I took out my baffles today. It took two hours total, but it was hard work. Extremely frustrating, confusing at times, grueling hard work at times, painful at times (my bruised hands are testimony to that.)
Because this is a subject lots of folks are interested in, I’m posting step by step instructions with images to help a bit. I hope that the Bonneville America community finds this helpful.
I used a 1 3/8†hole saw to cut into the baffles from the rear of the pipes. This was the easiest step of the process, but required a trip to Lowe’s to get the hole saw. Make sure your hole saw cuts metal. The one I bought at Lowe’s cost $10 and worked like a charm:
The pipes looked like this when I started:
And like this when I was done with this step:
NOW the fun starts. If you read other posts on this message board, it sounds like you can just wiggle the baffles and whack the welds them with a screwdriver and they’d pop out. This was NOT THE CASE for me.
Wiggling them back and forth started the process. The hardest part for me was finding an appropriate tool to crack the welds. The biggest screwdriver I had was not long enough to reach the welds. I looked around my garage and found these huge nails. I mean huge. Here’s a picture of the nails next to the baffles and a ruler. You can see that whatever you use to crack the welds has to be at least 8†long:
I used a combination of wiggling the baffles back and forth with a pliers, banging the nails through the welds and the inner bracket, grabbing the baffles with a vice grips and pulling, banging the nails through again. Ultimately what worked on one of the baffles was putting the sharp side of a chisel inside the baffle and banging on the other end with a hammer. This pushed the baffle into the exhaust pipe and finally broke off the weld. The second one came out due to twisting with a vice grips.
At the end of the process I was exhausted, sweating, and my hands were hurting, but when I turned the key and pressed the ignition button, it was all worth it. WHAT A DIFFERENCE! The new and improved exhaust note exceeded my expectations a hundredfold. I was planning to have an aftermarket exhaust installed to give the bike a more masculine sound, but no reason to do this now. I would describe the new and improved exhaust note as warmer and richer. I also have a digital audio file of the new sound. If someone can tell me how to post it, I’m happy to put it on here.
These are all the tools I used:
Here is how my pipes look now:
Hope this helps! If you need any additional info, let me know.
Joe
