Re: HD CEO on Loud Pipes

On May 29, 11:48 am, "Michael R. Kesti" <michaelke...@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
"tomor...@xxxxxxxxx" wrote:
First, I don't know of ANYONE who has pipes that rattle windows at a
distance of a mile.  But if I ever met anyone who did, I would agree
with you that they were an ***.

I live about 0.9 mile from a freeway on-ramp.  Most weekday mornings
between about 6:00 and 6:10 my home's windows are rattled by a biker
launching up that ramp.  I don't believe that this is the only ***
in the world who routinely accomplishes such feats.

I don't think he is the only one, but anyone who has a motorcycle THAT
loud is a blatant exception even to the masses of people who put
louder than stock pipes on their bikes.

Funny, my '73 Ducati 750GT, '74 Norton Commando 850, and most
especially my '77 Ducati 900SS all came with oem pipes that were
essentially unbaffled megaphones. They made a lot of power, didn't
retrict exhaust flow, and were painfully, obnoxously loud. Even back
then - and I owned them in the 80's and into the early 90's, not when
they were brand new - they weren't noticed or remarked upon, or
commented about at all. There was less traffic and fewer people
around then, too, so you would have thought they would have stood out
more. But they didn't. They were thoroughly unremarkable. Since
then, of course, stock motorcycles and stock cars have all gotten MUCH
quieter, so much so that the tire noise and sound of displaced air as
a car passes is generally higher volume than the oem exhaust system
puts out.

I think people in general are less tolerant of noise than they were
even 10-20 years ago.

Second, I hear exhaust notes on motorcycles, cars, trucks, and buses
everyday that are loud enough to be annoying to me.   In fact, riding
my motorcycle, I'm sure I'm assailed more by those annoyingly loud
sounds than the occupants of cars, cocooned in their double-glassed
and insulated interiors.   As someone else has pointed out repeatedly,
there are laws already on the books that can and do apply to those
illgal noise levels.  They are often not enforced at all, and when
enforced, are often enforced unevenly and punitively.  It is *not* a
motorcycle problem, it is a NOISE problem, one component of which is
some motorcyclist's modifications to their bikes.

You may be correct, but I'm not certain I get your point.

DOH! That's right, I was supposed to be making a point, wasn't I?
.