Quote:
Originally Posted by beatr911
An alternative to the Yamaha/Lifan V-twin 250 (which is very heavily finned for styling purposes but also add to it's ability to reject heat) is the Suzuki GZ250. Single cylinder narrowness and air cooled simplicity. Mileage is almost as good as the Yammie. And they are typically even cheaper....
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I've been watching those as well. They too give you the feet-forward seating position and locally the asking prices are half of what the V-twin Yamahas are. Right now on the local Craigslist are '05/'07's with asking prices of $1200/1400 respectively and they're not selling. I'd venture to guess come fall I can pick a nice one up for a grand.
I rode one awhile back and they seem like a great motor. There's a ton of unnecessary weight on it, too and putting it on a diet would help greatly. Removing all the stock bodywork and replacing it with plastic units from a dirt bike would not only save weight but allow you to recover some of the initial purchase price by selling the stock stuff on eBay.
Gonna be tough to beat bschloop's initial purchase price on his Yamaha, though and keeping the expenses down is half the battle. If you spend a bunch of money building a streamliner it's going to take a long, long time to recover your money in additional MPG. I'm really inspired by what I saw at Mid-Ohio, though and the runner-up guys in the competition were built with hard work instead of piles of money. This isn't to take anything away from Fred Hayes efforts, though--he had a beautiful, well-finished machine but I'm sure he had a helluva lot more in it than low&slow or bschloop's bikes. If you figure in construction costs both of them would have been the easy winners.
Again my congratulations to everyone who participated and my sincere thanks to Mr. Vetter for his efforts to make us work towards better MPG.