Noisy Motorcycles

I on the other hand...... I care for the environment and think all motorcyclists are evil. I think of the daisies and care for the local community, noise pollution is the worst.

 

Yeh Right @Rspete !!! That's a load of S41TE, you know the sound of a motorcycle should blow your hat the FK52 00F

 

I had that exact problem last year when several balancing vacuum hoses decided to rot out. Felt like a ASBO driving home, holding the throttle at 3000 RPM to keep from stalling.

Now that the weather is pleasant, some sop at work not only has obnoxiously loud pipes on his hog, but has a radio that has two settings, "loud" and "ear splitting". Yes, he chooses the higher level, as it plays over the loud pipes. His choice in tunes is not agreeable to me, but I am forced to listen. So it goes.

 

To all who's right to make a racket outweighs any responsibility to others:
Please ensure your contact details are available so you can be included in the rota for nocturnal bagpipe serenades.

 

Problem is that you're NOT gone in a couple of seconds. I live a couple of miles off the A2 and I can often hear loud bikes accelerate up the hill to the A2 roundabout, slow down then take off along the A2 towards Canterbury. I can hear them decelerate at the traffic lights about 4 miles away before taking off again. Sorry, but that IS anti-social.

 

Presumably he saves his less considerate side for the people he doesn’t know? I live on a ‘TT’ route and the bastardised Hogs, Ducati’s and 600 screamers are a total PITA throughout summer but especially at weekends. The OEM machines are often faster but whisper past.

Joking aside, you can dress it up any way you like as ‘safety’ (fighting a losing battle with car stereos) ‘performance’ (not if the popping and banging from many home untuned bikes is anything to go by) or whatever. The simple truth is that the population overwhelmingly regards noise as both pollution and a nuisance in the strict legal sense. For motorcyclists as a group to ignore its impact on public sympathy is massively self defeating. It’s just another version of the nightmare neighbour, the little bastids, you name it. The ‘biker’ reported in the Press would become a ‘yob on a bike’ if more of us chose to distance ourselves from the noisy boys.

 

Nothing wrong with loud bikes and cars if they sound right....as long as its not mopeds or 125s with open pipes its Corsas with 2,000 watt subs they are all determined to be def by 30.....thinking about it probably not a bad thing.

Even my old Supra sounded good..but crap video a mate took...turn the sound up.

 

According to a reliable mate of mine, Austria has just made up a law that bikes louder than 95db are no longer allowed to ride on country roads! Break the rule and you're fined something like €200!

The old bill there actually stopped me last year on my way to Rimini (whilst riding a super-quiet Deauville) because I was on a country road without permission. They proceeded to direct me to the motorway, which I particularly wanted to avoid not only because a Vignette is a rip-off but because I'm lucky if I could get 120kmh out of it. I ended up joining the road I wanted by cutting in a little further down - wixers

Not only that but when Germany wanted to introduce a Vignette system, those cnuts kicked up a stink and blocked it.

 

So I took off my tastefully louder than oem Legal pipes and put on some quieter oem after market pipes, after some moaning old git on this forum wouldn’t let up complaining about them, the things I do to keep the old farts happy, sigh in a martyrish way, well although quieter and don’t need a retune they turn out to be not road legal, so if I get pulled I hope you’ll cough up for my fine?
I name no names but it was Litteade

 

Everybody has an opinion, of course. Locally, for me, the number of 4 wheel drive pickup trucks far exceed the number of bikes! They are, mostly, riding on oversized wheels and tires with the exhaust as loud as possible. I had a loud exhaust on my truck for 20 years. This was when I was a young man. It appears to be a phase that one will eventually outgrow.

By the way, I now have the stock muffler on my nice, quiet truck.

 

Quite like hearing most of the bikes through our town. Makes me want to get out on mine. Can almost hear the clicking of keyboards though when I hear someone with noisy pipes accelerating long and hard into the massively quicker 40 limit.

Good sound is different to loud, but let's not pretend it isn't mostly a cosmetic change.

 

I'm not specifically talking about loud exhausts though. We have to carry a small registration document here with the details about the bike we're riding and on the paper it shows the db rating with a standard exhaust.

The KTM 890 Duke, for example, falls foul of the law at 96db from the factory. I can understand your contention with those chucking on a baffleless can (although there is an argument that it makes drivers audibly aware of them), but surely it's a bit of a cheek for a country to impose their wish on all of us unilaterally?

I would love it if Germany could charge only Austrians a toll for using German autobahns. Austria just acts like the petulant child of Europe with these type of measures - in my opinion of course.

 

I agree that some bikers take the piss and have excessively loud pipes and/or ride their bike in a deliberate manner as to sound like a screeming banshee, and they do none of us any favours. However, I imagine that the majority of complaints come from people that would consider any bike as noisy and evil

I don't know if my bikes are considered noisy My Street Triple I removed the TORS that it came with and went back to OEM standard silencers, as for me there is no significant benefit of the TORS and the standard silencers sound good enough to me. But with my Bonneville I have removed the awful standard silencers as they are far too restrictive (and heavy) and replaced them with Vickers silencers, this along with other mods have not been made to increase volume or necessarily performance, but mainly to improve general running and also aesthetics. I first tried some really nice short powercone silencers on the Bonneville, but I thought they were too loud when riding, so replaced those. I even went as far as buying a decibel meter, and the powercones were a little above 80db at 3000rpm, but they seemed louder when sat on the bike, and if memory serves right the Vickers are also at a similar db level (I'll have to check them again). When riding through villages I keep revs down, and always slow down to a crawl and pull the clutch in when passing horses. My point is, I try to be reponsible and considerate, but I believe the majority (not all) of people that actually go as far as submitting complaints about loud motorcycles, would probably do so for any bike with an ICE.

 

Internal Combustion Engine

 

The enforcement of noise ordinances in the US is capricious and subjective. Harley Davidson is a bit of a religion and many cops ride. The country road near my house is a popular route for hogs and I hear it every weekend. It's all a matter of degree and responsibility. It's always the same "look at me" lack of self esteem moron that can't stop blipping the throttle in town while at a traffic light that sets my teeth on edge. I suppose I should accept the excesses to prevent a "papers please" crackdown by imperial stormtroopers.

 

Run OEM cans on both my bikes, although plan to replace the Daytona with a road-legal aftermarket to save weight and look prettier.

Daytona came with an aftermarket can that even with the baffle in was too loud imo.

Get on well with my neighbours so don't want to piss them off, and, more importantly, when out riding, I generally don't want to attract too much scrutiny!

As others have said, loud pipes are competing against stereos, phones, etc and modern soundproofing - I don't think they are a significant safety aid.

DS

 

I like the Deep Purple, well Ian Gillan, reference. I'm off to dig out Made In Japan and annoy the neighbours.

 

It's these bloody idiots with tuned up bikes we need to worry about;

 

I thought that was Meat Loaf.