Ghetto exhaust gas analysis.

I bought the Noble Savage in February of last year, so I never had a chance to see how she performs in cold weather. So lately, I've been noticing massive clouds of white smoke from the exhaust when I start her up on cold mornings, particularly when I pull the choke. This, of course, worries me, but I figure it's just condensation from the exhaust baffles, since it starts emitting about thirty seconds after the engine starts up, and stops about a minute later, presumably when all the water vapor has been expelled from the exhaust system.

Ghetto exhaust gas analysis

Still, never can be too careful. I don't have an exhaust gas analyzer handy, but there's a quick, cheap, and easy way to rule out most major culprits of visibly large volumes of exhaust smoke. This also applies to cars and anything that has both an internal combustion engine and an exhaust pipe.

The only material you'll need other than that is a clean glass or Pyrex jar...

...and that's it. Collect the exhaust gases in the jar and see what condenses on the jar walls. In particular, you're looking for blue-ish oil droplets or black soot.

Blue droplets and burnt wire smell: motor oil in exhaust (not good)

Run a finger along the walls to make sure, and sniff the jar, too! Combusted motor oil has a distinctive smell, almost like burning wires. If the droplets have a slight blue-ish tinge to them, and you collect an oily film on your finger, then you probably have oil in the exhaust, which means you might have worn piston rings or valve guides. Those both are fairly expensive fixes, in that you probably don't want to do them yourself unless you really know what you're doing and are willing to undertake a full engine tear-down, but it won't fuck your engine if you wait a little bit. That's about the worst that can show up from this test.

Black soot and 'gas station' smell: partially-combusted fuel in exhaust (not so bad)

If there's black soot (particularly if your bike backfires a lot), that's probably partially uncombusted fuel, and you might want to jiggle with your air-fuel mixture. On most bikes, you can do that by adjusting a screw on the carburetor. That's not a big deal; you're just getting worse gas mileage and might be fouling up the spark plug(s), just as you would if you're getting oil in the combustion chamber, as would be so in the above case.

Water droplets andexhaust smell: water vapor in exhaust (just fine)

If all you have is droplets of water and the smell of fully-combusted exhaust, then breathe easy. It just means you live in Florida, and the temperature of the inside of a cold exhaust pipe is below the dew point.

By the way, bonus tip: always track your mileage. I use an app on my phone called (simply enough) 'Mileage', and the free version allows you to not only track average mileage, but amount of money spent on gas, best and worst mileage, number of miles between fill-ups, and tons of other nifty statistics that will be useful to you over time. Mileage is a fairly good indicator of engine health, as decreasing mileage could be a symptom of any number of things, most commonly loose valves.