$522.58, Yamaha Australia, yshop.yamaha-motor.com.au, (02) 9757 0011
One thing about two-strokes, they don’t run on the smell of an oily rag and, despite rotary exhaust valves and reed blocks, some of the fuel comes straight out of the muffler. So one of the first orders of business on our Yamaha YZ250XR long-termer was to give it a range suitable for trailriding.
The stock plastic tank is just eight litres, which a quick fuel-consumption run suggested would give us a range of 74km. Thanks to the bike’s lengthy production run and popularity for desert work in the US, there are a few after-market tanks, with Clarke producing 11.7L and 14.8L options while IMS does a 12.1L fuel cell which is also sold here by GYTR.
The latter is the one we went with to give us a range of around 120km for a reasonable trailride but the bike will probably do better after rejetting. It arrived in our favourite translucent colour so we can see the fuel level going down.
It picks up the fitting hardware from the stock tank, including the tap, mounts and fuel cap, so if you want to be swapping tanks on a regular basis you’ll need to find spares. We used a little grease on the nutserts for the tank mounts.
For some reason the filter on the tap’s fuel tube (which feeds the carby before you hit reserve) would not fit through the hole in the tank so we set that filter aside. There’s another one for reserve anyway.
A quick flush out with petrol ensured there were no slivers of plastic to clog up the works. The bigger tank pushes the front of the seat up slightly so the vinyl creased initially but the folds disappeared once the vinyl settled in.
The stock blue radiator shrouds bolted straight on because the shape of the tank did not change when the YZ250 was restyled and they stop the translucent plastic tank from looking ugly.
We’re looking forward to doing a full fuel run.
Wolter Kuiper
