A Short History of the Yamaha HL500 The Yamaha HL500 was an incredibly important motorcycle for the Japanese marque, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it wasn’t actually built or designed by Yamaha. The HL500 started as an an idea in the mind of Swedish motocross legends Torsten Hallman and Sten Lundin in…
Vintage Steele is a Vermont-based custom motorcycle workshop with a small team of dedicated wrenchers who have made a name for themselves over the past few years by building practical, daily-rideable custom motorcycles. The Yamaha XS650 The Yamaha XS650 was first introduced in 1968 and stayed in production in one form or another until 1985…
Snow bikes have been growing in popularity in recent years, and there’s been a surge in the number of companies making kits that can be bolted to many modern and vintage motocross bikes to convert them for snow use. Orion Anthony is a resident of British Columbia and the founder of Northern Lights Optics –…
The Yamaha SR400 (and its sibling the SR500) are amongst the most reliable, and generally bulletproof motorcycles in existence. This is largely because the engine started life in the Yamaha XT500, an enduro-adventure motorcycle built to compete in the world’s toughest adventure races. It succeeded in its mission, winning both the Paris-Abidjan-Nice and the Paris-Dakar…
The Yamaha XJR 1200 was released in 1995 as a large displacement muscle bike with a comfortable upright riding position, and an almost obscenely wide torque band. Yamaha spent significant time making sure that the XJR 1200, and the XJR 1300 that followed, had sport bike handling characteristics but were tame enough for people to…
The Yamaha OW72 looks remarkably similar to the Yamaha XS650 on which it’s based, but this similarity hides a staggering amount of engineering that was poured into the OW72 by the Americans, Australians, and Japanese in an attempt to catch the Harley-Davidson XR750. The project for the Yamaha OW72 began in 1975 at the behest…
The Deus Grievous Angel is a Deus Ex Machine-built Yamaha SR400 that’s had a significant influence on the custom scene both in its native Australia and further afield in the USA and Europe. It was built by Deus in Sydney in 2010, after which it was placed on display in the Powerhouse Museum for a time,…
Back in 1978 when Yamaha first created the SR500 it was intended to be a Japanese replacement for British thumpers like the Manx Norton – yet Yamaha also made it a bike for entry level riders by building the SR series to be easy to ride and easy to maintain.
The Yamaha MT-07 (known as the FZ-07 in North America) was released in 2015 along with its larger engined sibling the MT-09. The MT-07 has a lightweight parallel twin with a swept capacity of 689cc, 74 hp at 9000 rpm, a lightweight tubular backbone semi-trellis frame, a monoshock rear, and traditional telescopic forks up front. The…
The 5 Minute History series are produced by Silodrome for eBay Motors. Click here to read the full article on eBay. The Beginning The Japanese are an interesting people. When US Commodore Matthew Perry engaged in a bit of American “gunboat diplomacy” back in 1853 the Japanese were forced to emerge from their two hundred…
The Yamaha SR250 is the little brother to the considerably more famous SR500 and SR400. Each of the SR bikes share a similar fundamental design – a single cylinder engine runs a single overhead camshaft which powers one valve in and one valve out, each of the SRs have a single exhaust pipe typically swept back…
The Yamaha TR1 is essentially the european version of the XV920R, the differences largely being an increase in displacement for the TR1, and some poorly advised styling tweaks. I’m reasonably certain that design brief for the TR1 was a picture of a Vincent Black Shadow with Japanese characters that said “do this” underneath it. Both…
