The bike is a 1991 Honda Nighthawk with just over 180,000 miles on it. It's around 230ccs, and carburated.
This is my first bike, so I don't have any idea what is typical behavior for a motorcycle. It's been running great, but there are a couple of things which I don't know how to gauge the severity of. I'm relying on this bike for my commute, so what I want find out is if this bike is safe to keep using as a commuter, or if I should stay off of it until I can take it into a shop.
It was really wet and cool yesterday morning, so you could see exhaust rising out of tailpipes clearly. A large amount of exhaust was rising from all around the engine block as I was idling at stop lights on my way home. It appeared to be coming from somewhere on the front of the engine where the exhaust is outputted, but the bike had gotten pretty wet the night before while it cooled enough to put a cover on, so I wasn't sure how much of it was exhaust and how much was steam. There is exhaust coming out of the tail pipes, but I don't know if it's less than it ought to be.
Here's a photo:
I know that this model has an issue where the exhaust pipe cracks near the shifter/break pedal, but that's not the case here. The exhaust was definitely coming from further up. When I got back home I put it in neutral and felt around the connection between the exhaust pipes and the engine block, but couldn't feel any sort of breeze. By that point it had warmed to the point where you couldn't see the exhaust anymore either, so I'm stumped. I'm tempted to say that it was just steam, but there seemed like way too much for that to be the case.
The reason this concerns me is that when I first got the bike, the shop that I took it into welded up a crack in the aforementioned spot and mentioned that if exhaust wasn't flowing right it could back up and kill the engine (kill as in render scrap). I have been getting random stalling, as mentioned here, so I'm wondering if this is potentially related to that, perhaps the early stages of a terminal problem.