new use for an empty techron bottle.

[Brian]

I came up with this idea at the last oil change. The bottle neck fits snug in the engine and the Mobil 1 bottle balances nicely inside it. The bike is on the side stand so having it leaning also helps.

[Bone]

 

[pocobubba]

WOW ! That bike looks clean .

[bassman]

Clever !

[Brian]

WOW ! That bike looks clean .

You should have seen it when I bought it. It was covered with three years of garage dust and pollen from sitting. I do my best to keep it looking good. It's a 97 with just under 17,000 miles on it. When I trailered it home it only had 895 on it. This is the first motorcycle I have ever owned that people in traffic will roll down their wndows to tell me nice bike or give me the thumbs up Those headers were totally blue when I bought it. I had to replace the muffler covers and the exhaust tips as they would not clean up. Who knows what the PO did to make them that blue?

[BonS]

Running lean due to clogged jets will do it. Also, if they were aftermarket pipes then they were single wall headers and these will blue readily. The OEM header pipes are double wall and it takes a lot of heat to blue the outer pipe.

[Grumpy]

WOW ! That bike looks clean .

You should have seen it when I bought it. It was covered with three years of garage dust and pollen from sitting. I do my best to keep it looking good. It's a 97 with just under 17,000 miles on it. When I trailered it home it only had 895 on it. This is the first motorcycle I have ever owned that people in traffic will roll down their wndows to tell me nice bike or give me the thumbs up Those headers were totally blue when I bought it. I had to replace the muffler covers and the exhaust tips as they would not clean up. Who knows what the PO did to make them that blue?

Letting the bike run on high idle with the choke on will blue the pipes rather quickly, especially if he let it run for a long time, the rich mixture burns a lot hotter.

[BonS]

It can be confusing when it comes to exhaust bluing. Grumpy's right, rich mixtures can cause it and so can lean. Long periods of idling, by itself, heats up the pipes due to lack of air flow for cooling and can cause bluing.

Actually, the hottest combustion is right at the perfect stoichiometric mixture, when there is exactly the right amount of oxygen to consume all of the fuel. Anything richer, or leaner is cooler than a stoichiometric mixture.

Even though a rich mixture is not as hot it can blue pipes because the fuel mixture continues to burn after it exits the cylinder and therefor heats up the pipes more. A lean mixture heats them up for a different reason: A normal or rich mixture burns but leaves a thin layer of unburnt gas right at the boundary layer of the metal surfaces inside the cylinder. This thin layer shields, or reduces heat transfer of combustion to the metal surfaces. When this layer completely burns off, as with a lean mixture, then combustion heat is transferred to the cylinder wall, valves and exhaust. When cylinder heat temperature increases it can burn valves, hole pistons, break down lubrication, blue pipes and make for general mayhem.

[Brian]

This will explain why I also had three burnt exhaust valves. I pulled both heads removed all the valves and ground them in by hand making sure each valve went back in the same hole after re-seating. If you look close at my picture you can see the bluing at the header flange that did not come out. Those are the original headers and pipes, the entire exhaust system was that blue when I started to work on this bike.

Thanks for the info on how this might have happened.