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“I started my business making exhausts out of my garage, a lot of people don’t know that,” Mike said. “I started making them twelve years ago. That’s how I got to quit my full-time job working for the city of Palmdale [California] as a maintenance technician.”

In the beginning, Mike was following market trends. “When we started out doing it we had an exhaust line called Storm Pipes we designed with a lot of innovation. Back then we went after looks,” he said. “I had a good idea of what we used to do then, but when everything in the industry…well, you know, when the custom bike thing fell on its face, that all just kind of went away.” MGS had been offering 17 different styles of exhausts for companies such as Big Dog and several other custom bike manufacturers. “When all that went away we started going after the OEM performance market, putting in cams and all that. Because we owned a dyno, and we were selling a lot of other people’s exhausts, I found out what I didn’t like about their systems, so I set out to have a couple of things I wanted. I wanted the fitment to be really good, I wanted the look to be really good, I wanted it to sound good, and most of all I wanted it to perform really good.”

Mike set out to compete with the number one selling pipe in 2008. “I went after them and kind of used them as a model because I knew to bolt on a set of those pipes was about 7hp,” he said. “So I made my mind up if I could achieve that, I could look people in the eye and sell ’em my exhaust. I wasn’t gonna sell ’em my exhaust if it wasn’t even that good, if I couldn’t even achieve that. So me and [Dyno tech] Mike Strozzi used to stay at night after I closed the doors and I just started cutting up head pipes.” Like with most innovation, it was all trial and error at the start. Mike said, “I’d put it on my wife’s FLH and we’d put it on the dyno and it was like ‘that didn’t work, let’s try this…’ I went through that for about four months, two to three nights a week, and then I just fell upon it. We did a pull on the dyno and I couldn’t believe it, it was a 12 horsepower gain. So, we actually just fell upon that and not only do they look good — they’re four-inch mufflers — but they’re the most horsepower-producing pipe on the market.”

The difference with a True Dual, Mike explained, is “There’s a stock exhaust like on a 2010 Street Glide, one goes underneath and the other one goes out the back, and not a lot of people like that. Ours goes out both sides.”

MGS’s True Dual Exhaust System is offered in a choice of triple-plated chrome or black ceramic, and he hasn’t taken the coatings lightly. “You get a pair of [another brand] black true duals and you look at them sideways and they scratch. To get a cut above everyone else, I wanted to do something better. The really cool thing we did is search out a company that actually primes them first, bakes them to 700-degrees, and then ceramic coat them. But the finish on the pipes still weren’t good enough for me, they were really rough looking. So we have our pipes polished first, like they’re gonna be chromed, and then after they’re polished we have them primered, then baked to 700-degrees, and then we have the ceramic coating baked to 700-degrees and what we do, like no other company, we coat the head pipe, the heat shield, and the muffler.” MGS offers three different-style tips to choose from: chrome, black, and brushed aluminum. “The brushed aluminum looks really good, we’ve sold a lot of them with the black ceramic,” Mike said.

Check out the MGS True Dual Exhaust System and MGS’s myriad other offerings at www.mgscustombikes.com, but be sure and check out his videos also on the MGS YouTube channel “mgs104rocks”.

“We use YouTube a lot to promote them,” he said. “It’s working. I mean we make twenty-five at a time and every time we get a lot in, they’re gone.”