Titanium Love

It’s been a long journey, and although not over, the remaining important bits are finally seeing closure. Namely, the exhaust. I’ve been waiting out to buy a used one from someone who said he was out of town, but would be back soon to remove and ship it to me. That ended up just being a huge waste of time. After many weeks, I said forget it. I decided to buy new and luckily was able to source this full titanium system from TiForce.

When it arrived, the package gave me a bit of a scare because it wasn’t very big or heavy, but all the pipes were just in segments so they boxed up well.

Headers installed:

4-2 Collector:

Tail pipe:

The muffler actually comes out at an angle to decrease the severity of the bends:

Overall the exhaust fit well and had excellent welds and construction. There is significant weight loss by going with this system over the boat-anchor stock one.

I wasn’t quite finished with titanium goodness just yet, because another package arrived containing some Pro Bolts. The ATE SuperBlue brake fluid was also received, so I could now get the brakes filled and bled.

I went with titanium windscreen and front axle bolts, plus rear sprocket and rear axle nuts. I also put the rear wheel back on and fitted the Akrapovic carbon fiber rear fender. The DID ERV3 520 Chain was previously installed around this time as well. Here is a left side view of the rear end’s situation, along with the Renthal 44t rear sprocket.

A close-up of the Gilles chain tensioner… a very trick part and allows for easy adjustments with a cam gear drive.

Here’s a picture of the front brake reservoir with the tygon tubing after bleeding everything.

For the rear brake’s reservoir, I decided to use a slightly unconventional approach by omitting an actual reservoir. I simplified it by just using a length of tygon tubing as the reservoir, capped with a brass fitting with a barbed end.

The brake rearset is missing the heel guard in the above picture, because I decided spraying it with bumper coating wasn’t going to suffice. It seemed like a contact area like that would cause the paint to rub off easily, so I sent it in to get properly powder coated.