My fourth bike was a Yamaha XS250C, the C denoting 'custom'. Custom here meant a nod to Harley Davidson-styling with glossy black paintwork, a stars-and-stripes badge and lots of shiny bits hanging off it. The engine was very basic under all the glitz: a four-stroke, air-cooled parallel twin, and mine wouldn't even run properly. I took it to the local bikeshop to get the carbs balanced, as I'd read that the carbs went out of synch and caused poor performance. They charged me a(cliched) princely sum for the service, but the bike still ran no better. I still had my 125 at this stage and that would easily outrun the XS, even two-up! The XS was a heavy, ugly pile of crap.
So I started to customise it further. The halogen spotlight conversion for the crappy original headlight was a sensible modification (and indicative of my failing night vision), but alas, the only sensible mod I made. There followed a new badass seat (wider and more stepped), spiky, chrome-plated nuts and bolts here and there and a silver eagle mounted on the headlamp dish.Oh, dear. It must have looked like something the biker out of the Village People would have fancied. Christ, I had a near-miss there.
My brother Steve took a look to find out why the bike was so underpowered and found one of the carbs had a split diaphragm. A replacement rubber and wey-hey -- it was still a heavy pile of crap, but at least it had two lungs. And yeah, so much for the carb-balancing service of the local bikeshop. Huh.
I slid off the XS a few hundred yards from my mum and dad's house.. Nothing on the road to fetch me off, no warning wriggles from the bike, it just gently dropped to the ground spilling me and several hundreds pounds worth of photography equipment I was carrying. I wasn't hurt but the way it just low-sided at a moderate lean angle made me distrust the XS even more. Time to sell it and move on to bike number five.
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