Sooo you’ve been searching the internet for dealerships that have new bike sales and you stumble across a husband and wife selling ‘both’ their bikes for two thirds of what you’d pay for a new one. One’s a 2009 Yamaha Road Warrior; the other is a 2009 Yamaha Raider. Both have less than 8500 miles on them. They’re the original owners and the bikes have two years left on their extended factory warranties…soooo you trailer them home.
Soooo now you’re faced with the question many metric riders face: Do you try’n ‘Harleyize’ your metric OR do you own ‘ALL’ of what you’ve bought. I VOTE you own what you bought for the simple reason; if you wanted a Harley you should’ve bought a Harley.
Harley makes the best Harley in the world. No amount of messin’ with different exhaust systems is gonna give your ‘metric’ that ‘classic’ potato, potato sound. At best you’ll get a sound that’s something between what Uncle Henry sounds like after he eats Auntie Em’s bean salad and what Auntie Em sounds like after she eats her bean salad. And if you take the baffles out you’ll get a sound that sounds like Auntie Em and Uncle Henry together in the shower after they’ve eaten tooooo much of Auntie Em’s bean salad…
The fact the husband and wife were backroad junkies and rode most of the time with a group of sport touring riders (they’d both bought BMWs after the sold their bikes) meant they EMBRACED the fact their Yamahas were designed, engineered and built differently from Harleys. They even went out of their way to complement those differences.
They did not attempt to lower their bikes but kept the ‘stock’ heights and adjusted for stiffer settings. The Road Warrior was even given a narrower taller 190 55 17 rear for easier cornering and a bit better lean angle. The Raider was given the tallest 210 40 18 rear tire manufactured for the same reason.
The Road Warrior’s high exit exhaust is a Yoshimura RS-3 Stainless Steel slip-on made for the Suzuki 1250 Bandit. It weighs somewhere between 5 and 10 pounds and has a ‘mellow’ not flatulent sound; and may I say, God bless all the bean salads, Uncle Henrys and Auntie Ems in the world.
The Raider has a Vance & Hines 2 into 1 ‘Big Radius’. It weighs half of what the stock system did and was actually fitted with, and this will sound sacrilegious to some, a small baffle to increase the backpressure and MID-RANGE.
…AND sooooo I decided to accept the fact these metric bikes were never designed or meant to be Harley wannabes, and it’s all ‘Good’…and peace settled in over Ego, I mean Echo Valley…and Auntie Em and Uncle Henry lived happily ever after.
RIDE SAFE
