frankenpipe (aka Peters Pan)

today my colleague Peter came by to have me check his bike, he had some problems with his water temp gouge.

it's a Honda Pan European and he uses it as daily, any weather driver, so it is somewhat important that he could keep an eye on the engine temps.
before he arrived at the Garage i could hear him coming from far.. not a sound you'd expect of Pan European..
ah well, i would check that out later..
first up: the water temp sender. as i screwed the thing out the radiator no water came with it.. ouch.. the sender is in the lower parts of the radiator, so there has to be water surrounding it! and it has to pour out when you remove the sender...
that's an easy fix for the sender... fill the engine with some water again, so it's surrounded with water, and hope there was enough in it before to save the bike from serious damage. it seems no serious damage had been done.

now let's check out that loud exhaust sound!
after a short "finger feel" i could sink my whole finger in several holes.. wtf?
so off with the rightside pipes!
now that's odd.. it's a Honda so it's build to perfection right? wrong! the headers are stainless steel but the collector (which is a integrate part of the headers) is of plain steel. so that part was rusted to oblivion!

and trust me.. the other side was even worse!
but as long as the headers were of the bike i could always do some patching up, bastard style!! (my colleague is also a poor fucker like me and a new exhaust system is just to expensive)
so i took some scrap sheet metal, a hammer fired up the welder and started forming and welding..

so after a little while the Franken pipe was ready!

at first i thought i could patch up the holes with small patches, but the collector was to worn out, the metal was way to thin to weld something tight. so on the side where i started it looked like Frankenstein..

for the other side i started making a brand new side of the collector and welded it to the last thick parts of the collector.
also the outlet pipe was rotting away on the welds so i tackled that with some metal sheets to.

the Frankenpipe is air tight again and the Pan is a little more quit!
i used 0,8 MM (MiliMeters) sheet, so i think the collector will survive the bike!