Millennium R1
Millennium R1
When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping (and try not to spend much)
JOHN BURNS
THE WOMEN'S MAGAZINES SAY THAT WHEN YOU NEED to wash that man right out of your hair, rearrange the furniture. Me? I get on Craigslist. And one day, BOOM!, there it was, the bike of my dreams: 2000 Yamaha YZF-R1, 14k miles, pranged-up fairing, $2500. Will go no lower than $2000. Oh, a hard bargainer, eh? I picked up the phone...
Here's a secret I am almost reluctant to share: Inside every crotch rocketliter-bikes, especially-there's a great standard motorcycle waiting to get out. Insomniac readers with memories might recall the scraped-up `96 Kawasaki ZX 9R I stuck an LSL Superbike handlebar kit from Spiegler USA onto a few years ago. That one's been a great bike, but I have to admit, it's not much to look at. (Mr. Editor Hoyer said it looks like the side of a garbage truck, before relenting and saying it looks like the bottom of a garbage truck.) The first-generation Ri, on the other hand, is the one I've always wanted to peel naked: that beautiful brushed-aluminum frame, the braced swingarm, the stacked gearbox... The 2000 model actually has a few refine ments, without giving. up the raw, torqu ey flavor of the long-stroke original.
Young Jason (not his real name) was 19 years old and selling the bike for a friend who'd decided to move to Brazil to get away from it all after ramming his R I into some immovable object or other. Something had impacted the front wheel pretty good. punching a hole in the fender, bending the right brake disc and leaving a terrifying du eling scar on the front wheel. After a few minutes on the battery charger, she fired up and ran, just barely on about two cylinders, coming onto all four at higher rpm. Hmmm. Clogged pilot jets. Too bad the youngsters know nothing about the mysteries of the carburetor, or melody, or love, or... Good com pression, though.
While Jason went on about need ing money to fix his truck because his girlfriend had landed it wrong off a jump, I couldn't help noticing this was one clean 10-year-old Ri. Low miles, unmolested fasteners all around, stored inside and the thing I always look for: a stock exhaust system. The grips still looked new.
How low wilt you go?
This was too easy. Rather than risk the bad karma of haggling the kid even low er, I gave him $1500 and rolled the thing onto the back of my truck, along with a box containing some crumpled body work, the official Yamaha manual(!), Jason's checkbook (!!), a few Legos, a bicycle tube and some other stuff.
Fifteen hundred, says Jason.
Congratulating myself on my motor cycle-buying skills and near-complete lack of remorse at taking a callow youth to the cleaners, I then noticed as I was rolling the thing up my driveway how the bars pointed at quite a differ ent tangent compared to the direction of travel. And when I parked it and stood back for a good eyeballing, it became apparent that those big gold anodized fork tubes looked like the Johnnie Walker logo-not so parallel, not even close. DAMMIT! That kid TOOK ADVANTAGE OF ME!
Let's not panic. Let's call an expert and panic. No worries, said my friend Brad, you can get Ri front ends all day on eBay for $300. He's right. Apparently, Yamaha sold so many Ris, there are lots of parts out there. Even better, when I got the front wheel in the air to take things apart, as soon as I loosened the triple-clamps and did a little jiggling, the front end untweaked itself. All was well in forkville after all. Yessss!
How did we do this stuff before eBay? I oniy needed one but got two straight front brake discs for $80, a new front fender for $25, lower triple-clamp for $40 (one of the stops was busted off the original), new left footpeg and car rier (polished) for $40, Chinese brake lever for $9.95 (how do they do it?) and ghetto LED turnsignals for $15.
I liKe carburetors tlie way stereo philes like vinyl: I like their analog feel. I'm sure if! worked on bikes for a living I'd hate carburetors, but then if I worked on bikes for a living I'd have starved long ago. I like the little brass jets and things, and the satisfaction of Jcnowing how carburetors work. Yeah, sure I do. While I was going to be in there anywayto clean the pilot jets, I went ahead and got new one-sizebigger ones from Sudco instead for $3.80 each. And while I was doing that, I stuck in new NGK CR-9E sparkplugs for, like, $6 each. She fired up and ran like a champ-and nearly burned to the ground thanks to the fuel leak that sprang up shortly after I poured in some cheap auto-parts-store fuel system-cleaner concoction. After idling a while, the engine would load up and die. What the #$%&?! It all pointed to a bad carburetor float, but all the floats and float needles/seats looked fine.
Back to the Internet, where www. rl-forum.com served up the answer on a silver platter: What goes bad are the 0-rings that seal the float-needle seats inside the carburetors. Replacing the 0-rings cured the leak and resulted in a crisp-running Ri that feels freshly bro ken in, which at 14,000 miles, is just about what this one is. Beast...
From there, it was a simple matter of ordering up my favorite Buell XB headlight assembly-super light and packing a pair of H7 bulbs-for $116 from my local Harley dealer. And I flirted with the idea of a Speed Triple flyscreen or similar before being over come by a wave of penury and inspira tion from the Shinya Kimura School of Cheap. Shinya likes to use as much of the original bike as possible, warts and all, and a little playing with my Dremel tool left me with a "flyscreen" made up of the R1 `s stock windscreen and upper fairing fragments, complete with scratches and what appear to be cigarette burns. Way authentic. Instead of looking like something tacked on, the original blue mini-fairing provides a visual clue of the way the Ri originally looked and actually does deflect a little wind off the chest. Together with the Buell lights (on a custom, Hoyer-reinforced alumi num bracket courtesy of his new TIG welding apparatus), the Ri looks sort of like an overgrown Zuma scooter. Or that frightening thing with eyeballs on the Geico commercials. I was so inspired I kept the Dremel humming, slicing up the fairing lowers to come up with a bellypan that covers unsightly bits like the shock linkage and exhaust collector. A little sandpaper on the edges of the pan and a blue Sharpie, and the results would make Pierre Terbianche envious.
Let's sum it up, then: $1500 for the bike and a bit more for the taxman; $116 plus tax for the Buell lights; $80 for brake discs; $130 for the lower triple-clamp, footpeg, etc. There were a few trips to the hardware store, too, but we're looking at a strong-running, 133-horsepower bike I'm not at all ashamed to be seen on for under $2K. (The CW spares shed did hook me up with a lovely pair of new Dunlop Qualifiers, gratis.) I'm thinking about going really crazy and dropping anoth er G for an Ohlins shock and steering damper. Who am I kidding?
It's not perfect, but I like that-less suspense this way, re: the first ding. My favorite pre-existing imperfection, in fact, is the shallow baseball-shaped dent in the rear of the gas tank. It's not obvious, but it's there-and must've been put there by a manly man with literal balls of steel-a left one, anyway. Ouch. I'll take the glory
