Where the exhaust connects to the head its turned blue. The exhaust makes a high pitched whistling type sound while cranked and backfires whenever you cut the bike off.

Any ideas? Are these things related?

Ok, any idea about the whistling?

TJ9000 wrote on 06/27/09 at 14:28:09:


Not sure about the whistling, but I do know a couple of other members have mentioned it before. I don't remember what they did to fix it. Maybe type in exhaust whistle in the search function, just be sure to set it for "all posts" to get the most results.

Two things I would do that take about 15 minutes:

1) Tighten the bolts that attach the exhaust header to the engine. If they are loose they will contribute to the backfiring sounds. They rattle loose very frequently due to the vibration of the bike.

2) Adjust your idle mixture by removing the brass plug and adjusting the hidden screw. That will allow you to create a richer mixture. This is different from adjusting the idle speed screw which only speeds up your idle.

A richer mix might slow down the rate that your pipe turns blue and should reduce the backfire when you roll off throttle.

It is documented here with photos:
http://suzukisavage.com/cgi-bin/YaBB.pl?num=1221818822