YOUR CLASSICS
Martin Fletcher’s restoration of this 38-year-old Yamaha XT550 was a real saga that involved all its previous owners, as he explains
The saga of Martin Fletcher’s XT550 restoration, including a complete cast of ex-owners
I FIRST SAW this bike in 1984, when it was just two years old and I was (just) 17 – but never thought I’d end up restoring it so many years later, or that I’d be able to track down its 38-year story. For me, it’s not only been a journey of discovery, including the realisation that I either knew or had heard of all the owners, but also a very steep learning curve in how to restore an old bike – and how not to! But I’ve loved every minute of it. The bike was originally bought in 1982 by Dale Hawker from Minehead, Somerset. He saw the bike advertised in Motorcycle News by Team Ham-yam Racing Ltd of Chester-le-street, County Durham, paid a deposit by Access over the phone and they delivered it from 340 miles away for the princely sum of £25! His brand new XT550 cost him £1265 including delivery. Amazingly, Dale has managed to find the original sales invoice, Team Ham Yam key fob [both shown here] and numberplate, which he’d kept all these years – and kindly gave me them so they could be reunited with the bike. I’ve also managed to get hold of photos showing Dale as the proud owner of his new XT550 in 1982.
The first time I saw it properly was in 1984, when David Dyer, who lived in a village five miles from Minehead, went to have a look at it with the intention of buying it. I tagged along and thought it was a beautiful bike – but, being aged 17, well out of my price range. That was the last I really saw of the XT for 34 years. I found out later that David, who’d bought the bike, then sold it to a Robert Coleman for £750 in 1986. I’d heard of Robert, but not met him; he was a friend of my boss, Ian, at the time – Dale, Ian and Robert and a few others used to spend all their time tinkering with their bikes and riding over the moors and hills around Exmoor. Robert sold the bike to David Cornish in 1988 for £500.
David Cornish was a motorcycle instructor at the time and, while I knew him from school and occasionally saw him around town on an XT550 in the late ’80s, I didn’t realise it was the same bike I’d looked at in 1984. After that, the Yamaha seemed to completely disappear off the radar, until in 2018 someone told me that David was selling his bikes – a Honda CBX, a GT750 ‘Kettle’ and an XT550 – and I popped to his mother-in-law’s house, just down the road in my village, to get David’s phone number (as he now lives in Cornwall). But lo and behold – the bikes were there at her house, only about 200 metres away from mine!
David had stopped riding bikes in 1993, and the XT550 was in a sorry state. It hadn’t been ridden for 25 years and had spent some time being stored outside; it had also acquired a red seat and gold rims somewhere along the way. This seemed a great fixer-upper project for me to play with, having recently built myself a new garage/workshop at home, so I bought the bike for £400. The intention was to just get it going, clean it up a bit and sell it on. Then I started to wonder if this was the bike I’d seen back in 1984 with David Dyer, and went to see Dale Hawker to ask if he remembered the registration number of his XT550. He reeled off the number straight away, I showed him the photograph of the bike I had just bought – and it was the same one! He was amazed that the bike still existed. Now I realised that it was the same bike I’d seen all those years ago in 1984, it began to mean more to me than just a ride-and-restore project. I wanted to do the best I could for the bike.
I hadn’t realised quite what a state it was in until I started to look at it closely and the reality of how much work would be involved dawned on me – but I didn’t let it daunt me. There was hardly any paint left on the bike, no ignition, the tank was very rusty, the seat and wheel rims were the wrong colour, and I didn’t even know if it ran! I put a new spark plug in to test it, but there was no spark, so I bought another coil, put that in and it still wouldn’t go. Obviously, there was no point spending time and money on the bodywork if it wouldn’t run.
I enlisted the help of my friend Alan and together we decided that it must be the stator that was the problem. So I had the stator rewound and hey presto – we had a spark! We squirted oil over the valves, hooked up an external fuel supply, then kicked it over and on the