Hawk Exhaust HACK Mod: De-Cat and Spark Arrester

[xposur]

I decided to mod the exhaust on the Hawk. It is really restrictive and there is not a lot of aftermarket exhaust systems that work for this bike. I know of 2 brands but they do not line up correctly and sit lower than they should.

First Thing I did was remove the spark arrester and cut off the plate in the back of it with a cut off tool and replace it with a screen to improve the flow a little bit.

2nd was the cat.
I removed the header pipe, its bolted to the head (2 14mm nuts) and muffler(10mm bolt clamp).

Once removed I used a cut off tool to cut it directly in the middle of the cat.

The cat was really restrictive and held a lot of heat in the exhaust. To remove the cat material I used a 3/8 drill bit to drilled in the center and worked my way up in size. The metal will twist around the drill bit and pull off the pipe nicely. The key is to go up in drill bit sizes and work around in the pipe and the metal will come out easily. Use needle nose pliers to pull off any remaining metal and or a flathead.

Once the pipe is cleaned out of the cat material, bolt back to the bike and use the heat shield as your alignment guide.

Weld a bead on there so it holds, then remove and finish welding around.

(Welding tip:make sure you use a shallow penetrating rod if your arc welding like me. I was anxious to do this and used whatever rods I had at home, which was a 6011 and this will melt a hole in the pipe! Use a rod like a 7014, or stripe down the pipe to bare metal and use a 6013. I used 6013 which is for clean metal and the exhaust pipe has a coating on it, ended up giving me slag holes. Im not a pro welder either, I can weld, just not pretty!)

After you weld all the way around, check for leaks by putting the welded section in water and blowing into the pipe. Alternatively you can coat it with gas leak solution and look for bubbles after blowing into it. I had a few air leaks on mine so I covered them with JB Weld.

I painted my entire exhaust with a goldish high temp paint from autozone and installed it back on. Will most likely need to go up in jets.