Street-Tracker 650 Yamaha

Yes, I know. Everyone's building a street-tracker, or maybe everyone's already got one. Doesn't matter--I still want one. I have a deep aversion to buying anything that I can build myself, as well as the kind of attachment you can only develop for ideas that you thought up all on your own.

That's right. I invented the street-tracker. Stood right there in Dave Best's Harley shop in about 1984, staring at the immaculate Shell/Champion 750 Yamaha flat-track bike, and thinking "Man, what a cool thing that would be--put a headlight on that puppy, sweet-talk your way to a license plate, holy cow, wouldn't that be the fastest, lightest, best-handling thing you could ever ride on the street?" Everyone I mentioned it to gave me the look. No way I was going to build the thing, you understand, nor buy it--if it wasn't a motocross bike, I really had no use for it at that point in my life, but the idea was just sooooo neat.

So now that the dang things are almost a fad, I'm jumping on the bandwagon and gonna finally get one my ownself.

My brother-in-law Byron found me the bike at a yard sale while I was off on vacation, and through a complicated cell-phone multi-party negotiation, bought it for me and even hauled it home. My wife thinks he's a bad influence; actually she thinks we are kind of simultaneous bad influences on each other.

Here's the $400 beauty:

Well, actually, that's it after I took off the dumb apehangers. And cleaned the carbs so it would run. And made a few illicit runs to town on it just because it's a motorcycle, and it runs.