Arriving home, I tossed aside the work duds and settled in to a fashionable pair of dirty jeans and my grubby overshirt. There was work to be done!
Opening up the Power Commander box, in inspected the contents and the instructions. Seemed pretty staright forward and I was about to get started on that when it hit me; hey Dummy; the pipes will take much longer, so get moving on those. The daylight ain't gonna last forever.
Ok, so opening up the other box - Rinehart Racing it says on it. Oh, there's gonna be some racing when these things are installed!
Laying everyting out gently, I probably should have snapped a pic, but oh well. You've seen pipes before. The first thing to do was to remove the old set of pipes (no kidding, Dave). It's amazing how quickly nuts and bolts can rust up and resist you! I had this foolish exhaust off toward the end of last summer, when the pipe cracked, remember? Man, it was still quite a struggle to get things loosened up - the one thing that kept me going was the thought "Well, I know these things loosen up because I JUST HAD THEM OFF a few months ago!"
When I had finally removed the last section of pipe, it was time to remove the O2 sensors. Holy Crap - had I really tightened them that much? WTF was I thinking? But at last they were off, and I was able to set the pipes over on the lawn, well out of the way.
According to the instructions, I apparently have to resuse the old flanges and retaining rings. The rings are difficult to get off if you don't have a pair of C-clip pliers. Good thing I have a pair - they were off in no time. Once those come off, the flanges slide right off, too. Here's a pic showing the old gasket, the retaining ring, and the flange.
Here, the retaining ring has been removed (I just hung it back on for the pic), and you can see that the flange will slide right off.
Here are the new pipes, flanges and retaining rings installed (make sure they are both facing the right way!), as well as the old gaskets next to the new ones.
As you can tell by the angle of the sunlight in those pics, the daylight was making it's getaway so I figured this was as good a time as any to pause. I will continue tonight with putting the new pipes on.
There was just enough daylight left for me to attempt the Power Commander install. Seemed pretty straight forward, remember? Sure enough, the OEM stock wire harness comes out nice and easily, and swapping the PC in was a piece of cake. Now to tuck everything away so I can get the seat back on...
Hmmm....ok, the instructions say to just tuck things into the space in front of the batter. Maybe I need glasses, but I sure don't see any space in front of the battery. I even removed that black plastic cover you see on the left side of the pic. Nope, no space to be found under there. What the hell?
The daylight was just about done so I cleaned up the tools, parts, and trash, and rolled the bike back into the garage. I knew Zig has the same PC on his bike so I gave him a call and he said yeah; you have to remove the battery and tuck everything down beside it, into the compartment. Ok, that sounds easy enough, I guess I'll find out soon enough.
That's where things stand now. Oh yeah; I have to pick up some plugs for the O2 ports on the new pipes. Although, I did see a post on a forum about being able to use sparkplugs....imagine hooking up a button and a live line to that, revving-then-dropping the throttle and hitting the button? The flames out the pipes would be pretty cool, but blasting that kind of back draft into my cyclinders is probably a very bad idea.
More to come - the plan is to resume things tonight. Still no call from Cook's, though. Fingers are crossed that that call will come in soon...
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