Ever owned a lemon? That bike you regretted buying within a month? If not, lucky you. If so, go ahead and tell us about it. Below, in reverse order, I’ve listed the five worse nightmares ever to come into my possession. Times have moved on, but I’ll still never purchase another Yamaha again.
5. Cotton Messenger. My one and only British bike. A 324 cc Gloucester-built two-stroke twin which had all the faults associated with the proprietary Villiers engines of the period. The only time it impressed me was when a mate managed to start it up and the throttle stuck open. The feeble brakes were no match for the bike’s trial gearing and he managed to demolish the double gates at the end of his drive.
4. Honda CB 250 RS. This may seem an odd choice, as most bikers look back fondly on this single with its claimed top speed of 90 mph, but the particular one I had was a reminder that Monday mornings occur in Japanese factories, too. It just wasn’t up to a daily commute between Wirral and Bootle, where I then worked. While the balancer shaft did a good enough job of preventing vibration, bits nevertheless kept falling off it, and the back wheel buckled as a result of exposure to Liverpool’s notorious roads. The last straw was when the kickstart waved farewell in the Kingsway Mersey Tunnel - a serious problem on a motorcycle without an electric boot.
When the RS was introduced to the UK, journalists predicted that it signalled the end of the CB 250N Superdream, but it didn’t happen that way. The RS was reported as being faster and more frugal than the twin - it was certainly lighter - but never came anywhere near outselling it.
3. Suzuki GS 400T. Nice-looking custom twin. Mine boiled batteries; nothing could stop it from doing so. The UMG was baffled as to why the machine had such dodgy electrics when the closely-related GS 400 roadster experienced no such problems.
2. Yamaha YDS-7. 250 cc two-stroke twin, immediate predecessor of the air-cooled RD 250. Unreliable as hell, it ate spark plugs with a vociferous appetite. A quirk of design meant the engine received no oil when ticking over. One of the plug caps melted on mine for no obvious reason. I once lost my rag with it so badly that I kicked it across an M6 slip road. It had its revenge though, as its unreliability cost me a girlfriend and a job.
1. Yamaha XS 500. Hate, hate, hate. I thought that it would’ve been reasonable to expect that by 1977 the Japanese wouldn’t consider releasing a machine on which the valve seats persistently cracked. It was though Yamaha had decided to combine the worst features of British and Japanese bikes. Oil leaks, poor fuelling, terrible driveline lash, uneven power pulses from the crank and a balancer shaft that worked so well that the rack kept vibrating loose… the list goes on and on. Handling was below average and it spent a significant time under my ownership as the heaviest 250 single in the world.
Hate, hate, hate.
Just like you Valencia i shall never own another Yamaha again.
1.Yamaha Diversion 900...what a pile if shite. broke down on the way home from picking it up and it only got worse from there. It was foggy December afternoon on the A3 between Egham and the M25 my brand new 1996 divvy 900 started to misfire and finally cut out in the pitch back with less than 30 miles on the clock. the reason, the HT leads on the spark plugs were arcing against the petrol tank! other faults included failed fuel gauge and fuel warning light and failed speedo cable at the same time all the time. speedo cabes never lasted more than about 1000 miles. Not useful for a courier so i was always running out of fuel (did about 2500 miles a week!)
head lamps would always fall out of the fairing Yamaha stopped replacing these under warranty so ended up drilling holes in the fairing and zip tieng the headlamp in to the fairing, ohh yea and the fairing mounts always failed so they were zip tied as well.
in the 6 months it had fried 3 batteries and two gennies and one reg.
Wheel bearings especialy the front were a replace at the 6000 mile service item, they never lasted any longer.
brake calipers siezed for a laugh and needed weekly strip downs and new seals during the winter (Yamaha said that i should wash out calipers ever few hundred miles of winter riding with a hose.ffs i was doing 500 a miles a day EVERY day!)
the clutch was made of chocolate and the lever was even worse in London traffic. used to carry a couple of spares always needed to have at least one spare cable strapped to the side of the other to do a quick change over(cable bends were too tight causing regular failures could swap cables over in the dark in the rain in a min or two in the dark i did it so often!)
swing arm bearings well, they failed. often. as did the welds at the head stock.
forgotten how many fork oils seals it had fitted. and in 6 months it had two cam chain tensioners fitted.
the exhaust fell off. a lot especially at the silencers which would shear at the collector box. ended up riding it with no silencers.
On the up side it was a nice colour,
I owned it for 72,000 miles. sold it after 10 month to Bernies Breakers in Aldershot for £500. it was comprehensively FUBARed.
definitely the worst pile of poop i have ever bought. the mileage was nothing really i have owned countless bikes with hundreds of thousands of miles with out even a misfire but this one even struggled to run for the first 30 miles with out help from the RAC.
GPZ 1100 . The first fuel injected Kwaka . Riding around the lakes you had to leave it in third gear . Fourth gear was gutless below a ton . Annoying piece of shit..
Suzuki GT 250...ate plugs like they were going out of fashion,blew head gaskets so many times I had a 125 single,leaked petrol into the cylinders through the vacuum fuel tap and caused a hydraulic lock...that said I went all over the place on it and became quite adept at stripping down a two stroke..
Beckett tuned Yamaha RD250lc...so unreliable..ate pistons for fun..stripped it down once on the IOM to replace a piston..only became reliable when I fitted a YPVS motor.
Suzuki 1200 Bandit...had a habit of becoming a 600 twin in the rain..but had a propensity for wheelies in the dry..
Aprilia AF1 replica! What on earth was that engine made out of, cheese and biscuits?? Had it 2 years and I think I may have got 2k miles out of it before I gave up on it, 2 engine rebuilds and a crank failure. It looked stunning, handled lovely, but the engine was a complete dog! Never ever will I buy an italian bike ever again
There are two bikes that spring to mind and if it weren't for running other bikes in parallel, I would probably have given up motorcycling.
The first and worst was a Triumph TSS bought new in 1983. It was the last hurrah of the Meriden Co-operative being a development of the Bonneville with four valves per cylinder, new design barrels, a heavier crank, electric start and a claimed 20% power increase. It should have been good but it was an abomination and I should have known better with Triumph going bust at the time. I bought it from Anglo Bike (also a mistake) and specified some extras like rearsets, ace bars and megaphone exhausts. On the day I picked it up, it shed an indicator lens from excessive vibration and later blew head gaskets. It leaked oil due to the cylinder head being from a batch of a batch of porous castings. It got through 3 mirrors which broke due to vibration. The electric start failed but fortunately the kick start had been retained. It once caught fire from wiring problems where I made the mistake of putting it out. An inner tube perished leaving me with a flat tyre while it was parked. A coil failed. The Veglia speedo's needle swung all over the place over 50 mph. The fueling was never right and no amount of fettling ever made it run right. The stud holding the silencer in place broke causing the downpipe to break but when I replaced the downpipe, it wouldn't match the existing one due to the balance pipe stub being in a different location. So I had to replace a perfectly good downpipipe with one that matched the replacement. It broke teeth off a gear cog which chewed the matching cog. The design had never been developed properly and the quality control was a joke. The dealer was useless even though they raced one in the Battle of the Twins series, constantly claiming Triumph owed them money. If it weren't for the XL185 I had at the time, I wouldn't have enjoyed motorcycling at all during that period. After 15 months, I cleaned it up and traded it in for a Z650. It was worth taking the financial hit for something that did what it said on the tin.
I'll post again on the more recent lemon which wasn't as bad but was considerably more annoying.
The second disaster bike was an Aprilia SL1000 Falco and like ramsey_trog, it left me swearing that I will never get another Italian bike. What bugs me so much about the Falco was the way it was hyped in the motorcycle press with comments like it being of comparable build quality to Honda. Yet I didn't consider it to be of adequate quality for a motorcycle of this period when there should be no bad bikes being made.
It was bought new in 2004 from On Yer Bike who, as an Aprilia dealer (among several other marques) were selling them at very reasonable prices. I was assured that these were UK models rather than parallel imports. So how come when it was due for its first MOT, I discovered that a continental pattern headlight was fitted (replaced free as it ought to be) by OYB and an Aprilia expert determined that it was originally destined for Austria from the VIN plate? The original equipment tyres were Metzeler Sportecs and I suffered three rear-wheel punctures in the first 10,000 miles. The third occasion was a sudden deflation in the rain on the outside land of the M6 and getting to the hard shoulder without dropping it was not far short of miraculous. I don't believe this was bad luck but tyres with a weak construction. Falcos leave the factory with an air box restrictor and a restrictive map. This is normally addressed at the first service where the restrictor is removed and a wire to the ECU cut to trigger a new map. The dealer failed to do so and I felt it was gutless for the sort of bike. It was marketed as a sports tourer with the emphasis on sports. I considered it to be sports riding position and tourer performance. I was never comfortable with the engine which never seemed to be particularly fast, even after it was derestricted and was very inflexible. You really needed second gear in 30 mph limits. Early on in my ownership, it started accepting smaller and smaller throttle openings without bogging down and I just struggled home. The following day there was no recurrence and it stayed that way. A major weakness was the starter sprag clutch which could fail if you didn't get a clean start. Fortunately, I was spared this problem. It was also thirsty and expensive to service. I was never comfortable with the handling with the bike being quite tall with It finally excelled itself when riding through a village at night switching to main beam on exiting it caused everything to go black although the engine kept running. This was eventually traced to a fuse which blew and continued to blow every time a used the horn. I must have touched it being located in the wrong place by accident fumbling for the switch. The speedo started throwing up random numbers with a maximum of 270 mph and then zero. This was due to a failed speedo sensor. It also reset the rev counter to + or - 1500 revs to what the engine was doing at random. I had three offs, one doing a u-turn - my fault, one being rear ended by a pensioner in a camper van - his fault and one where it spat me off approaching a roundabout - bike's fault. For the second off, the repairer was unable to obtain a fairing bracket and so repaired the existing one. For the final off, I couldn't get the damage repainted since Aprilia use a 3-part solvent based formula and this is unobtainable since only water based is readily available. The clutch slave cylinder started leaking at some point so I replaced it with an aftermarket unit. The last straw was when I lost the passenger seat for the second time because it was reluctant to positively lock down. There was little support from the owners' club since one shouldn't complain about Aprilias on their web site and somehow these problems were my fault. If it weren't for owning a 1200S Bandit at the same time, I would have questioned whether to continue biking. So after struggling for 5 years, I tidied it up and traded it in for a used ZX-9R - Kawasaki to the rescue again. It's everything that the Falco is not and much more fun on both roads and track days.
I had a Yam XJ650 once. It wasn't exactly a bad bike, in fact it was a good bike to ride and we had some great times together. But my memories of it are distinctly mixed. The previous owner had fitted a four into one exhaust which looked the business, but presented me with a nasty surprise the first time I came to change the oil. Trouble was, the downpipes blocked access to the oil filter housing. The whole exhaust had to come off in order to get the filter out. The next snag was that the studs holding the pipes into the cylinder head were weedy little 6mm efforts. With the universal Japanese motorcycle layout of an across the frame naked four, they were well placed to catch all the crud the roads could throw at them, and then corrode to buggery. About three of the little sods sheared off. This meant that the head had to come right off and I had to cross the palm of a friend of a friend to take it into the tool room at Plessey's who had the spark erosion kit to get the rest of the studs out. It cost me several beers and a few packets of fags. I didn't fancy repeating this rigmarole every few months, so the Yam went to a new owner with the studs slathered in copper grease, and I bought a BMW Boxer to replace it. Some time later I had an XJ600 and I noticed the studs in virtually the same engine had been upgraded to 8mm, and the oil filter location had been moved anyway. Far more sensible.
XKLYBR, I should elucidate as to why the horrible XS 500 "spent a significant time under my ownership as the heaviest 250 single in the world."
It was indeed a (500 cc) twin. One cylinder kept cutting out. So...
(Please see also Triple955's allusion on this thread to his "Suzuki 1200 [i.e., four-cylinder] Bandit... [which] had a habit of becoming a 600 twin in the rain...")
A pleasure to clarify, though by no means a pleasure to ride the darn thing.
Regards.
urgh....er5 definitely a lemon... vague front end and just generally a pain in the ass...
wenchie aka cbr400 aero loved her but must hav spent about £1500 on her over the 3 years i owned changing bits and upgrading bits.... sold her for £700 as she was getting a tad lardy for my knackered shoulder and didnt want her rotting over winter lol
1979 Triumph T140E leaked 11 month old when i bought it leaked like the torrey canyon, hopeless Lucas Rita electronic ignition puched it as much as i rode it only had it 3 month i think it was traded it for a Honda 750 single overhead cam K6 i think it was, chalk n cheese chalk n cheese
250cc matchless. it was fast, compared to the bantam I had before it, but the crankpin kept snapping. mind you it got me into fixing engines and bikes. only wish I had the same enthusiasm for bikes now as I had then.
Oldbiker54, I also had a T140 back in ྋ and yes, it was a proper pig. I became a dab hand at replacing the primary chain tensioner blade (or just bodging it with a large socket wedged hard underneath it) and arsing about with the electrics. I now own 2009 865 Bonnie and she's a totally different critter, did 14,000 miles on her last year and no problems whatsoever, brilliant bike
I had a GT 750 kwaker grey import it was so unreliable,ignition coils you name it cant remember half the faults now,but it let go on me in the fast lane on the M6 bit scary trying to coast across to the hard shoulder
![The Worst Motorcycle(s) You've Ever Owned. - Forums [Biker Match]](/images/backgrounds/strips/8mobileLQ.jpg)
![The Worst Motorcycle(s) You've Ever Owned. - Forums [Biker Match]](/images/backgrounds/strips/8desktopLQ.jpg)
