Exhaust noise

I love the sound of my Norton 16h, although the alarms of various cars and houses go off when I accelerate too much .......

I agree that the pattern silencers are too noisy.  I have some DB killers that I use on the Firestorm ,I will look at these to see if they can be modified to work.  Ear plugs are now an essential item if I am to have any hearing  in my last decade ( or possibly two!)

Should always be worn- the wind noise alone at 50mph is enough to cause damage. Have always used them and despite the excesses of racing 2 strokes in the '70's can still hear really well.

Agree that many of the aftermarket 'silencers' aren't!

George. 

Armours say somewhere on their site that they don't use internal wadding because it encourages internal corrosion due to condensation.  I don't know what (if any) wadding was used in the 1930's - when did glass fibre appear?  Of course Norton had a mania for altering silencer designs, so the problem has always been present since the good old days of the 1920's when every town in the country had different rules and many police constables persecuted motorcylists on principle.  Motor Cycling published the good news when one particularly ruthless constable at Hampton Court finally retired.

I remember the fibreglass linings from my Dommy silencers streaming out behind me  as I hammered my 88  from kent to Lancashire  on the weekends.

...is fitted with a Gold Star "silencer" as was the order of the day in the early 60's.  It has no  interior so I bought a "mute" to fit in the outlet. The noise from on board was better but the  "following" sound is just as loud.  My cousin will not travel behind me as it "farted" on the overrun once and the "Mute" was never seen again!!

J

That's put me right off a Goldie silencer  Jonathan! I've been considering an Armours early 30's Norton lozenge shape with fishtail, but I doubt if it will be significantly less antisocial! But we have so little opportunity to make a noise that I don't think I'll bother.

That looks stonking David, and I would not bother about the sound  ,which is very characterfull from behind.   Makes me all the more determined  to get the 36 Rudge up and fixed.

I hope we see it later this year! I think you were due to turn out a few weeks back with a small group of Surrey NOC, but weather changed the date...the changed day was so bad anyway when the skys opened it proved to me that the Inter makes a passable submarine!

I was behind you most of the way back!!.  And well soaked.

I had a very noisy bike in the late seventies, with copy Dunstall megaphones,  probably the loudest bike I’ve ever ridden, if I opened it up going up hill people used to hold their ears! 

I got stopped on the outskirts of Bournemouth by a very chatty copper who liked the bike but wasn’t impressed with the noise and gave me a ticket - no noise meter. Fortunately he was a bit distracted and didn’t notice a couple of other misdemeanours!  I got fined £10 for inefficient silencers and £10 for excessive noise, which I thought was being tried for the same offence twice but hey ho you live and learn - the report in the paper accurately reported what I had told the policeman that I had tried to quieten it down with chicken wire and half a coke can (that obviously didn’t work!)  Anyway after that I headed to Armours and bought the cheapest pair of long silencers I could find and fitted those ....... absolutely no difference!  And the bike .... wait for it ....  a Norton Jubilee!  Sadly it died shortly afterwards and was sold to a biker in Martock never to be seen again. 

Dan