My ol' Yamaha YSR50

[Smithers]

How could I forget this gem. I actually put a LOT of miles on this little bike! It was neglected and went through 2 friends before I could convince em to hand it over to me. Then I went through the whole thing and put a Toomy Racing kit on it. The colors are from the early 90's Kawasaki ZX-7 bikes that I really like for some reason.



This bike got ridden nearly everyday to work or from town to town on the back roads. The powerband was really annoying since the bike had NO power until it screamed to the top of the RPM range. Then it would really pull. But it's not like it had a lot of power so it would only pull about 60mph I think... but that was if the wind was at your back. This little bike would have been a terror if I had put a larger 4-stroke engine in it. A lot of the guys that raced them would put 80cc dirt bike engines into them and they were pretty mean. But I think a 125 4-stroke engine of some sort would have been perfect. All in all it was a really fun bike but just too damn slow when you can jump on any old streetbike and rip off down the road at 100mph in 7-10 seconds.

[Smithers]

Here is a shot of my ol buddy on the bike before I started working on it. It was kinda beat up and a friend of mine had tried to strip off the paint but got distracted and gave up. Hell we were only in high school!




Ah seeing it like this makes me sick. Such a cool bike neglected so much. I really had a fun time working on this little wheeler. I sold the bike to a guy at one of the restaurants I had worked at who then sold it to one of my other friends who always thought the bike was cool. Then the friend that I bought it from took it from him! So the little YSR50 went full circle and is still owned by a good friend of mine. He bored out the engine and bought all sorts of trick parts for it. I think he's crazy cause the bike it still slow, haha. It REALLY needs a bigger engine! It would have been cheaper to put a larger engine in it than the parts he built the current engine up with. I'm not sure how much the bike was bored out but you can only go so big. I'll have to update this thread sometime and get some recent pictures of it. At least he's holding on to the bike for good this time.

I wouldn't mind getting one of those modern Honda 50 race bikes! Now those look like something worth putting a little effort into.