The Plan...

I've wanted a motorcycle for as long as I can remember. It just seems that other things often take priority over spending a ton of cash on a two wheel death machine. I always told myself that one day I'd buy a Harley. The problem is, spending 15 or 20 thousand on a Harley would more than likely not be happening anytime soon. I also wanted to customize any bike I got to a certain style I liked. I wanted little or no chrome, a hard tail section, solo seat, either some ape hangers or z bars, ditch all the turn signals, maybe even make it a suicide shifter. Pretty much lose anything that didn't make it stop or go faster. Something similar to the following few pics...







Another problem was that I didn't want too spend all that money on a bike and then start fooling around with the engine and changing parts and cutting up the frame when I had never before even attempted to fix or modify a motorcycle and knew absolutely zero about engines.



Well, not to long ago I stumbled onto a website called http://www.xs650chopper.com/ . I discovered hundreds of people building gorgeous bikes, and all from the platform of the old 1970 to 1983 Yamaha XS650's. From that site I discovered several more, like http://www.650motorcycles.com/ , http://www.xs650.com/ , and the amazing 650 garage at http://xs650temp.proboards.com/index.cgi. Almost a subculture of people building and modifying the Yamaha XS650 in every way imaginable.

I made my mind up. I had been dreaming of owning a bike for years and now it seemed possible. I could find an old rundown dirt cheap XS650 for under $1000 for sure and build my own bike the way I wanted to. And since there was this wealth of information and mechanical how to's on these sites, I could learn everything about the engine and bike as I went along. I would strip the bike COMPLETELY apart, even the engine and all the wiring and teach myself everything along the way. And, in the end, if the bike blows up, well, at least it didn't cost me $15,000.

In the following pics, all are modified Yamaha XS650's. Of course, I don't imagine I'll get mine as sweet as these ones, but even half as nice and I'll be happy.






Now, all I gotta do is find a cheap Yamaha XS650.