No past issues with mice, but I thought it's a good pre-cautionary measure. Too cautionary??? I just want to do the right thing here.
Are you suggesting that mice will gravitate towards the air box before crawling into the tail-pipe?
I reckon it's a good move!!
Better safe than sorry, and I know from experience that if there's a space and enough mice around, some of the little buggas (or maybe not so little!
) will crawl in there and try to make a nest &/or eat everything they can, edible or not!!
And I can assure you that it's bloody hard getting a mouse nest, a few cooked and now very ripe (former) mouselets, and at least a couple of kilos of shredded and then partially melted plastic out of a Spyder exhaust; especially if said exhaust was on a Spyder that was un-knowingly started and run for a bit before the shredded plastic clogging the exhaust melted enough to cause the engine to stop at the most annoying and dangerously unsafe spot!!
Do you really need to ask me how I know this can occur?!
If I'd known how much crap there'd be in there, how stinky it was, and how hard it was going to be to get enough of it out to let the engine run again, I wouldn't have offered to even
try to get it out!
Ps: While the exhaust was jammed full of shredded and then partially melted plastic as well as a (formerly occupied) mouse nest, there was
NO foreign material of any sort in the air cleaner, despite there being ample evidence that they'd been very close to that area, in the form of
lots of wires & plugs/sockets etc under the tupperware that'd been gnawed into oblivion! It took about a week of fairly solid work to get everything cleaned/emptied & fixed/running again, but the Spyder still stunk of baked mouselets and baked on mouse piss
all the time, and it also reeked of burning plastic every time it ran for more than a couple of minutes when I gave it back to the owner!
I think that may've been at least a part of the reason why he traded it in on a newer model shortly after, despite the 'upgrade' meaning that he hadta give up his really nicely modded/upgraded V-Twin motor! He still bemoans that 'upgrade'
, but he also shudders every time he recalls the combined smells!
Just Sayin'
