Exhausted

I love my new Triumph Scrambler!  I have not been as excited about a motorcycle since I got my first Triumph (the Trident, which I still have).  And, one of the things I am excited about is personalizing the bike, and making it my own.  This will consist mainly of cosmetic changes (I don't plan to hop the motor up, or anything), cleaning up the profile of the bike.

One of the things I am changing is the look of the exhaust.  I like the stock set-up, except for the awkward-looking heat shields.  Specifically, I do not like the misshapen pie plate just below the rear of the tank, and I don't like the over-sized guards on the mufflers, at the rear of the bike.

Here's a view of the stock heat shields (and also my new mirrors, mounted beneath the bars, to clean up the top of the handlebar).

I took the pie plate off, yesterday, and rode around running some errands.  I never even noticed it was gone.  My leg crosses over the pipes well behind that spot.  So, I figured that a smaller plate, mainly there to just cover the mounting bracket welded to the pipe, would be sufficient.

Yesterday, I went to Ace Hardware and bought some 2" x 1/8" aluminum stock.  Today, I set to work.

I pulled the big guards off of the mufflers, as well, and cut pieces of the stock to cover those brackets, as well as one to cover the pie plate bracket.  Then, I drilled the mounting holes and test-fitted them.

I then marked off a radius on each end of the new guards, and went to work with the angle grinder, bench grinder and metal file.  Once I had them fairly close to the finished curve, I mounted them up and did a bit more filing while they were in place.

So, here are the new heat shields.  I still need to do a bit of finish work on the edges, and polish them up.  But, even in this semi-rough stage, they look 1000% better than the stock shields, to me.

What do you think?

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