ot: > Having now having gone out and spent thousands of dollars on a brand new Yamaha WR450F last year for racing long distance across the jungles and deserts of South Amercia & Africa, I have come to the conclusion that there are waaaay too many design flaws with this bike. Dont get me wrong, I enjoy riding it, but seriously compared to the greatly superior german bikes you can get these day, I just don't know what I was thinking.
Where to start?
The engine Actually the engine okay, it runs on virtually no oil because it blows out through the breather and goes into the carb if you ride it full gas for more than 40 minutes. I had to change the position of the breather.
The transmission: Not great for the longer hauls getting out of cities to the good stuff, I could'nt afford the cush drive so I have to limit my speed to 105km/hr instead;
The seat: Too small, resulting in serouisly bad monkey butt, had to get a Renazco seat made up and two sets of those gay gymshorts to survive. Even with all this crap, those big german made machines seem to have much more comfortable seats:
The suspension: Dangerous for the big jumps at high speed and not good for riding over huge boulders. I upgraded the suspension totally.
The fuel tanks: the stock tank was just too small, I had to put on expensive aftermarket tanks, I have 32l capacity now, but I had to move the airbox to up between the front tanks. That was PITA. :
The fuel consumption: Dont ask!
The mud guard: The high mud guard was poorly designed for my high speed riding. It slows me down so I had to get a low- profile mudguard like those BMW GSA's have.
The carburettor: I heard fuel injection engines are better. At least I can maintain mine. The only problem is its practically impossible to get with taking off the whole rear subframe! WTF? The design team must hate the Yahama maintenance team for some reason. Maybe one of the mechanics slept with a design ou's wife or something, I dunno. :
Now I am a poor navigator, so I have to have extra place for Navigation equipment, like GPS, roadbook, but there is not enough place for that either, so I was forced to change the whole front fairing so I could fit that in! I mean, why didn't the engineers consider this?
So here is pic of the steed as I bought it:
And here it is after all the design changes:
:imaposer: :imaposer:
In Jest after a similarly named post made not too long ago about some or other poorly designed bike.
