Some of the build and restoration threads on XJR are so awesome that I could only dream of creating such artworks as many of you. There are many beautiful bikes on this site, most of which are naked or full-faired builds, but Frank really isn't like many XJ's left out there. Before me she was stripped and chopped by a madman! And since I've gotten my hands on her, she has been sun worn, crushed, and unfortunately has led a bit of a rough life cosmetically. But she still lives! And I have had a dream for Frankenstein from the moment I got her that will soon be lived out for an old, deserving bike. I have used much of the knowledge here to start bringing Frank back to the condition that she needs to be and then some. With much respect I have gained much inspiration from you all and hopefully she'll gain as much from you.
I purchased Frankenstein in late 2011 from a friend that I went to school with and pretty much made her who she is today... minus the crushing and neglecting part...that was mostly my bad. :/ She was an old faded '96 Yamaha XJ600 that was taken into the hands of my friend Brock, and turned into this!
The rear frame was chopped and rebuilt to have a 2nd seat as well as some pretty sweet LED's! I was immediately in love with this Frankenstein the moment I saw what was becoming of her! Well Brock and I parted ways and moved to different cities along with his beautiful bike. We kept in touch and I always reminded him of how much I loved his motorcycle. Years later I caught a lucky break when I found out that my friend had a new R6 that he was riding and that Frankenstein had been sitting in the garage untouched for some time! I immediately took that opportunity and convinced Brock to let me take her! (All these years and he finally caved!) He brought her up to running condition and sold to me for a fair price...Finally!
I also need to point out that this is my first bike and I had never before owning Frankenstein learned how to ride or even really ridden a real motorcycle. (Except this one time when I made Honor Roll student in Elementary and our Principal gave a bunch of us a motorcycle ride around the neighborhood with his Harley crew. It was AWESOME!) But besides that, nothing!
This is Frankenstein when I first received her! After a couple of months of waiting, my buddy brought Frank to me during his move from Dallas to Seattle. She has the chopped rear, LED tails, LED turn signals, chopped front fender, down-turned handles, and a jet kit. Being my first bike, we opted to put the speedometer back on so my friend took the really cool diamond plate front off and mounted the speedos. I hope I can fabricate something just as nice when the time comes. She gets so many second looks from the tail end! And I definitely love when they ask, "what is that!" Most think it's a Bandit or Buell. She even gets the Ducati and Triumph guesses too! And it always tickles my fancy when I tell them it's a 90's model Yamaha.
So I've got this bad-ass (pardon my language) bike here sitting in front of my apartment and I have NO IDEA how I'm gonna teach myself to do this. I mean...I know how to drive a manual transmission car...and ride a bike... so it can't be that bad. THANK YOU YOUTUBE! I start searching videos and reading the owners and repair manuals that my buddy gave me with the bike and started trying to learn everything I could about my bike and riding before I actually rode. That, and I didn't have money for a helmet at the time so was waiting on that so as not to crush my skull learning how to take off or something silly.
Once I got the helmet I got on the bike! And around the parking lot we go! Then around the neighborhood. And eventually around the city! And once the blood gets pumping you only want more right!
Well after riding Frankenstein for a few months her age really started to show. The chain started to kink and the sprockets were super worn. She'd die if I didn't get her started in the first few tries. I certainly knew that she'd need attention soon. Things got really bad when I gradually started to feel the clutch slipping and one day while riding to my girlfriends house I smell a burning in my engine and my bike starts slowing down and my RPM's start going up. Great! Clutch is gone! Luckily I wasn't to far from the lady's house and was able to make it there and park on her sidewalk. I figure I'll leave it there for a few weeks while I buy a new clutch and put it back on!
Now lemme hop off topic real quick and tell you a little bit about where I'm from and the weather we have here. See I come from a mid-sized city named Lubbock,Tx,USA. Made up of Roughly 300,000 people we're known as the "littlest big city in Texas". Or the "biggest little city in Texas"... One of the two. We love BBQ and our college football! Go Red Raiders! And like many of the BIG things we have here in West Texas are Big Rolling Plains, Big Skies, and Big Wind! And I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the wind part.(Not the gaseous foul kind) We've got winds here that will blow the roofs off of houses! Forget about owning a trampoline unless you tie that sucker down! And this wind will bring in the craziest sandstorms, duststorms, haboobs, or whatever you want to call it, that you have ever seen this side of the Earth!
Well one windy Spring day in 2012 I go into work and get a call around 10AM and find out that this happened!
I almost cried, but couldn't because my poor girlfriend was probably more worried about Frank than her own car so I didn't want to make her feel bad.
Got her lifted back on 2 wheels and checked her out. Luckily :/ the main branch only crushed my girlfriends car (R.I.P.) and the smaller branch that crushed my bike broke during the fall and didn't fold my bike in half. Checked the connections and engine.Gas tank badly dented, exhaust dented, brake lever broken, broken mirrors, and a few more things that I couldn't figure out. But in the end, she wouldn't start up again :'(
Then came, The Great Neglect...
After the Tree incident I turned my attention toward other things that unfortunately weren't Frankenstein. I guess I got kind of down about her being pretty much trashed by that stupid tree that I wasn't ready to drop all that extra cash! So there she sat, in front of my loving girlfriends house, untouched, fading in the hot West Texas sun.
Then one day...
I ordered parts for her! A whole slew of things that I knew she needed and took her to a mechanic buddy of mine to diagnose the starting problem.
I was thinking the starter or a sensor/switch was bad. He was thinking the rectifier or the stator...Then I was thinking hopefully not the stator! We get the bike over to my friends house and he gets to diagnosing the issue. I go ahead and have him change the clutch and sprockets/chain for me while he's at it and it turns out that a carb needle is broken, the rectifier is broken, and the Start/kill switch is trashed. Oh and my battery wasn't holding a charge which explains the dying after 3 starts. Once those issues were taken care of, SHE LIVED AGAIN! Uglier than ever...But alive!!! And just in time to get at least a couple of months of riding before the cold season starts back up!
After getting the mean machine back up and running again I noticed that I'm having a bogging? issue in the mid-high RPM range during 3rd and 4th gear. During hard acceleration, the bike does fine moving through the RPM's and gears until I reach the higher range in 3rd and 4th, where it then starts to bug out and lose power. I have to try and counter this by dropping down a gear to keep my speed up. I was thinking that the issue stemmed from an airflow problem at first. The carbs are jetted and the air filter and exhaust are stock. I planned on upgrading both to try and fix the problem. Could this also be a tuning issue? I have yet to solve this problem and would like to square this issue out before I get to riding again. :/
Jan/2014 - I had been riding my rear tire bald and could definitely feel that both my front and rear brakes are about gone. Sure enough, one day after riding to my cousin's house, I noticed a large hole in the middle of my tire. Bummer!
Feb/2014 - Received a huge and really late Christmas (or really early Birthday) present from my girlfriend!! I think it was probably a 50/50 of her feeling guilty about Frank being smashed in her front yard and the other half her actually loving my passion for my bike. But I definitely have to give a shout out to my lovely lady for buying me such awesome gifts!! (she actually gave me a handful of cash and said go crazy on Frankenstein) What a lovely gal!
New rear tire! Ordered and installed!
Also ordered front and rear brake pads, a 2007 Vstar rear shock, fork seal kit, and a new Vance&Hines full exhaust.(I know I know alot of you don't fancy the V&H but for me it was this or the D&D exhaust and I couldn't find any affordable D&D.)
March-2014 While starting out for a ride to a small town about 30 miles away, unfortunately my dear Frankenstein took a bite out of my toe! Sometimes I like to put my feet up on the rear pegs while riding to get a little more comfortable breaking the wind. I noticed a few days earlier that my left rear peg was bent backwards a little and moved it back to it's previous position. I knew the weld was weak and needed to be re-welded on, but hadn't realized that day of riding that it had completely fell off. While moving my feet to the rears at 70MPH, I felt my foot catch the chain and get sucked into the rear wheel well. The rear immediately locked up and I knew I was in for some trouble! A couple things immediately went through my mind during the incident...If I fall with my foot stuck in the well, my foot is probably going to go with the bike and I'm probably going in a different direction. Second, Please don't lay this over! I just put work into getting her going again! And lastly, my foot is on fire!!!! So there I am, swinging the bars left to right. Trying to counter every move the locked up rear is making! Finally, I yank my foot out without my shoe I guess around the 15-20mph mark. (My speedometers don't work BTW so I am always guessing my MPH/RPM/and MPG.) I check behind for traffic and move my bike off the road while looking at my mangled toe
Luckily I was riding with 2 other friends who turned around immediately once they saw that I wasn't behind them. After a quick decision to not try riding back to my friends house, a couple of miles away, one of them went to pick up his truck, they loaded my bike in the back and they took me to the hospital. All in all, I lost most of the hide on the side of my pinkie toe and got a small fracture. Needless to say I'll be getting some proper riding gear. New Riding boots and a new riding Jacket. 
Looks like I'm off riding for about a month or 2
A week after my little accident, I received the rest of my parts and just couldn't wait to get them put on. Since the accident, Frankenstein has been chilling out in my buddy Brandon's awesome garage! I swung by one afternoon and we got the parts on minus the fork seals!
Lifted her up!
Got the old pipes off!
Fitting the new pipes, we noticed that 2 of the bolts were missing from the kit. We used some bolts that my buddy had laying around and shaved them down to fit the V&H Bracket
Swapped the front and rear brakes
Installed the Vstar shock and K&N filter!!!
This is how she sits today. Waiting for my foot to get better.
Future plans include but not limited to -
Replace the front fork seals this Thursday March 27 ,2014
Buy a New/used chain guard.
YZF600 front end swap- I have most of the parts that I bought from a buddy for $60. Including forks, wheel and disks, upper and lower triples, r6 blue dot calipers hopefully with the lines and MC. Will the old XJ Master Cylinder hook up with the R6 brake lines or is it going to be a full swap? Hopefully I can get this front end done by the end of Spring. I still need to buy a new front tire and a set of clip-ons to fit. Maybe some R6 switches?
I also plan to sand down and repaint a good condition gas tank that I bought off of Ebay a few months back. The old tank is rusty outside and in and all dented up from the tree-fall that it definitely needs replacing. I think I paid $60 for the tank. It had a good paint job (maroon) and an ugly foam protector, but I've been sanding it by hand and will probably take it to a buddies body shop and use a couple of power tools to make that task a little easier. I'm thinking of either Flat Black again, gloss black, or maybe a flat dark green to go with the Frankenstein theme. I have a petcock rebuild kit to go with the new tank.
I would like to find out what is knocking in my engine and also why it is sputtering out in the higher RPM range in 3rd and 4th gear. I still haven't fixed that problem. I haven't gotten to ride the bike since the accident so will have to troubleshoot when I can get on it. Tuning issue? Also read that timing advance can help performance so I may look into that as well.
During the brake pad change I noticed that the rear disk has huge grooves in it from metal to metal grinding, so a new Ducati Monster disk will be replacing it soon.
Still thinking on the wider FZR rear wheel. I just bought a new 130 to fit my seca rim but I do love the fat look!
Cosmetics will likely be last but I want to mount a small speedometer and take off the bulky and broken seca speedo that is on right now. I only use it to help me find N. Otherwise it's useless and ugly!I love the stacked headlights instead of the big round dome look so will look for a new set of headlights in the future to give an aggressive feel. Once she's mechanically sound and has a face lift, I will most likely ride her out until the winter time where I'll strip her all down to the frame and get everything powder-coated and painted.
This is my Frankenstein. I can't wait to get back to riding her and keeping her spirit alive. Thanks for checking out my post. I will continue to post updates as they come.
