Well, I finally got some decent weather, and took Thing1 to work. It's a 25 mile ride one way, and a coworker and I took a nice long ride at lunch, though his daily rider is much newer. Overall, I think I put 75 miles on it - just enough to get the new tires broken in.
Before we left for lunch, he was looking over my bike as it warmed up, and he noted that it seemed loud. I shrugged this off, as I knew the exhaust had some holes along the bottom of each pipe. As I pointed at the exhaust to explain this, imagine my surprise when we looked down and saw this:
It hadn't been like that when I left my house.
Clearly the rust was worse than it looked, if that whole section fell off on my ride in. So now I need to really figure out what I'm going to do about replacing the exhaust. My headers are all fine as far as I can tell - it's just the mufflers that are rotting out. I have three options, as I see it.
1) cut the mufflers off, and replace them on the existing headers. This is the option I'm most curious about, as I would prefer to keep a 4-4 exhuast. It's also the least straightforward option, as I have no idea how one goes about selecting replacement mufflers, or how I'd mount them, or anything.
2) & 3) when I purchased that parts lot, I did get two different sets of 4-2 exhaust. I'm attaching pictures, in hopes that someone can tell me anything about them - good or bad.
I'll call this one 2)
and this one 3)
here are 2&3 hanging next to each other - 3) is clearly at least several inches longer and larger overall. I do have the other of 2, I just slapped it on Thing2 for a minute to see how I felt about the look, so it's not pictured here.
So, can anyone help me ID these pipes? And/or steer me to replacement mufflers that would be suitable?