Well, I finally got round to fitting the PipeWerx de-cat link pipe and silencer, and boy am I glad. To start with, the standard item looks a bit drab, doesn’t it? I mean, you might have thought that the SP version of the MT-10 might come with something a bit flasher looking out of the factory, exhaust-wise, considering how trick the rest of the bike is, but no. So reason number one for going down the Pipe Werx route is purely aesthetic. Reason number two is aural; the bike wasn’t quiet, but there wasn’t much of an exhaust note – it was a mixture of induction noise and engine rumble which, if I’m being brutally honest, didn’t set my world on fire. Reason three was weight – I know how bulky and heavy the standard systems tend to be, with their exhaust valves and their catalytic converters. And reason four was to see if the power and the throttle response felt any different with an aftermarket pipe.

Removing the old pipe was a piece of piss. The only fiddly bit was removing the cables for the exhaust valves, but even that was pretty straightforward. The difficulty came when I tried to fit the new link pipe. It’s a ‘two into one’ piece of pipe, and the ‘two’ end didn’t match the bottom of the two header pipes – they were about 10mm too far apart, and the headers weren’t budging. No bother, I’ll just loosen the tops of the header pipes to try and get the play I need to slip the pipe on, it’ll only take me a few minutes, I foolishly thought. It didn’t take me long to realise that I wasn’t going to loosen the headers without first moving the radiator and the oil cooler out of the way. It was a right pain in the arse. In fact, I nearly opted to take the front wheel out just to help me get my hands in. Anyway, my plan eventually worked and once I'd loosened all eight of the nuts holding the tops of the headers in place, I managed to wiggle enough play into the bottom to fit the Pipe Werx link pipe. The rest was pretty straightforward, although I did have to do a bit of head scratching to work out which way the bracket holding the end can was supposed to go, but I got there in the end.