V-Star 650 Custom

Here's the poop on gutting your V-Star 650 mufflers w/cats. You can either do it the easy way or the hard way. I'll show you both.

First let me say that I love the styling of my V-Star... except for those goofy looking mufflers. They're too long and they taper at both ends which to my eye looks bad.

I saw a few V-Stars that had what is known as a slash-cut modification and thought to myself, "now that's the way the factory should have done it!"

Unfortunately, the how-to examples I found were all pre-cat mufflers. Eventually I did find a .PDF file that described gutting the cat version of the mufflers. It had several pictures that were very informative. However, the document lacked an email address that I could use to contact the author to clarify a few of my lingering questions. So, I was still uncertain about performing this modification. I didn't want to have to do a lot of hammering or punching just to get the guts out of the mufflers.

But after deliberating on this modification for several weeks, I took the plunge. I figured that I would just take my mufflers off the bike and chopsaw the ends off. How hard can it be right?

Wrong! it was do-able but not easy as you end up cutting through many layers of metal, fiberglass and cat material. And it took forever to finish the cut.

But I learned from this that you can make the job much easier by simply taking a 3" pneumatic cut-off tool and cutting a groove around the muffler shell where the end-cone begins to taper. Once you've cut the groove all the way around the muffler, you can easily pull the end-cone and the cat material right out of the muffler shell. Now you can put the muffler shell on the chopsaw and make the slash-cut at the angle you choose. I chose to cut my mufflers at 30°.

I have to say that at first, I was certain that I had screwed-the-pooch on this modification. The bike is so freakin' loud I wished I could have turned back the clock and undone the mod. But once I rode the bike around for a few days I began to get used to it. It's still freakin' loud but I don't think it'll get me arrested.

Here's the tools I used to perform this modification:
A Kobalt 3" pneumatic cut-off tool:
A Harbor Freight 14" industrial cut-off saw:

Here's a shot of the wrong way (left) and the right way (right) to gut the mufflers. As you can see the left side shows that I had to cut through a lot of material in order to get the slash-cut I wanted. The right side shows that using a 3" pneumatic cut-off tool to cut through the shell of the muffler allowed me to simply pull the cat out of the muffler with the end-cone attached.

Here's a couple more shots of the "right way" vs. the "wrong way" to do the job. Please save yourself the aggravation and use a 3" pneumatic cut-off tool to remove the end-cone and cat. Do not try to slash-cut the mufflers without first removing the cat.

Here, you can see that the cat is just an insert in the muffler shell that slides right out.

After you've removed the end-cone/cat the mufflers still have a small baffle remaining. I left that baffle intact as the gutted mufflers are freakin' loud as it is.

The final result! I cut the muffler shell at a 30° angle and I think it compliments the angle of the Custom's rear fender. Click Here for a Video I hope this helps!