Electric Start, Air-Cooled: Motogadgets’ 1980 Yamaha XT500… By the early 1970s, the big single-cylinder four-stroke off-roader was thought a species all but extinct. After all, the great British 500 singles like the BSA B50 […]
Tag: Yamaha XT500
Torakusu XT: Yamaha XT500 Street Tracker
Jean-Michel Atlan’s street tracker, reimagined 40 years later… In 1877, Japanese entrepreneur Torakusu Yamaha, the third son of a samurai of the Kishu-Tokugawa family, founded Nippon Gakki Company in order to manufacturer reed organs. Torakusu’s […]
Junkyard XT: Yamaha XT500 Scrambler
Junk to Jewel: Resto-modded XT500 from Workshop43… The Yamaha XT500 remains one of our favorite single-cylinder motorcycles of all time. The big air-cooled enduro won the inaugural Paris-Dakar Rally, swept the podium in the second […]
Streamlined XT: 1980 Yamaha XT500
Black Cycles Australia builds a streamlined XT for Retromotive… If you’ve been following BikeBound for any length of time, you know we’re big fans of the Yamaha XT500. Not only did the 500cc single win […]
Yamaha “SRXT500” Vinduro by 86 Gear
From Street to Scrambler… By 1971, BSA and Matchless had both gone out of business, and with them the British 500 singles whose torque and character had proved perfect for such a wide variety of […]
Torque Monster: Yamaha HL500 by Se7en Six Collective
“This motor effortlessly lifts the front in 3rd while ploughing 3-inch furrows at the rear…” The Yamaha HL500 — aka the “Aberg Yamaha” — is one of the most fascinating motocross bikes of the 1970s. […]
Queen of Dakar: ZZ Moto’s 1981 Yamaha XT500 Resto
The Yamaha XT500 is one of our favorite bikes of all time. The twin-shock, four-stroke single-cylinder enduro came out in 1976, a street-legal version of the TT500 introduced a year earlier. Yamaha USA had realized […]
A Real Thumper: Yamaha XT500 Resto by 86 Gear Motorcycles
“It is a real thumper. Lots of low end torque. Raw and real.” If you’ve been following BikeBound for very long, you’ve probably heard us sing the praises of the Yamaha XT500. It’s hard […]
Yamaha TT500 VMX by Beeton Fabrications
An HL500-inspired vintage motocross racer from Down Under… It may seem hard to believe today, but by the mid-1970s, the four-stroke thumpers that once ruled the dirt were all but dead. Both BSA and Matchless […]
Dirt Road Ripper: Yamaha XT500 by MotoRelic
“Foot down and elbows up! Braaap!” The Yamaha XT500 is one of the most successful dual-purpose machines of all time, a big-bore four-stroke that proved itself in professional desert racing and on thousands of miles […]
