My love of motorcycles was forged in the mid 80s with a string of two stroke learner legal motorcycles. I would say that I had best part of ten bikes over five years before my attention moved into cars, then scooters.

Four strokes motorcycles never really appealed, and I always thought that If ever I returned to the motorcycle scene it would be with some sort of looney two stroke death machine.

I work in an environment where most people have bikes, and it was hard to resist the chatter of the canteen lunches., with photos and banter of evening pub visits and drunken camping. My dream bike, the RD350LC were now far too expensive to ever consider joining the movement at work. That said, after a brief glance on Ebay one day, I found a bike that ticked every box I could ever dream of. It was a four stroke, but it had the looks of the LC, at a price I could afford.

Long story short, the XS400 was to become my realization that these four stroke sleepers, could be made cool with the right modifications, and every bit as exciting as the less reliable two stroke equivalents of the day. The bike I purchased was complete and well restored so all I had to do was use it.

However, owning this bike had resurrected my passion for motorcycles, and before long I had spotted a project bike for sale on a facebook group.

This was an XS250 , the smaller capacity version of the 400. I placed a deposit on the bike and went over to Stoke On Trent to view. The seller kicked the bike over and explained it would run on choke but died once it was taken off. To me this should be sorted with a carburetor clean and possible refurbishment. Other than that it all looked pretty straight forward.

Later that evening the bike was back at my house after the balance was paid, and a few days later the strip down process has started, and I began to form a vision of how I wanted it to look on its return to the road after more than 20 years.

I felt that the scrambler style would give me a bike that would be more comfortable over longer distances than the 400 cafe racer, with the option of being able to do some moderate off roading should the need arise. On top of that it would look radically different to the 400, so between the two bikes I should have a bike for most occasions.

So my plan was to strip down the bike and check over all of the main components. These would be cleaned, painted and rebuilt replacing anything that looked vaguely suspect with new where needed. One of the first items to be dismantled were the carbs. It was no great surprise to find a lot of varnishy residue inside both, and one of the float valves was corroded and leaking. This was almost certainly the cause of the running issues so I set to cleaning and ordering the replacement parts.

To assist with the cleaning process i decided to buy a sonic cleaner. This was around £50 from ebay and works by capitation bubbles induced by high frequency pressure (sound) waves to agitate a liquid (water). The agitation produces high forces on contaminants adhering to substrates like metals, plastics, glass, rubber, and ceramics. This action also penetrates blind holes, cracks, and recesses.

Progress was slow but the end results were pleasing. The only issue was that there wasn’t a crburetta refurb kit for the 250cc version of the bike. Not sure why exactly as the 400s were pretty easy to get parts for. This meant that I had to source a second set for parts.

Upon stripping down the air filter boxes there were further signs that this bike had been seriously neglected. The air filter elements were rotten and had large holes that would have proven to be ineffective and even damaging to the engine.

The engine was a silver laquored finish which didn’t really fit the look I was after.

So as with the carbs, the engine was removed, cleaned meticulously, and painted with Very High Temperature paint. The fins were then cut back to reveal the silver aluminum and it was given a coat of laquor.

The frame was never going to be right from the stock yamaha factory design, as it was more about the additional styling in the way of plastics and grab rails to support the pillion passenger. So the angle grinder was put to good use in removing a carefully selected amount of metal, which was then replaced with a purpose made ‘hoop’ that required tubular inserts and a bead of weld on each side.

Once the frame had been modified, I had a base to be able to create a combined splash tray, indicator mounts and number plate fixing. I used sheet aluminum for this and also made some retro style side covers to replace the plastic ones.

After a little time investigating the status of the fuel tank,it quickly became apparent that it was in a very poor state of repair. The inside was rusty, and the outside had hidden dents that were covered by large amounts of body filler. It was a more streamline ‘teardrop’ style fuel tank that /i never really thought would suit my build, so this was the reason i needed to replace it with a ‘coffin’ style tank. This was brought from eBay and had just the right amount of patina.

At this point I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted the bike to look, and the fuel tanks ‘tin worm’ was going to be the basis for the rest of the weathering on the bike. I knew I wanted to upgrade the lights to the brighter LEDs to replace the tungsten bulbs, so i purchased an inexpensive replacement main light and indicators from the internet. I also brought a three part kit from the internet to create fake rust, which worked really well when applied to the bowl and rim of the headlight. I wired all the lights to the bike and was really happy with the look I had. I also brought a replacement front mudguard which also received the same treatment.

The exhaust was originally a two into one standard yamaha effort with quiet baffling as you would expect on a stock road bike. However, these were changed to individual manifolds with gold heat proof insulation, with stubby silencers.

The only way to get the wheels to look anything like decent, was to have them powder coated. The tyres were very old and as with much on this build they didn’t fit the look I was after. So both needed to be addressed. I had a local motorcycle shop strip off the old rubber, strip out the bearings and send them away to be coated gloss black. I ordered tyres that had an aggressive tread pattern.

The original seat was grotesque, and sold on eBay to a buyer that no doubt wanted it for its originality. Obviously it could play no part in this build anymore, so I had to fabricate one myself. I used a cardboard template to select the area I had available. From here I created a plywood laminate base, and modelled fiberglass around this, the frame and the tank, after wrapping everything in celophane to protect.

The bike is still not complete even though it was brought in 2019. There have been a number of reasons for that, but I do hope that I will be able to enjoy ridingthis project, and indeed letting oter people enjoy seeing this bike out and about on the roads of Derbyshire in the future.