Yamaha RZV500 V4 Two Stroke street legal Kenny Roberts & Eddie Lawson GP500 Racer The Inside Story

[Music] [Music] [Music] Wow hi guys welcome to another episode of Cramer's classic cycles I'm Kirby Kramer today I have something really fun to share with you we have 2 not 1 1984 Yamaha RZ 500s these were legend back in the day and still pretty much are they're a v-twin put together to make two V twins so in essence you've got two cylinders like this and two cylinders like this at 50 degrees producing about 80 horsepower in the street level trim these were similar to the o/w 70 that Kenny Roberts won several world championships with in the early 1980s Yamaha built these in limited production to celebrate those victories I believe these were only made in 84 and 85 they make about 50 pounds of torque they weigh about 430 pounds dry about 475 all up and they are really a hoot to ride a very broad powerband and they have a counterbalance ER in them so they're actually quite smooth both of these bikes have JL pipes on them one in stainless and ones painted black as you can see the bike with the black pipes on it also has an olan's rear suspension system so we're going to go through a little bit on these bikes and then pull off some of the fairings and also show you some of the magic inside and then we'll go out and ride them really a treat to see two of them going at the same time if you listen carefully at certain settings you can hear the engines synchronize their harmonizing at the same speed powerbands pretty narrow it doesn't really make any power until about 6,000 rpms and the sweet spots about 7 to 10 that's where this really gets going so some of you may not know these bikes were never imported into the u.s. that's because smog restrictions started kicking in in 1984 and 85 they brought in the RZ 350 it's little brother but Yamaha chose not to import these into the u.s. these two bikes are Canadian point of entry so it's interesting if you look at both of them the speedometer is in kilometers per hour both of them have pretty low miles also up in front here space is kind of tight it does have oil injection so there's an oil injection tank on the left and a radiator reservoir on the right both of these bikes had the Yamaha power valve system and you can hear that kick in it goes and cycles when you first turn the key on the rest of it's pretty standard where you've got a tachometer turn signals high low beam low oil light and of course radiator temperature a lot of cool things on the RZ 500 one of the most notable things about the RZ 500 is the perimeter steel frame these were mild steel and they cradled the entire engine the Japanese version actually had a handmade aluminum alloy system which saved about 30 pounds that was to compensate for the fact that the Japanese version was detuned to about 65 horsepower these bikes were reportedly somewhere in the mid 80s on the rear end here you'll see it's an 18-inch mag wheel this one's been powder-coated black and it's got a unique rear disc on it you can see the rear disc is vented and it's actually in three separate pieces so it can flex easily the idea was to reduce weight and increase heat dissipation one- i found with these discs is at this age they all tend to warp a little bit they're still very effective but you get a little wobble for some reason on the rear brakes this bike along with many i've seen has jaeil pipes they're a handmade work of art all hand welded I believe this one's stainless steel they're made in Czechoslovakia in a minute we'll pull off the cowlings you can see the artwork that went into making these pipes something else that's kind of interesting a little detail is the Kickstarter these bikes are easy to kick-start but it has a détente Kickstarter that goes back opens up you kick the bike and on a normal bike you just close it and be done but this hits your knee this one locks Ford which is a nice feature moving our way around to the front Yamaha was fresh off winning the 1984 Grand Prix they did the vented front discs on the front and they also went with an anti dive front brake system this was unique in that when the front brake was applied it would actuate a valve that was supposed to restrict the dampening on the compression on the fork to stop the front end from diving under hard braking my experience is that it didn't really work very well and it took away from them some of the responsiveness of the front brake you can see up here there's a little adjustment on it as well the front wheel in itself is unique it's 16 inches so it was a smaller front wheel designed to make the bike more nimble and you can see just how wide this front tire is it's as wide as some rear tires on bikes of the day the whole bike is of course fully faired and a few minutes we'll get into pulling off the cowlings and show you what it looks like on the inside it featured clip-on handlebars which are made of hand welded steel typical gauge package up front the fuel tank is hinged so when the seat and rear cowling is removed the fuel tank will show you in a minute flips up like this that would give you access to the upper cylinders for changing the spark plugs and for doing some minor adjustments the exhaust pipes actually run through the top exhaust pipes run through the seat area here and they crisscross under the seat that's how they make it so that the rear pipes don't have to stick further and they're all the same length which worked out quite well it's a six-speed gearbox I think the crank cases are made of magnesium so it was very state-of-the-art in its day one of the things that's neat about this seat is right now it's set up for a single rider but by removing these knobs this back shell pops off and it's actually a twin seat most of the guys think it looks better like this let me see if I can get this little cover to come off these knobs actually also assist in removing the seat which is nice so I think you'd agree it looks way better with the seat cowl on so the seat removes just like a normal motorcycle seat then if you take a look inside here some of the magic begins here's the two exhaust pipes that are the upper ports I'll show you that here in a minute an awful lot of beautiful hand welding going on to make those to tip up the fuel tank it's pretty easy you need the specialty design stick it actually came with a prop rod but that's been lost over the years so all you have to do is pull this little pin up front it's got a full tank of gas so it makes it a little bit heavier and then this tips up here and I've made this little stick which does a pretty good job of holding it this one also has a quick disconnect here so we can tip it up either even further so you can see now these are the top two cylinder heads and you see this is at an angle about the same as the stick and the forward cylinder heads order a different angle will show you those here in a minute not a lot of room to spare as you can see it is fairly easy to get to the spark plugs air cleaner system is here and then on each side there are two carburetors it's quite interesting the lower carburetors are fed by case reed valves which go directly into the crank case because of lack of room the upper cylinders have Reed's going directly into the cylinders instead of the crank case the front part of the engine has a counter balancer on the front crankshaft but there's no counter balancer on the second crankshaft the bike runs very smooth this is your choke lever right here it's kind of neat it's got four little cables going to it so when you pull this lever that sets the choke on all four carburetors there are 26 millimeter makuu knees so now so you can see more of the engine I'm going to pull off the bottom cowling and then the two side cowlings and we'll get a good look at what's going on inside so now we remove the cowlings we've got the tank flipped up and it's we'll try and get some close-ups here of just the way the engines laid out it's got if you want to bring the camera in closer here so you can see one set of cylinders is that approximately at this angle and the other set is at this angle roughly in between they both have their own separate crank shafts than they were geared together so it was a very compact engine if you come down underneath you can see part of the advanced suspension for its time was to put the shock absorber for the rear-end way down here and you can see it was also adjustable it also had the advantage of lowering the center of gravity again you can see more of the beautiful handiwork on those jl pipes come up to the other side we'll walk around the engine and we can see more of the carburetors I remove the air filter plenum this of course is the water pump here and the electronics are mounted up here to the right and throughout the bike this bike had the Yamaha power valve control system which increased the throttle performance the factory bikes the o/w 70 and 70 ones actually had rotary valves and they didn't have the power valve system on some of them some of them they did so very high-tech for its day so on this side you can see I've pulled up the left air box plenum and you can see the two carburetors are minded one on top of the other side by side they actually feed in and go to 90 degree intake ports as I mentioned earlier the lower cylinders were fed by reed valves going into the crankcase because of space constraints the upper cylinders are fed by a reed valve going straight into the engine cylinder obviously rejecting is a big deal this one's jetted pretty closely but quite a bit of labour to get all this off to change the Jets something else that was unique for its time is the gearbox on these was known as a cassette system which is pretty common today but it enabled the mechanics of the day to change out the gear ratios much faster at the track let's rock [Music] [Music] [Music] well that was really fun I can only get to about third gear these are geared very tall but still moving along pretty good Kramer's classic cycles I'm Kirby Kramer thanks for watching our feature on Yamaha is our Z 500 V for two strokes and reminds me when I was a kid I wanted to be Kenny Roberts and this is about as close as I'm gonna get if you like this video please subscribe and hit the thumbs up button and we'll create some more for you thanks again [Music] [Music]

Channel: Cramer's Classics

Views: 305,336

Keywords: Yamaha, RZ500, V4, two stroke, motorcycle, Eddie Lawson, Kenny Roberts, classic, classics, classic motorcycle, street bike, track bike, GP500, race, race bike, fast, gopro, dslr, canon, mavic, mavic air, dji, 200d, ikan beholder, takstar, sony, sony vegas, road bikes, Allen Millyard, street legal, Ow71, world champion, RZV500, RZV500R

Id: -FXlhLPLTeE

Length: 16min 13sec (973 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020