THE X(j) FILES: EPISODE I

by Al

Scully: So did Boggs confess?

Mulder: No, it was five hours of Boggs "channeling." After three hours I asked him to summon up the soul of Jimi Hendrix and requested All Along the Watchtower. You know, the guy's been dead twenty years, but he still hasn't lost his edge.

THE X-FILES

It was summer. I was without a bike. I was broke.

I hatched a plan to get one on the cheap. So, I hit Ebay, and ended up buying a 1983 Yamaha XJ900RK for $1900.00.

The seller gave me the history. It was bought new, traded in at 47,000km, and he saw it in the bike shop. In about 1996.

It wasn't saleable. It needed a rear tyre and some other stuff. He made the bike shop an offer, they accepted, and he took the bike home to restore.

It sat in his shed, and he didn't restore it. He got married and had children instead, and found himself broke and short on time. He put a bit of oil in the cylinders and waited.

After it had been sitting in his shed for ten years, he put it on Ebay. He said it needed a paint job, an air cleaner, a battery and a rear tyre. He said he'd rigged up a remote fuel supply and started it, and it ran. He said he did a compression check, and it was up to spec on all cylinders. Easy, I thought, so I bought.

1983: the brochure

1983: the brochure flip side

He was very enthusiastic when he delivered the beast. "These are great bikes", he said. "I've had people calling me up making me offers to buy the whole bike just for the Staintune pipes."

I checked it out. It looked half OK, and he helped get it off the trailer and into the underground garage at my unit. It was hard to push. And he gave me the fuel tank and a box of parts, which included the fuel tap, the fuel gauge sender and a few other bits.

"These are famous bikes", he said. "Did you ever see that movie Stone? It was full of these, and they were wheelstanding everywhere".

I saw that movie Stone. I also worked at Kawasaki back in the early seventies, when we gave Sandy Harbutt a dozen or so Z1 900s to film Stone. I decided I'd rely on my own observations from then on.

But I remembered the Yamaha XJ900.

The first XJ was a 650. It was reliable and fast, and had a rock solid bottom end: forged crank and plain big end bearings. They subsequently made a 650 turbo (a mate of mine had one, and it was Two Wheels magazine's Bike of the Year in 1982), a 750 and a 900 using the same bottom end. Mine was the first model 900 - the XJ900RK. Yamaha had bored and stroked the 650, and after stroking it there was so little room left in the crankcase of the XJ900 that they had to put the big end bolts in upside down to clear the cases.

The Yamaha XJ900RK was physically big. It was one of the first Jap long-distance bombers. I liked the style -- I'd owned a GS850G Suzuki in the mid eighties. The Yamaha XJ900 was a comfortable tourer for its time. It had a bikini fairing, which made it wobble a bit when you got up to those speeds which it is illegal to admit doing; but its competitors had no fairing. It had a shaft drive. I've loved shaft drives ever since I broke a chain outside Coonabarabran on the weekend that Cribb and Mundey escaped from jail and no-one was picking up hitch-hikers.

The Yamaha XJ900 had a top mounted alternator to keep the engine narrow, and the transmission shafts were not in the same plane, to keep the engine short.

It had internally vented brake disks, and anti-dive forks with air assistance. When you braked, a piston on the forks would shut a hole and increase the compression damping.

It had two valves a cylinder, which meant that you saved time adjusting valves which you could spend riding. It drank a bit of fuel and it spun a bit hard at highway speeds, but it made 97 bhp and it would do about 210km/h and a standing start 400 in about 11.8. And NOTHING sounded like a Yamaha XJ900 on the pipe.

So, I wheeled the XJ900 into my garage and checked it out.

Three months, I figured. A grand plus rego, I figured. I might miss summer, but I'd have a BUNCH of spring rides.