Follow along as we install a Lowbrow by Kerker 2 into 1 SuperMeg exhaust system on a 2006 Harley-Davidson Sportster. Tuned, high-performance, made in the USA and only $399.95! Lowbrow by Kerker SuperMeg exhaust systems are available for XL Sportster, FXD Dyna and FXS / FLS Softail, with more fitments coming soon.
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You can read a full transcription of this video below:
Hey guys, Todd from Lowbrow Customs here again. Today we're going to put our new Lowbrow Custom's two into one exhaust on this fine 2006 Harley- Davidson Sportster.
Here's what the head pipe looks like. It does have some threaded bongs on the back. Comes with a hardware pack. There is some included plugs to fill this holes because they did not have fuel injection until 2007. This is the last year of the carbureted models. If you have a carbureted model, you'll use these plugs. We'll put those in in a sec. We'll show you. If you have a fuel injected bike, you'll be putting your O2 sensors into these threaded holes here.
Once again, that's what the head pipe looks like and it has this really nice muffler. Cone shaped. Should produce some good power on this Sportster.
Let's get started on removing the pipes that are on the bike now.
All right. I like to use a real long extension. I've got a half inch socket that I basically ground down. On some of the systems like a stock system, you'll need to remove your heat shields. It makes it a lot easier to get the four nuts that are attaching the pipes to the front and rear cylinder heads.
On this bike, this particular exhaust system, it looks like we won't need to remove the heat shields which is a good thing. That'll save us some time here today. I have ground this down for getting into tight spots. You're going to have two fasteners, two nuts on the studs on the heads, front and rear.
That one wasn't very tight. Also, take a look at the studs coming off of your heads where I'm removing these nuts from, if they look corroded, it's a good idea to spray some lubrication on them before you start the job. Let them soak for a few minutes. As you can see, look how rusted that is. We will be replacing these nuts with new, shiny ones.
Okay, got the two rear ones off. It looks like whoever installed this last system used two of the stock fasteners have a flange on them. That one does not. This one is tricky to get to. I actually have an extension with a wobble end. Since we're close to the motorcycle here where the painted part is, we'll go ahead and add another extension there.
There we go. There's our four nuts off. Let's check out what else we need to do to get these off. Here looks like we have four bolts with probably some dog bones inside the channel here. We'll grab our half-inch wrench for those. Get them loosed up.
Once they're loosened, I'm going to switch this ratcheting wrench because that'll make it go a little faster. It's a tight spot to the ratchet in there. Almost out. Probably should support that so it doesn't fall. There we go. There's our rear pipe.
Now it looks like with these it looks like we probably have enough room to get a ratchet in there. Let's try it. That's tight. That's not happy. She's a little rusty. Let's get a six point.
Anytime you have fasteners with rounded off corners, it's advisable to use a six point versus a 12 point. We got some corrosion going on here. Boy, that's tight too. There she goes. There we go.
We got one more part to take off. That big honking bracket there. You may notice that the bracket goes behind this cover. On the rubber mount models, all of them have the bracket behind this cover so we'll take that off next. Okay, we've got a 5/16 Allen for this larger fastener here. Boy, that's a tight one.
I would assume there's a Torx back on here but that may have been put on with an impact which I don't recommend using a impact when there's on something like this.
Red Loctite. Extra red Loctite on there. Sure hope they didn't lock tight the small ones here. Now we're going to go to the 3/16 for the two smaller ones. No lock tight on that one. Just a lot of corrosion. Maybe there was. Boy, that's pretty corroded. Gang, look at that.
On the bottom ones behind this bracket, I'm going to use a regular Allen wrench and seeing how tight the other two were, I'm going to use an extension with a deep well socket to give myself some leverage like so. Yes, so much for that program, it wasn't even that tight. Hey, there's the nut we lost from the exhaust, yay.
All right, now that I've got that one loosened, I have a long 3/16 with a ball end. You might not, everyone, have one of those but that's going to make my life a little easier to get this one off. I wouldn't want to break that free with a ball end because it's liable to if it's really tight, it's liable to break the socket.
A bunch more red Loctite and a bunch more corrosions. Pay attention. Long one, short one. Long one goes on the top, short one goes on the bottom. Okay, now we can get to the fasteners for this bracket that was on the other exhaust system.
Let's attempt to take these other three fasteners. Hopefully, they didn't use as much Loctite on this one as they did that one. I'm not opposed to red Loctite but I think that was a little overkill on that one. I know you tempted to get your impact out for this stuff but when you have a steel fastener and an aluminum threaded hole, you're better off to do it by hand. That way, you can feel what's going on. No Loctite on that one. Okay.
Okay, we have the one fastener left to get to that's up underneath here. Here's your standard sized 5/16. Gee, imagine that. Mr. Vance & Hines doesn't want me to use that tool. Got a cut-down one here. No, I can get that in there but not really.
Look, they put a hole in there so you can move the brake rod out of the way. T27 Torx, some lubrication. Look at that. That was awfully nice of them to put a hole there but I sure wish they would have put a hole right about there where I could have got a socket through there. A 3/8 drive 5/16 Allen probably would have been a better plan of action than this.
Okay, now that we have the brake rod out of the way, we'll go ahead-- We couldn't fit the socket. I don't have a short one of those. They do make sockets for Allen's that are very short. I don't have that particular size. We'll use the standard Allen wrench and our leverage. There she goes. Now, we'll just have to muscle it off by hand because we still can't get anything in there. Sure glad whoever installed this bracket didn't Loctite these.
We'll go ahead and use the ball end of this one and we'll use this like a lever. We'll carefully remove that because that seems to be going a little bit faster than going a turn to turn, take it out, turn, turn, turn. That's a birdsong, isn't it? There we go. Now we're having some success.
There's your Vance & Hines bracket off the bike. Look at her. Look at her. Okay, I'm going to trial fit this to see where it's going to go. It's going to go to those two, three there. We're going to use two of the large fasteners we removed from the bracket. It looks like it'll probably be easier to go ahead and put our brake rod back on first.
Utilizing my T27 and for you guys wondering what's going on with this little contraption here, this is one of my favorite tools. It's just a simple nut driver but it has an end that you can put a ratchet on. Fancy, I know.
Not possible to get it that tight with jus this. Great, now, like I said, we're going to utilize the two fasteners that were in the other bracket. There's our new bracket.
Go ahead and get those started in there.
Once again, our 5/16, I think we'll snug up the top one first but not all the way so we can get to the bottom one.
Well, now that I've reattached the brake rod here, it just happens to be right in front of that fastener that I need to get to and I really can't see any way to get to it other than if it wasn't so dang tight going back into the hole. I might be able to thread it by hand and use the ball end. I'm just going to go ahead and drop this out of the way. It's only two fasteners. That should give us the room we need to get to that.
Look at that. Now we got plenty of room to get to that.
Yes, I think there was just a little bit of corrosion in that hole so I couldn't thread it by hand.
Okay, got those two fasteners there nice and tight. Go ahead and put my front back on 'cause we're done with that portion of the program. We've got this little plate here that's electrical. I'm sure you got that lined up.
We'll go ahead and finally tighten those.
We're ready to put our cover back on. One other thing, as you're tightening these, be sure that the smaller hole right here is lined up with the threads for when we put the cover back on because this fastener also goes through that bottom hole in conjunction with those two.
We are ready to put this cover back on once again paying attention long screw on the top, short screw in the bottom. Obviously, the largest one goes here.
Once again we need our 3/16, there it is for the two small ones. That one went in very nicely along with our new bracket for the exhaust system. Getting all three of these down to the bottom and then I'll go ahead and finally tighten them.
Don't overdo it on the little ones.
Click. The cover is back on. Now we're ready to take the flanges off of the old pipes, the flanges, and the snap rings and we're going to put those on the new head pipe. That's where it attaches up here.
You need to reuse your old parts. I'll grab one of the pipes here. This is the part we're going to reuse. I have these transmission pliers. Works very well for removing these. You're just going to spread it open.
Pop it off like so, take your flange off like so.
Okay, I just got done putting new seals, gaskets, whatever you want to call them, exhaust rings into the cylinder heads. I took out these ones I didn't agree with. They're not very thick and replaced them with stock Harley ones because they'll seal against the flange on the pipe here. I've done front and rear.
When you're putting new ones in, you got to be careful. They're fragile. You want to get started in the hole and use your thumb and push it in all the way around and make sure it's all the way. There's a little step inside the head that it rests up against. Get those installed nice and clean and neat. Now we're ready to go ahead and get our head pipe ready for installation.
We're going to put the included plugs for the O2 sensors because this is a carbureted bike, we don't have any O2 sensors that the exhaust does come with. Some plugs in the hardware bag. That'll go in these two holes here.
If you have O2 sensors, you'll be reinstalling those with just a dab of antifreeze on the threads of the O2 sensor being careful not to put it on the part that is reading your exhaust gas. The hardware bag does have some antifreeze to put on your O2 sensors. Once again, just on the threads. Don't glob it on, not a whole, big bunch. Just get some on there so they don't get seized up in there if you ever need to change one if it fails.
Also, if you have a later model, there's two different size O2 sensors, we do have some adaptors on the website. These are for 18 millimeters. The plugs and the holes, we also have adaptors that will 18 millimeters and then 12 millimeters in the center if you have the smaller, we have those available. Smaller O2 sensors. We have those available on the website for purchase.
Okay, I checked these before we started rolling here and I'm going to be using a one-inch socket of the hex on this. Once again, I don't really see any reason to put in antifreeze on these because they're not a sensor, they're just a plug.
She's a tight one.
She's a tight one too.
All right, while using a socket on here, I noticed that we have a hex on the bung that's welded in here with the threads. This socket was getting caught on that other hex and preventing me from fully tightening it.
So I basically switched to a wrench. That way I could see what's going on. I can see that I'm not catching that other hex there and so we went ahead and final-tightened the two bungs in there, the plugs for the O2 sensors that we're not using.
The next thing we need to do is we're going to reinstall the clips and the flanges on here that attach to the cylinder heads. As you notice, as this goes over here it can slide up and down there so as to not ding up the finish on here, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take a little piece of tape and I'm just going to tape that on there. Now it can't slide up and down here and scratch that black finish while we put the clip on.
Okay, once again, we're going to use our internal snap ring pliers for transmissions to spread this open. We're just going to go over the top of that flange being careful not to open it up too much because you don't want to spread it out. There, that's a nice fit there.
You'll notice that there's a little recess on that flange that when I take this tape off, this will slide up to that and keep it from coming off when it goes onto the motorcycle. Now we go ahead and do the other side. We'll go ahead and get our rear one on. Once again, this tape protect it.
If these rings are really distorted or really rusted, it's a good idea to change them.
There we go. All good. That one seems to be pretty good. Fitting up against that ring nicely, the exhaust clamp. We've got out O2 sensors plugs installed and our front and rear flanges installed. We can introduce her to the motorcycle and see if they like each other or not.
I got her up in there. I've determined this is a really tight fit with this forward control in the way. What I did was I got the back going first, slid the back up in place and then pulled the front one away from the fins on the head. It will fit, it's not that it won't fit, it's just a really tight going to get it up in there but we did get it. Once again, be careful. I put a rag around here so this didn't bang against that.
Now I have it up where it needs to be. I'm going to go ahead and take the tape off of the flanges and get those lined up. You're going to slide this flanges up over the studs. It can be difficult so you can wiggle the pipe a little bit. You want to get them started nice and even front and rear.
You don't want to put any nuts on until you have both the front and the rear. If you need to, you could take a socket on an extension and get it over the flange and maybe give it a little help. There we go, that's nice. I can see it went up there further on the threads. We'll go ahead and get our nuts started. Front and rear. Once again, don't tighten front or rear until you have all four nuts on there.
Another thing I've learned over the years from putting hundreds of exhaust systems on, these should thread on like melted butter. If it feels like it's crooked and it's not threading easily, stop, regroup, take a look. If you've taken other things apart on your bike, these once again are fine thread, not coarse thread.
I can see that the bottom one is stared quite a bit more than the top one. As I get ready to tighten these, I'm going to tighten the top first and you want them to go pull that flange on the pipe that's compressing that gasket evenly. I got the two rear ones started. Go ahead and do the front.
Look at that. See, nice and easy going right on. This other one is difficult to get to. Sometimes it's easier to start this one by hand rather than using your socket.
That one is starting easily. That's what we like to see.
Also, I'm using new nuts on here because the old ones were very corroded as we saw earlier. That makes life a little easier too because you have a nice, new nut with good threads on it versus an old crusty rusty nut, not the best plan of action.
Now we can go ahead and start snugging these down. Once again, evenly front to rear. You're not just to cram the rear on all the way. We're starting with this one and then we're going to go to this one, do that a few turns and then go back to this one. Alternate. You can also see how much stud is coming through the nut.
[music]
We'll give it a quick check here. Looks like it's going pretty even. That's one starting to get pretty tight so I'm going to stop there.
Now we'll move to the front.
We need our extension that's got a little wobble to it and this other one.
Those are looking pretty even. Once again, back and forth front to rear.
On the real earlier Evo Sportsters, that particular flange was only about this thick and it was easily worked or bent when tightening this so if you have that style bike or you have that style clamp, you could see when I had these clamps off there, way thick in the middle and then they taper down where the nuts go on.
Harley saw there was an issue so they corrected it making this new style clamp. Now I can tell that as I go side to side, that one's feeling pretty tight and this one's not so that's okay. There we go, she's tightening down now. Again, don't overdo it. We're crushing that gasket without breaking anything.
Okay, we'll go to the backside now, rear pipe.
Once we get it all together and we get the muffler on and we get the bike running, once in a while, you may find that you have to go back over and hit these one last time to make a nice seal. I've got them nice and tightened down.
We're going to go ahead and put the muffler on and we're almost done. We're ready to put the muffler on. Clamp comes with the kit. You're going to loosen it up so you can slide it over the pipe but don't loosen so much that it may slide back and forth. That seems pretty good right there. I'm facing the socket head 3/16 up so I can get to it right from here to tighten it.
Then you've got a couple of these T bolt arrangements. There's a channel on the backside of the muffler. It's wider in the middle so go ahead and slide those both in front to rear. Those are going to line up with those two holes on the bracket we installed earlier and we'll go ahead and get this on here. I got a feeling it's going to be a real tight fit.
I've determined this a pretty damn tight fit. I went ahead and took my T bolts back out because basically, what I'm doing is as I'm sliding it on there, I'm rocking it back and forth, up and down and spread out the end of the pipe a little bit.
Now that I've got it, I don't want those in the way. We'll have to get them on afterwards. There she goes. Additionally, you may also find you can put the clamp on before or after. You can always take that apart. I've got this on there.
Now I have to turn it to get this to line up. Once it goes on and spreads out then it's going a little easier. That first time going on I notice it was very tight. I don't think you're going to have any problem with going to far then not be lined up with these holes back here. There it is. Maybe just a little more.
Now I've got this flat of this lined up with that. Let me go ahead and put these back in there. I'm just going to pull this out to slide these in there.
There's that one.
There we go. Those lined up with the two holes on here.
The make sure that slide it down here and see that this channel is orientated this way and this way. That it's flat up against this bracket and it is. We've got a couple of flat washers and some nighloks that go on the T bolts.
Get that started.
Then I'm going to use my ratchet wrench again because that's going to make it a little easier to tighten those up. All we have left to do is make sure this is positioned where you're happy with where it's at. At the edge of the muffler, you're going to tighten that. You're going to tighten these two and we'll be all set. We'll be ready to try it. Ratchet wrench on the back too, half-inch.
Nice and secure. Not trying to break the T bolts, I'm just trying to make sure they're tight. They're nighloks, they're not going to loosen up once they're tight. Okay, those are pretty good. Now, back to our 3/16 on this clamp.
Once again, we just need this tight. We don't need to break the clamp. Looking at the backside to see how tight it is, a feel thing.
'cause I'm guessing if you keep cranking this you can break this clamp. That's pretty tight there. Okay, all set. There she is. We'll go ahead and clean up our tool mess here. We'll go outside and fire it up. Make some noise.
Hey guys, just another wonderful sunny morning here in northern Ohio. We're going to go ahead and fire up this Sportster so you can hear our new two into one exhaust pipe. Yes. Let's give her more rev. Let's go for a ride. Not.
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