exhaust dent removal

Hello,
I was wondering if anybody knew of a way to remove some dents that I have on the bottom of my head pipes. The person that had the bike before me must have hit a curb or something, which dented one of the pipes to almost half of its original diameter, with a slighly less severe dent on another.

Thanks for the help.

you could weld pins in the dent then use a slide hammer to try and pull them outor just cut out and replace if you can get all the way around to weldB)

You can drill a small hole on the other side of bent on the pipe and tap it out then weld up the holes. That's what I had to do on the hard to find Yoshimura header I have on my 650.

I will tell you the best way. Take the pipe off of the bike and get a long rod that you can screw a ball on and lube it up and push it inside the pipe to push the dent out from the inside. This is how they remove dents from musical instruments. You can reem that baby out. Question is where to rent that tool that just goes on a vice. Same thing happened to me and that is how I am going to take out the dent.

what do you do when it gets stuck inside the pipe and wont come out? brass is a lot more workable than the pipes of a header

Just to make things more complicated, if they are original pipes they may be dual wall. Does anyone know for sure if that's the case? Ed

PLUMMEN wrote:

what do you do when it gets stuck inside the pipe and wont come out? brass is a lot more workable than the pipes of a header

Well if you saw the rod and ball ends I was talking about and thinking of the place where it logically might have happened I would think that maybe you might have a chance of not getting it stuck (using lots of grease)and perhaps be able to get it out.
Sounded like you said headers right? Of course if the pipes are not looking all that great perhaps it would be better to find something else to put on? A picture would be worth a thousand words and put to rest all assumptions.

Buttttt.... You have a point about the heavier metal. I think though that if you can get in and work it might be easier than drilling holes or cutting and welding and if that doesn't work then what they said will probably be what to do.

gurt wrote:

... wondering if anybody knew of a way to remove some dents that I have on the bottom of my head pipes... dented one of the pipes to almost half of its original diameter, with a slighly less severe dent on another....

If not concerned with protecting chrome finish, and have an assistant, could fashion a metal pry rod with rounded end (a crow bar might be okay) or even a hardwood dowel to reach inside and lever against the dented area, after heating the dented area cherry red hot to soften up the metal.

Or perhaps ask the friendly local muffler shop guy for advice and assistance. They have special tools for enlarging pipe diameters and might be able to use progressively larger ones to work out the dent, even without heat.

Good Luck!

i seen some guys that build nascar headers use what looked like trailer hitch balls welded to long rods to straighten dings in headers out.sometimes they were in between two bends where you couldnt get the rod in so they cut them straightened out the dents and welded them back together.it gave you another welded joint but those flow better than dents.they would use heat on the dings,didn't see any grease tho.

So there it is. We used grease so that the balls would slide smoothtly as we were working with instruments in which we needed to move the ball smoothly so that we could slide the ball around easily. Well I am glad to hear that someone else reaffirmed my thoughts on this. I would be willing to bet that any muffler shop up to snuff would have those balls and rods.
To cut and weld? That is beyond my skills I think it would be less effort to just find if not a new exhaust a used one somewhere cheap before I would spend much on fixing old pipe.
So that's that then. A picture would be worth a 1000 words.

i have seen succesfull results buy filling it with water and freezeing it.or u could plug all openings, fill with preasureised air, and heat the dent with a torch.

Thanks alot guys, I tried the rod with a ball on the end and that pretty much did the trick!