Flat tracker is always one of my favorite style of custom builds, a nimble narrow chassis, up right sitting position, and a wide flat handlebars, perfect for Taipei city street. During my regular online custom bike surfing, I saw this YZ450F custom Flat Track race bike by Yamaha team Estenson Racing, it’s just so cool and so attacting. It was during a build and Faber Studio was doing assembly for me, so normally I shared the photo to him, we worked together both my Husvarna 501 supermoto, and Honda CRF300L Street Tracker projects, they are both super cool builds, but when 501 sports a more extreme race big single engine, and CRF300L got this more easy going power unit, one is too hardcore for the street, one is less exciting to ride. Faber, as a Tenere lover he happened to be servicing his own Tenere at the shop. We stared at the Tenere frame and like, “that geometry looks very similar to YZ frame…” and we all know Yamaha CP2 for that perfect balance of street comfort and enough power to have fun with…
I went back to my office and pull up a Tenere 700 photo and a YZ450F photo, and photoshop them together, “why does it looks so meant to be…?”
So I proposed to Yamaha Taiwan about this project, and that super easy photoshop photo did convince them, and provided us a Tenere 700 to do it.
Next is basically tackle it piece by piece, YZ450F aluminum subframe is in and Tenere 700 heavy steel subframe is cut off. Subframe mounts made and the whole back half of YZ body work is fitted with YZ subframe, Faber stripped the super complex wiring to it’s essential. After the wiring is tucked away, JZO Crafts fabricated a full aluminum full tank which is utilizing the space of Tenere/YZ frame and also provide mounting for all YZ plastics, which turns out to be a funny shape and a surprising 6.8 liter capacity. Once the body is YZ shaped, we turned to make it into a flat tracker, thanks for our friends from Sweden, Ohlins supplied a custom tuned RXF48S forks with flat track length and for Tenere weight, and a Tenere bolt-on rear shock, which we make custom linkage to lower it to match the front. With Faber found this perfect location for its preload adjuster beside the engine. As for wheels, Roland Sands Design Traction and Hammer flat track wheels are always the baddest look out there, especially the heavier version hammer rear wheel, might be an overkill for this bike’s weight but it does look pretty cool. Beringer Brakes provide the supermoto brake kit for the front and caliper/disc for the rear which I made custom carrier and bracket to fit. KOSO provided their GPS speedo kit which further clean up the wiring. When it comes to the exhausts, the original idea was to do 2 low slung ones like flat track racer look, but YZ plastic already has that asymmetrical shape to house the high pipe, so we decided to do a dual exhausts system which one goes high and one goes low. And of course DNA filter provided their top of the line kit for this, KCT sprocket helped make the matching design sprocket, which is hooked up with RK black/gold chain.
After it's all said and done, the finished bike weighs 158kg with all the fluids compare to stock Tenere's 205kg.
