are vtr down pipes stainless

[motojohn]

silly question but im striping down the bike and was thinking how nice the the exhaust would look polished but putting a magnet to it it appears to not be

[Wicky]

You can polish it shiny but ridden about it'll soon discolour and slowly revert back to brown. There are new aftermarket stainless headers available on ebay.

What are your manifold clamps like? viewtopic.php?f=38&t=41917

[motojohn]

thanks for that i will have a look

[VTRDark]

They are stainless but a really crap quality stainless. They do polish back up really nice and you can get a mirror shine on them if you want. They wont rust back up too quickly as long as you don't go riding in the Sea They actualy go more of a Golden colour as long as the finished polish is to a high quality and smooth and you can always keep on top of them with a wipe off now and again with a bit of wet n dry and or compounding polish. I sprayed mine afterwards with a high temp laquer.

I spent two days with diffrent grade of wet n dry doing these. I don't have a garage or polishing wheel so was done by hand.
See my headers

I'm sure admin Chris will be along shortly to show you and I how it's done properly I'm sure you don't need the extra expense of new headers for sake of a bit of hard work and self satisfaction of doing it oneslef. It's best to remove the header though but please be VERY CAREFUL with the bolts and exhaust studs as you don't want a stud snapping in the head. Use plenty of lubricant and or maybe a bit of heat. The front is usually the worst and you might want to consider using a nut splitter on them and replacing the nuts.

[fabiostar]

as said they are crap stainless.. now bare with me here, this is gona sound a bit mad lol.. but its worked for me

polish them up and before you fit them get a bit of copper inner wiring. you only need maybe 8 inches or so. and wrap it round the header pipe up close to the clamp...the cooper by its nature will suck a lot of the heat outa the header and helps keep them from discolouring.. yeah i know but it worked for me.

[motojohn]

I will try the copper wire trick , I have a industrial size polisher so doing the pipes would not be a big problem for me as I used to do a lot of Ducati pipes as they suffer in the same way

[sirch345]

I'm sure admin Chris will be along shortly to show you and I how it's done properly I'm sure you don't need the extra expense of new headers for sake of a bit of hard work and self satisfaction of doing it oneslef. It's best to remove the header though but please be VERY CAREFUL with the bolts and exhaust studs as you don't want a stud snapping in the head. Use plenty of lubricant and or maybe a bit of heat. The front is usually the worst and you might want to consider using a nut splitter on them and replacing the nuts.

That sounds like a cue for me to give you the link of when I did mine

I got them to this stage below, the link on how I did mine is here:- viewtopic.php?t=7027&highlight=spit+polish





Beware though they do go off colour very quickly. I mention it in my link above, although I quite like the goldy colour they go.

To answer your question, as others have said the headers are stainless steel, just not top quality stainless hence why a magnet sticks to them. (Just a quick search. That could be something to do with the way stainless steel is produced and not so much the quality of our headers).

Chris.

as said they are crap stainless.. now bare with me here, this is gona sound a bit mad lol.. but its worked for me

polish them up and before you fit them get a bit of copper inner wiring. you only need maybe 8 inches or so. and wrap it round the header pipe up close to the clamp...the cooper by its nature will suck a lot of the heat outa the header and helps keep them from discolouring.. yeah i know but it worked for me.

I've done that old trick many years ago on my old Suzuki GSThou, although that was chromed headers. I can confirm it did work in keeping the chrome looking good,

Chris.