Ye Introduction

...as it stood around 6pm today.

On 24 December 2011, I bought a 1979 Yamaha IT400 from a friend who was leaving the state. He gave it to me for the measly sum of $200 (because he's that good of a pal). At that time, it could be summarized as follows:

Good:

• It ran - usually well, made a pretty good amount of power
• Shiny new kickstart lever (after the old one broke)
• Cracks in exhaust bits had just been repaired
• Cheap!
• Had been generally maintained by friend

Bad:

• Fuel leaky
• Bad petcock -- pal was in the habit of pulling the fuel line off the carburetor and stopping it with a Bic pen!
• Missing items: speedometer, taillight (may not have been originally equipped), kickstand, skidplate
• Exhaust still rough despite repairs -- loud!!
• Sometimes hard to get started
• Generally rough-looking -- seems at least one of the previous owners was only really interested in keeping it running and in one piece.

I was determined from the onset to get this thing into a better shape. But how? Full restoration? I had looked (and drooled) at plenty of pictures of restored (or perhaps meticulously maintained) ITs, and that looked pretty amazing. However, a few things pulled me away from that idea:

• This IT seemed like a pretty rough starting point for a ground-up resto, and therefore...
• Such a restoration would undoubtedly be very expensive
• ...and difficult for someone with very little motorcycle experience.
• I don't have a truck to cart the thing around, which would become important, because...
• I intend to ride the IT (a lot) when it's done (so it shouldn't be a show bike). Furthermore,
• As I looked around at motorcycle styles, the most interesting to me were Dual Sports and Adventure Tourers.

Thus I decided that, as I put this motorcycle back together, it would be in the direction of a dual sport/light adventure tourer. Sort of a "resto-custom", to borrow a term from the car enthusiast world. How well will this work out? I'm not sure. I am not expecting to go in with a trials bike and come out with a KLR, or anything like that. I just want it to be usable on the road around town, and able to drive itself out to where the dirt is. And thus the project was conceived.

In coming posts, I will give a little more history, play catch-up with what I've done so far, frame some of the challenges I have encountered or foreseen so far, and probably go off topic a few times. Stay tuned!