YAMAHA YZF-R1 5VY
Poor PB is rueing his choice of track-day steed – but with some patience and research he may just have tracked down some rare parts…
Paul Berryman pores parts…
Aquick recap of this R1’s story so far would be; browse, buy, seize, strip and oh bugger!
The crankshaft and rods were now junk. Claimed by the destructive cocktail of abandoned clutch plates and flywheel magnets circulating amongst the oil, replacement parts to rebuild the motor were needed.
As the owner of a 2004-2008 R1, shopping for used engine parts you’ll soon find you’re fighting over scraps, each burdened with the age-old ‘supply and demand’ premium. The detaching flywheel magnet issue on this generation of R1 ensures significant demand for both whole engines and major internal components too. Crankcases are common, and cheap, the important stuff that goes inside though? Not so much! That tells you all you need to know; as you’d expect for a 15-year-old sportsbike, plenty of these engines have made it on to the secondhand market, but the vulnerable bits (cranks, rods, gearboxes, flywheels) have already been snapped up. Damn.
After enough internet searches to drive me slightly mad, but only coming up with motors that had ridiculous £1500 price tags, unknown provenance or scrap-ready parts that had been scraped out of already
blown engines, it was time for lateral thought. The good news is I like finding workarounds to problems – I’m almost indefatigable when it comes to proving I’m a smart arse (you don’t say, PB? – Bertie.) The task in hand was to find a crankshaft, connecting rods and as many other 5VY
compatible engine parts as possible to make the required rebuild happen.
Here’s what I knew. The basic 5VY (2004 R1) engine architecture ended up being used on a few subsequent models – first up, the do-anything-comfortably FZ1S/N model from 2006 onwards. Sadly,
the biggest component on my shopping list wasn’t going to come from an FZ1 – their crankshafts are 40% heavier as the engine is a ‘friendly’ detuned R1 motor. But here’s a lesson – constant poring over online parts diagrams started to discover other crankshaft options. The later 4C8 model R1 (2007-8) used the same crankcase design, albeit employing a 16 and not 20-valve top-end. The bottom-end commonality was assured, however, when examining part numbers. This told me that if you bought a 5VY crankshaft from Yamaha today, they’d actually be delivering you a later 4C8 one. Sadly, the later model also suffers from gearbox as well as flywheel problems, making good used engine parts rare and expensive. But it did mean the search had broadened to two R1 models, not just one; indirectly, that turned out to be a BIG help.
Indulge me for just one more anorak-ish model history story and then I’ll get to the good bit! It’s 2010 and Yamaha has officially run out of good ideas for new middleweight models, so they launched the FZ8 – a budget parts bin special, made from 85% of an FZ1, but with a smaller 16-valve 779cc engine built into the basic architecture of the bigger bike’s motor, which itself was 90% 5VY R1. One bit of the FZ8 that didn’t come from an FZ1 was the crankshaft – with the smaller engine needing a lighter crank, and parts-bins being bigger than budgets, guess what Yamaha fitted? Yup, an R1 crankshaft from the 2007-8 4C8 model (and thus 5VY compatible) – boom! More good news in that they also raided the R1 parts bin for the connecting rods, which come from the 2009-2014 ‘big-bang’ model. Again, this is a later (thus presumably better) part that still works with the 2004 5VY model. The FZ8 clutch basket was actually a 5VY part number and the crankcases, oil pump, water pump? All of these were the same, too. Get in!
Now, prior to me writing this article, FZ8 motors didn’t command much of a premium – which is how I ended up with a whole 10k mile motor from a 2014 machine that had been rear-ended for just over £600 from a breakers in Chelmsford. Ok, it’s not a complete gift at that price, but a) it is the perfect donor for all the bits my motor needed and b) they’re more available than R1 motors.
One bonus element of the 2014 FZ8 engine that I couldn’t wait to investigate was the flywheel. The stronger superseded part was released around the time this engine was built, so my hope was that I’d just inherited a £650 flywheel in my £600 motor! Sadly, that idea vanished at the sight of the old part once the cover was off. Note – I’ve since found what I think is the release date for the new part as October 2015.
So at this point, the hours of anorak wearing on the Internet had yielded a terrific result. I finally had all the parts I needed from a low-mileage motor that simply weren’t available without the lateral thinking I’d had to apply.
The moral of this story is, when you’re faced with no way forwards, look sideways, use the web and online parts diagrams/ numbers and research!
Right about now this article should get way more interesting, as the engine rebuild was about to be undertaken by a very interesting bloke. You could blindfold Pete Beale, stick any 20-valve Yamaha engine from 1985 to 2006 in front of him after breakfast and I reckon he’d still have it apart before lunch was served. Thanks to years of both racing and tuning these motors, he’s ‘the man’ when it comes to
this type of engine. Peete is now retired so he picks and chooses his jobs, which are few and far between. I was blessed that he’d offered to do this motor during a conversation about other stuff, but I’d agreed to abandon my usual modus operandi of standing over someone’s shoulder, taking a million pictures and asking a million stupid questions to form an article from the results. Fair enough!
So… instead of delivering you a highly detailed, blow-by-blow account of the build, let me instead run through what was done. The FZ8 crankshaft, rods, crankcases, oil and water pump, clutch basket and stator were mated with my original 5VY barrels, pistons, head (which also enjoyed a light skim), cams, STM slipper clutch, gearbox (which was mint), cam-chain and timing trigger. I had also forked out £300 for Yamaha’s new improved flywheel that won’t allow magnet detachment, thanks to a thin shield as part of the re-design.
Another minor improvement is the removal of the AIS system, which vents the crankcase into the air-box via a solenoid. It’s a complicated array, weighs about a kilo and clogs up the space where a plug spanner needs to go. I’m not really sure what it’s for on this bike. In the USA it’s an even more complicated system with extra pipes that also vents clean air from the air-box into the exhaust port to ‘alter’ emissions positively. But this pared-down version seems an entirely pointless contraption. As such, its removal won’t annoy Greta Thunberg too much. A couple of nicely made block-off plates from ebay for £16 were a quick and easy fix to all that.
The big news however, is that when all was done I ended up with a totally refreshed motor. Pete replaced all the main bearings and big-end shells, dialled in the cams to his preferred timing (the 5VY cam sprockets have both fixed and slotted holes to allow either a ‘from-thebox’ re-build or a tune-up) and reshimmed the top-end so the valve clearances are spot on. Basically, aside from using some 10,000mile components (all of which were in excellent nick) this is a new motor with a little extra oomph, thanks to the upped compression. Get in!
Next up, it’s time to slot the motor in the chassis, give it a run on the dyno and take it for a little test at my favourite track in Spain. Sounds simple, huh? Guess what? It was anything but – this bike is a true-blue pain in the arse.
■ Thanks to – Pete Beale (don’t call him, he’ll call you).