Sprockets: 1982 Yamaha XJ650 Turbo

One of these just popped up on craigslist near me and I'd like to know more about the bike. I'm having trouble finding information or a decent forum for the bikes.

I don't have the room to store it over the winter so I'm not going to buy it, but it seems very interesting and is going cheap. I wouldn't mind owning an oddball bike as long as it was fairly reliable and parts were still available.

So... What's the deal with these bikes?

The deal is that a motorcycle is the last vehicle on which you want to deal with turbo lag.

Notice that they don't make them anymore.

As I recall, Yamaha had the turbo sorted out pretty well on that bike and it got good reviews at the time. Today it's pretty collectible.

I never rode one of those but I did ride a 1st generation Kawasaki GPz turbo and man I hope Yamaha got the turbo lag figured out.

The early GPz's had the turbo under the swingarm pivot meaning there was all kinds of lag time for the exhaust to spool up the turbo and all kinds of tubing to compress air inside, making for very memorable and frankly quite terrifying turbo lag.

The one I rode scared the crap out of me. In a straight line, it was cool because you could shift your weight forward to keep the front end down as the power came on. But as you say, in a turn... do your braking, lean into the turn and roll on the power and it would pull normally for about 2 seconds which went by sorta slow and then HOLY S*^% !!!

I owned and modded an XJ650LJ (turbo seca). Really, stock the thing is a Bob Costas cat if your used to any modern sport bike. Power came on at arround 4.5-5K and really wasn't any worse than a mid 90's era 600 bringing on the juice. Overall the bike got good MPG, and was comfortable to ride, but the suspension is not great, and the brakes are not up to the task of stoping an 85hp bike. It actually behaves really well if ridden within it's capabilities. I then decided to start modding it. It changes it's behavior a bit when modded. I started by putting a manual boost controller and upping the bost to 12lbs. The bike has a boost reference fuel pressure regulator, and is blow thru so no real problems there and my previous owner had swapped a holley blue fuel pump in when the stock one died, so it had plenty of fuel. At 12lbs it got a little more unruly, and a fair amount quicker. Boost obviously came on harder, but was still very managable. In the intake there is a bypass valve that limits you to 14ish lbs of boost. That had to go, and having heard on the turbobike forums that the XJ650 engine was bulletproof, I decided to unhook the wastegate all together. It made a hair under 20psi, but would lift the head up off the combustion chamber and spray oil out the headgasket (oil cooled, so no reall problems brought about by this). I only ran it that way a few times and dialed it back to 17-18. I raced a friends FZR1000 and wasn't destroyed, he had maybe 2-4 bikes from a 20ish mph roll to ~100. I ended up returning it to stock as it just wasn't great to ride, as I would have needed to really go through the brakes, etc. It really needs new rims/ front end as the 18" tires are not the best. All in all fun bikes and I'd own one again now that I have a good reliable main bike (ZRX1200R).

Sorry about the rambling.. just thought I'd share my impression of owning one.

Thanks for the replies... Sounds like a lot of fun to me haha.

I don't think I've ever seen a single 80's turbo bike on the road, but I think they're pretty neat.