The project
For a while now I've wanted a bike thats a little less practical than ULGa and was roughly the same age as me (1980 was a vintage year). The other thing was it had to be different to ULGa, so where she is an inline 4 chain drive (this discounts the usual favourites like the Honda CB750) the XS850 is a shaft drive triple. Also, crucially, it had to be at a price I could afford!
I pcked it up on Ebay for the princely sum of £370.22 plus another £99 to transport it from Suffolk to the OMC in London where I'm goin to work on it. So this is what greated me when I got to Oval yesterday, along with much merriment and ribbling from Matt, Si and Em.
1980 Yamaha XS850
do we think 29,623 or 129,623?
Day 1
I Spent about 4 hours today stripping the bike down, and was pleasantly supprised that its not as bad as I feared. The frame looks solid, rust on the exhaust looks superficial, maybe its not going to be so bad...
Stripped out the old air box, definitely not keeping that ugly old thing, got the carbs off and opened up the first one to see this...
Basically the residual fuel had been standing for so long it turned to tar... They'll need to be ultrasonically cleaned, luckily Matt knows a guy, but now I'm a tad woriied abut the rest of the engine.
Also noticed that the rubber sleave on the shaft drive is perished... but the plan is to get the carbs cleaned, refit them and see if we can get some life out of the engine, if that works then I'll get started on the shaft drive and the rest of the bike.
This is how things looked at the end of the day.
© 2012 by Tom Harrington.