Ktm Unplugged

KTM Unplugged

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

“WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO CHANGE canisters?” my friend Phil Caravello asked last week as he sat aboard my shiny new black KTM 950 Adventure and subtly tweaked the throttle. “These stock pipes sound pretty good. Not too loud, but nice and throaty.”

“Weight,” I said. “The titanium Akrapovics I’ve ordered are supposed to be 59 percent lighter than the stock canisters. That’s a big difference.”

Phil nodded. We were standing in the alley behind his bicycle shop in Stoughton, Wisconsin. As a long-time bicycle racer and Ducati buff, Phil is receptive to arguments for lightness.

“I just hope they aren’t too loud,” I said. “As in headache-loud.”

As it turned out, they weren’t.

I took the bike into our local dealership for its mandatory 600-mile inspection, and asked if they could bolt up the new canisters while the bodywork was off. So they installed the Akrapovics-along with a jet kit-and I picked up the bike last week.

It runs perfectly. The KTM is quicker and freer-revving, feels noticeably lighter and sounds good. The exhaust note is just slightly deeper than the stock system, but still quite civilized-not loud enough to frighten our cats or wake the neighbors when I come home late from yet another night of riotous living and coffee swilling at Barnes & Noble.

“We’ve got your old mufflers in that cardboard box,” Steve Barr, the co-owner of the shop, told me when I picked up the bike. “You really owe it to yourself to lift the box.”

I hefted the thing, looked at Steve and raised one eyebrow. It felt as if someone had melted down two bowling balls and recast them as mufflers. On the shop’s UPS scale, the box weighed 23.5 pounds. We hadn’t weighed the titanium canisters, but I’d hefted these as well and guessed they weighed less than 5 pounds each-as claimed. By comparison, they felt like Styrofoam.

As I was getting ready to leave the shop, a mechanic pointed out a pair of hex screws tack-welded to the bottoms of my new canister outlets. “If you grind away those welds and remove the screws,” he said, “you can pull out the end caps and the mufflers flow a little better, but they’re quite a bit louder.”

I looked at them and nodded. Ah yes, the “competitive riding” option mentioned in the KTM parts catalog.

So I rode around all last week, enjoying the KTM’s improved performance, lighter weight and mellifluous but still stealthy exhaust note. Society and I were both happy.

But, of course, I kept seeing those two tack-welded end cap screws in my mind’s eye and wondering what the bike would feel like-and sound like-with the inserts removed. Yesterday, I finally caved in to temptation.

I got my Dremel tool out and sliced surgically through the tack welds on those screws, taking care not to lop off the back half of my bike-as so easily happens with high-speed power tools in the wrong hands. I removed the screws with a 4mm hex wrench, grasped the inserts with a pair of pliers and jerked them out. Then I started the bike.

It sounded.. .good. Wonderful, in fact. Boomy and full-throated, almost like the Contis on my old 900SS Ducati. But loud.

I took a test ride and it sounded great on the country roads. At highway speed it had a satisfyingly mellow but hardhitting sound, and the engine seemed to breathe even better and rev more freely.

But then I got into town.

And here the sound waves caught up to me. I could feel the individual exhaust pulses bouncing off the walls of houses and brick storefronts like mortar round concussions, minus the shrapnel. Memories of my time as a recoilless rifleman in the Army came echoing back-into my one good ear.

A woman gardening in her lawn looked up sharply as I went by. Two men talking on a street comer stopped talking and turned to look at me. I tried shortshifting and staying off the throttle, but it didn’t help much. I had to admit the pipes were simply too loud for town.

They made people stop what they were doing and look at you. Which is almost never a good thing, unless you are drowning, or choking to death in a restaurant on a stringy piece of Swiss steak and need the Heimlich maneuver.

But having citizens with no interest whatsoever in motorcycles stare at you is usually bad for the sport. The problem is, they aren’t really looking at you or the motorcycle; they’re just staring at a perceived lapse in decorum.

In all fairness to the non-motorcycling public, I am sometimes guilty of a similar reaction when a car with huge door speakers pulls up next to me at a traffic light, blasting out bass notes and pulsating with sound. Music is a highly personal thing, as my parents once pointed out when I tried to make them appreciate Howlin’ Wolf. So I decided that no one really wanted to listen to the glorious melody of my new free-flowing pipes in the town of Stoughton and headed for home.

On the way, of course, I stopped at the suburban home of my riding pal Jim Wargula so he could hear the canisters.

“They sound good to me!” he shouted over the cacophony in his driveway. “Besides, who’s going to complain? They aren’t any louder than a hundred Harleys we’ve got running around town with straight pipes.”

This comment, I have to admit, gave me pause. There are several things I like about Harleys, but I’ve never thought straight pipes on a Big Twin were the gold standard of sonic bliss.

So when I got home last night I let the pipes cool, and then put the end caps back in place with a dab of blue Loctite on each of the screws.

I won’t be tack-welding them back on, however.

In fact, I may just carry that 4mm hex wrench in my tankbag, in case I suddenly find myself in totally empty desert near Dakar or Stoughton and get the urge for a little competitive riding.