Performance Exhaust Rant / Discussion

[YZEtc]

So, the original question was why would an FZ-07 rider chose the Yoshimura over Arrow or Graves?
 
Well, I doubt everyone in the market for an exhaust will do heavy-duty research and compare all of the dyno charts (that may not have been done on the same dyno and/or the same atmospheric conditions, anyway).
 
I believe that most riders will go for the one with a popular brand name and that is easy to get.
Everybody knows the Yoshimura brand name, and any motorcycle parts retailer can get it.
Lots think it looks good, too.
The price seals it.
 
I believe the nature of the 270-degree crank, twin-cylindered engine of the FZ-07 is responsible for it's good tone (sound), no matter what brand name exhaust you buy.

[howworkclutch]

Spending that much on aesthetics is to my mind far worse than performance-oriented purchases.
 
That's the domain of Harley Davidson. I wonder if I should print up a bunch of Yamaha stickers for cars?

[noltz]

lol

[Allan]

Spending that much on aesthetics is to my mind far worse than performance-oriented purchases.  
That's the domain of Harley Davidson. I wonder if I should print up a bunch of Yamaha stickers for cars?

Well, buying this bike in general as a performance oriented purchase is far worse than buying a bike that is made for that thing in my mind. This bike is made for street riding, and that is what is predominantly good at. Just because we like to put money into our bikes doesn't mean you need to compare us to Harley riders. Come on man. Let us be who we want to be and spend our money the way we want to.

[howworkclutch]

what do you mean by that? i'm not stopping you. i simply don't agree with you. its nothing personal.
 
i think there are two different "dollars" in america. old dollars (the kind i have. i believe $100 is a lot of money) and new dollars (the kind young people have. they see $1000 as "no big deal").
 
i can't justify the cost of some of these "upgrades". probably because i have bills to pay and The Man is still paying me in old dollars.
 
if you have new dollars to spend: good for you. i just wont ever spend a grand on an exhaust system when i can throw a few dollars more on that grand a pick up a nice little lathe. by the way old dollars are good for buying tools

[nmucat]

I'm new to the cycle world versus car world. The price of parts is crazy when you compare them. I got a full exhaust (headers to tail pipe) for my 98 Durango and it was less than any of the performance systems for the FZ07. Old saying you have to pay to play definitely applies

[Allan]

what do you mean by that? i'm not stopping you. i simply don't agree with you. its nothing personal. 
i think there are two different "dollars" in america. old dollars (the kind i have. i believe $100 is a lot of money) and new dollars (the kind young people have. they see $1000 as "no big deal").
 
i can't justify the cost of some of these "upgrades". probably because i have bills to pay and The Man is still paying me in old dollars.
 
if you have new dollars to spend: good for you. i just wont ever spend a grand on an exhaust system when i can throw a few dollars more on that grand a pick up a nice little lathe. by the way old dollars are good for buying tools

Trust me, $1,000 is a big deal. The only reason I was able to buy the pipes in the first place was because when my grandpa died, I got left some money. So I decided to use it to pay off my bike, do a couple repairs on my car, and treat myself to something nice and buy a new exhaust. He used to ride motorcycles back in Argentina and he really liked my bike, so I found it fitting to use the money that way. If it wasn't for that money though, I would have not bought an exhaust for a long time because I couldn't afford it. I didn't just have $1,000s of dollars that I could just throw away. Trust me, I don't have what you call "New money". Everyone's circumstances are different and you can't be so quick to judge when someone buys something that costs a lot that you maybe wouldn't buy on your own. I think most everyone here knows the value of a dollar. I may be young, but I sure know what it's like to work to pay bills, as I have them too.

[howworkclutch]

i can be quick to pass judgement on anyones purchase any time i feel like it. i'm not saying "youre a bad person and i don't like you". i'm saying "you gotta be nuts spending that much money on an exhaust for $7k motorcylce". i think we can still be friends but maybe you feel otherwise?
 
i don't care if you won the lotto. that exhaust is 1/7th the price of the bike. its absurd.
 
but the real kick in the groin is these remapping services. i wouldn't give those people $15 to install candy crush saga on my phone. they wanna act like they're doing rocket surgery but the reality is dynojet has them on the hook and they have to pay the dyno-tax. those few shops who own their dyno outright just charge a few dollars less than the guys paying rent on a shop/dyno.
 
some folks dont understand how upside-down the pricing is on that stuff. a few have said a jet kit is supposed to be cheap but i bet if they sit down in the shop and turned their own jets from some brass rod they'd rethink that position in a hurry.
 
its way way easier to use your mouse to make a few data changes than it is to change jets. and those jets require a lot more skilled labor to produce than young people seemingly know.
 
upside down. thats what this whole tuner culture is. upside down.

[pgeldz]

Oh crap, I should be admitted into the hospital soon because I must be insane, especially when RotoBox releases their Carbon Fiber wheels for the FZ-07 costing half as much as the bike itself..
 

 
- Paulie

[noltz]

lol

[carcrusher1978]

There's no replacement for displacement.

Agreed!!!

[crazycracka501]

Money comes & money goes our whole lives, you can choose to horde it or spend it, but you can't take it with you when all is said and done. No other bike I looked at or rode had the riding position, look or power (where it counts) that I wanted. I could have spent more money on another bike, but it simply wasn't what I wanted. I spent the money on a kit for the suspension, the exhaust and EJK, hell I even painted the thing and now it looks, sounds and rides like everything I have ever wanted in a bike. Keeping that money in my bank account can never equate to the happiness I feel when I look at, sit down and start up my bike. Money is useless unless it is paying for something you want, it just sits there, whereas my bike puts a smile on my face when I look, start and crack the throttle (especially with my overpriced exhaust).

[pantheraleo]

Yoshi plus EJK cost me 545 + 225...well short of 1k. I couldn't care less what anyone thinks about the 'wisdom' of my purchase. The whole idea of owning a motorcycle can be argued is foolish...
 
I love my bike. Its a great machine I enjoy even more with my pipes that growl and roar. I'm also happy with the EJK that smooths it out and eliminated the excessive (for my riding style) engine braking.

[aeisan]

You should see the $900 wheel set I just got for my $2000 mountain bike. Proportionally speaking, that's like getting $3500 wheels for the FZ-07. I'm crazier the the joker (the Heath Ledger one, not Cesar Romero).
 
Honestly... No one here has any place telling anyone else how to spend or not spend their money, be it hard earned or a windfall or whatever.
 
This talk of old dollars and new dollars is BS... Each and everyone one of our dollars are equal. It's all about how much YOU value your money and really, it's all relative. If I were looking at getting lunch, $100 would be way more than I would ever prefer to spend. Taking a date out for a nice dinner - $100 is not so much. If I'm talking bike mods, $100 is a lot less significant than either scenario.
 
As for pricing... Supply and demand. That is all I have to say. Pricing is not just a function of cost with fixed margins my friend. You argue how much goes into making a jet. I could easily argue more goes into making the computer chips inside the tuners (and before you call me on it - yes I am quite familiar with both). Do you own your own dyno? Yeah, me neither. What's cheaper and/or easier? Buying my own dyno, or paying someone that does own one for their time to use it? Even at the insanely high rates they charge, it's still way cheaper than buying your own dyno.
 
One last point of view... Cost of a mod vs cost of the thing you are modding... I'll put this in the perspective of my mountain bikes, because if you think motorcycle mods are relatively expensive, you should see the $5k+ builds we run in the MTB world - and those only have a 1MP motor on them! (1 man-power) You can look at a stock bike as something you buy and would not run more mods than what you spent on it. I don't - I look at it like a platform to start with and then customize to my heart's content. It's not uncommon in the MTB world either, except we have the option to start with a frame and build it up from there. Until they start selling motorcycle frames and motors individually, there's not much of a better way to build one up than to start with a full bike and mod it.
 

[No Hater]

This all comes down to supply and demand. If millions of FZ/MTs were on the road and dozens of companies made exhausts, the price of these would come down. Heck, we are already beginning to seeing that with over a dozen companies making exhaust kits. The free market and competition at its best. I plan on getting something along the lines of an M4, simply because lets face it....we arent really buying these things for anything more than a good sounding/lookin fart can. We're not going to get twice the perfomance out of a yoshi compared to an M4 so unless I really liked the look and sound of the yoshi I couldnt justify the extra expense.
 
I am guilty of puchasing a $1k factory pipe for my 09 Kawi SXR though and that too is a $7k machine. Although, that is simply because there were no other manufacturers. That at least showed significant power increase though.

[so1102]

Bottom line is everyone has an opinion, and everyone has a different view of what is important to them.
 
Me? I didn't have a problem springing for the mods I have done so far to make my bike better for me.  The fact that it was relatively inexpensive in the first place allowed me the freedom to be able to afford to make it just the way I want.  If I would have purchased a more expensive bike, perhaps I wouldn't have had to spend on things like suspension, but perhaps I still would have.  Personally, (to tie it back into the original post) I have "exhaust upgrade" dead last on my to-do list for the bike.  I fall into that camp where what I do should improve safety first, performance second, and aesthetics third -- and then I need to be able to internally justify the cost vs. benefit.  But that's just me.  I can easily afford to throw $1K into an exhaust + tuning (ECU flash or fuel controller), but so far I am not convinced it would be worth it to me.
 
As my grandfather used to say "to each his each"

[aeisan]

This all comes down to supply and demand. 

Copy cat.  JK!  

[howworkclutch]

supply and demand has no validity here. harley davidson proves this year-in and year-out. according to the innernets, there are 450 million harleys on the road in the us. exhaust systems for harleys are not cheap by any stretch of the imagination.
 
pricing is based on willingness-to-spend.
 
if you're willing to spend, someone is willing to sell. but pipes are no more rocket surgery than dyno tunes. you can find the formulas for building headers, do the design work, and take it to a good muffler shop (the good old boy kind) and get a screaming exhaust custom made for pretty cheap.... if you're inclined to do things yourself. send the prototype to china and they'll stamp out millions of the things and you can get rich with your new company. just make sure you give it some agressive sounding name and use z's instead of s's so the buying publics low expectations are met.

[aeisan]

supply and demand has no validity here.   ...
 
if you're willing to spend [i.e. you have demand], someone is willing to sell [i.e. supply]. 

Yep, no validity at all.  You win the internet today.  Congrats.  

[bmwpowere36m3]

but pipes are no more rocket surgery than dyno tunes. you can find the formulas for building headers, do the design work, and take it to a good muffler shop (the good old boy kind) and get a screaming exhaust custom made for pretty cheap.... if you're inclined to do things yourself. send the prototype to china and they'll stamp out millions of the things and you can get rich with your new company. just make sure you give it some agressive sounding name and use z's instead of s's so the buying publics low expectations are met.

 
 
That easy, huh? Why don't you start selling them and make millions?
 
Obviously these companies stay in business and customers buy these products... so if anything your opinion is probably in the minority.
 
I guess spending $7k on a toy is crazy in-of-itself... live with it, let it go and move on.

[bmwpowere36m3]

supply and demand has no validity here.   ...
 
if you're willing to spend [i.e. you have demand], someone is willing to sell [i.e. supply]. 

Yep, no validity at all.  You win the internet today.  Congrats.  

 
 
He just doesn't want to let it go....

[howworkclutch]

you missed my point but thats ok. i like typing.
 
i'm not questioning the demand for pieces of pipe that connect to an fz07 exhaust port. i'm questioning the cost. if there was a clear shortage of pipes i could see why they would be so expensive.
 
but there is no shortage of pipes. there aren't even a lot of fz07's in the wild. the demand is not high. the costs should not be high. its a frikken piece of pipe.
 
if you bought a pipe you're inclined to believe you've done the right and proper thing. but surely some part of you thinks "damn that really is an expensive piece of pipe. and its not much different that the top-rail of my fence"
 
 

[howworkclutch]

Yep, no validity at all.  You win the internet today.  Congrats.  

He just doesn't want to let it go....

the thread title is "Performance Exhaust Rant / Discussion"
 
it is what it is. have fun with it.
 

[Beemer]

All I can say is I'm real happy with my Akrapovic carbon pipe. I bought it for the sound/small gain in h.p. at a premium price and decided I could live with that (I hope others can) BUT! ... the next time I buy a bike it will only be one with a good factory pipe that has some bark! 
 
 
I noticed that some people we know like roasting their tires, wasting money in the process and yet no one cares or complains that they do. "Let It Be" - The Beatles
 
 
 
 
 

[bmwpowere36m3]

He just doesn't want to let it go....

the thread title is "Performance Exhaust Rant / Discussion" 
it is what it is. have fun with it.

 
 
I know, but you keep saying the same thing over and over and over.... WE GET IT! Just keep beating that dead horse.