When the 1984 Elite was purchased, the seller warned that the muffler was bad, so this was no surprise. Unfortunately, there are no new replacements availabe in the Honda parts system, and a serch of "junk yard" Web pages failed to turn up any mufflers. Doug Simpson's excellent scooter pages contained a sketch of a design for a replacement exhaust that (if I had a heli-arc welder and a tubing bender) would probably be fairly easy to construct, but one local welder offered to "fix' the old muffler for (in his words) "a lot less than building that new one..."
The in-side of the muffler (toward the wheel) reveals two expansion chambers. The leftmost chamber contains a loose part, rattling around like a marble in a tin can. The spot welds (barely visible here) probably hold baffles that force the exhaust gasses into a longer path for cooling and expansion to reduce the noise level.
Since the overall condition is not too poor, that left chamber will be cut open and, if possible, the loose part re-welded in place, then the chamber welded back together. This keeps all of those critical pounting points correctly located, making it possible to replace the heat shield and mount the exhaust system without making major body and frame revisions!
Page updated on Wednesday, August 17, 2005 17:23 Eastern