moved well away from making pipes for bikes this old.
I finally turned to the scoundrel’s last refuge – eBay.
I shouldn’t hack on eBay too much – I have managed to source all sorts of wonderful FZR bits from there from all around the world that I’d have had no chance of finding here, or through general web searching. The exhaust turned out to be one of these cases. Behind the links in eBay, the company – Dominator – was based in the Netherlands (although the product was shipped from somewhere in Eastern Europe according to the parcel tracking). The price plus shipping converted to well under AUD300 for a straightforward, round end-can with all the necessary clamps and connectors to hook straight up. The only other place I’d seen selling them was in Italy, and even an end-can was more like twice that price.
This, like so many other points in the project, was a point of measured risk taking. It seemed like an exhaust wasn’t something that could be stuffed up too badly, and at least the Dominator didn’t look like it was a hundred dollar Chinese generic eBay special.
The punt seemed worth it, so I ordered one, and within a week it was on my doorstep. Damaged, but on my doorstep. The instant gratification I was craving was in tatters, and the pipe had been clearly been given a pretty solid hit before it made it to me (although the source of the dent was a contentious matter with Dominator, who weren’t open to the most likely possibility from the evidence I had before me, that the pipe had been damaged before it had even been packed). That said, after a few emails and images back and forth, Dominator did come to the party and send me a replacement, so kudos to them for doing the right thing, even if a little begrudgingly (which is fair enough – no doubt they have their fair share of scammers trying to hit them up for free stuff).
Another week or so passed, and the new, unblemished can arrived, and in fifteen minutes it was hooked up.
Ah, there was the sense of instant gratification I was after…
The pipe was either nicely warbly with the DB killer inserted, or obnoxiously loud without it. I chose, of course, to ride around with the latter for a while, until it started giving even me the irrits.
The performance didn’t seem to suffer much either, in spite of not making any changes to the carburetors. Adding an aftermarket can like this without changing the fuel setup can lead to big ‘flat spots’ in the RPM midrange, but this at least didn’t seem any worse than it was before. Mind you, the baseline was pretty low thanks to the clapped out engine…
So, with a loud, shiny pipe, I spent just a little more time hooning around while I planned the next steps, which included another ‘Eureka’ moment, and a big deep breath…
Next up: Eureka! A panelbeater cometh!