As you may have noticed by now, we rather like doing things ourselves. It's easier to get what you want as you don't have to try and explain exactly what you want to someone else, you don't get let down by poor quality and of course there is the cost to think about.
Sometimes though we have no choice. In this particular case we need some silencers for the Moto Morini 3½ and while there are hundreds or thousands of off the shelf silencers out there, there are actually very few that meet our technical and aesthetic needs - and none of them are made from stainless. Normally in these cases we would make them, but in order to make them we need some pretty small sheet metal rolls which we don't have (a pretty niche item)... and so we turn to outsourcing.
That brings us back to the list of problems above, namely making sure we get exactly what we need and at the right quality. We dropped a line to some really very good tube fabricators we have used before and, yep, they had the smaller rollers needed - so then it was just down to communicating what was needed and so some design drawings were needed. As you may or may not know (and I really must get around to adding the design services page to the website!!!) we do quite a bit of component design - so it doesn't take too long to draw up some CAD designs (thats them there on the left ;) and a 3D render below), email them over to the fabricators, and get them on the case.
It might seem a bit odd at this stage of the project to be finishing off the silencers. Well we are just finalising the frame modifications so it can go for powder coating, and one of those modifications are the exhaust brackets - and rather than guess or make some "fit any situation" bracket we want to make sure it is right first - and for that we need the silencers. Oh and yes, the downpipes are all new stainless and who wants to stick some chromed up lump of a silencer on the end of stainless pipes? Not me.
I will pop up a little post with some photos when we get the final items from the fabricators in the next few days.
Of course every good project starts with a good old look and ponder. After eyeballing some pieces that for sure need attacking with a grinder and getting the general gist of what this thing is gonna look like once done the next thing on the list is a proper investigation of the electrics. Why electrics so high up on the list - cos they're cool!!! That and the fact that it is most likely they are going to be relocated somewhere else and that over the years a great variety of "great" ideas have come and gone - and you need to know your enemy. The other good reason to look at the electrics early on is that it is by far the most likely to have been butchered by a number of people throughout the life of the bike.