Mods, mods...

As I write this, Dallas is bidding on the big daddy slip-on Akrapovic exhaust. If you know us, you know that we ride the same bike, have pretty much the same tastes, same haircut, and thus in our ever-present search to be just slightly different so you can tell us apart, the modifications to our bikes are ever so subtlely different. To be frank, most of the mods are aesthetic in nature - Honda do such a great job with the engine out of production, why would you want to fuck with it? For the mod-curious, here's the small current list of the mods I have to my CBR600RR:

• Larry's fender eliminator


• Small rear turn signals and plate lights as option on fender eliminator kit


• Zero Gravity SR Series dark smoke windscreen


• Greggs Customs front flushmount turn signals


• Honda rear passenger seat cowl

Which brings us essentially to the end of the phase where you take a knife to the ugly stock black plastic bits on the bike and replace them with small much more efficient nice techy bits. There's only so much aesthetic work you can do - I've thought about de-stickering the bike or possibly going for that stealth option by removing all the factory stickers, but there's a lot of them under the clear coat so bugger that for a game of soldiers. To be honest, I think exhausts are an aesthetic modification as well which is why I am considering one. Dallas and I agree on street riding all a new exhaust would do is give you a more distinctive growl/scream and be a nice pretty backend to the bike for others to talk about. I'd be surprised if the amateur rider on street notices the typical 2-3 hp difference most slip on exhausts give you.

So why do it? Hard to explain - I think part of it comes from the fact that we love tooling with our rides and anything that helps us understand how our bike works, albeit small gives you a sense of satisfaction. I'll never probably be able to re-bore an engine or to re-map the computer but that's ok. I'm happy with the small stuff. Perhaps it's the continual spirit of improvement that drives us to keep tweaking, although I suspect one day we'll run the danger of getting stuck in an infinite suspension tweaking loop only to throw our hands up and return everything back to the factory settings, which are probably the best anyway for our street riding.

So whats next.. Indiglo dashboard? Alarm? Power Commander? HID Lights? All of these options either seem a bit over the top or just plain expensive. I'm definitely attracted by the lights, and have the fond hopes one day of maybe frying cicadas with 2 billion watt headlamps before they can splatter their last over my visor, but at over a grand for a decent kit, that shit's gonna have to wait until we've secured the house, baby.

Update: Dallas won his ebay bid! Hooray! We're gonna wrench it on this weekend, so once again he'll be the wrenching guinea pig. Wheee! Here's what he got:

Pretty, innit? It goes vroom. Loudly. Me, I might just spring for the sticker and try to pass off my voluminous stock exhaust as a limited edition akra :)

Oh, and Brandon - I do hope your weed whacker is now satisfyingly whacking your weeds. What the hell is a weed wacker? Is that what I know as a strimmer? All this gardening talk.. Wheres my sofa..