Agreed. My old harley had Vance and Hines pipes on it and , whist it never failed an MOT, it nearly always came with an “advisory notice” saying “noisy exhaust”
There was never a number on the advisory and it and it never failed but the MOT tester often gave me the dB readouts he took, either out of interest or in case I was ever stopped by the police…or maybe he just didn’t like noisy bikes 😀.
I think most decent MOT testers take a common sense approach to this stuff and the key line always seems to be “the noise emitted from the motorcycle is not clearly unreasonably above the level expected from a similar motorcycle with a standard silencer in average condition.”. My tester always seemed to reasonably compare my old Harley to “other noisy American bikes”, and not to, say, an R1 or a BMW GS etc
Of course, maybe the local police would take a different view on a different day, hence I always like to know the numbers just in case 😀
Having said that, I”m old and sensible now and i havent been stopped for years and even when I was young and stupid, the police have never tested decibels by the roadside….but then again, they never use to test window tints (or visor tints?) until they all got those fancy light tester/s…so who knows what new toys they get next 😀
To me it’s a simple equation, don’t give them a reason to pull you over and all will be good 😊 (until the new UK roadside cameras start to roll out that detect noise limits on top of everything else…then we are in trouble.
Why UK Noise Cameras are a Good Idea but Also a Bad Idea | Stable Blog.)
