Photos by John Grant and Dan Paris
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| Michelin AC10 tires are DOT approved and work very well in a variety of trail conditions yet are better than the stock tires on the street! |
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| Here’s the substantial pile of floof and cheese that was carved from the XT, not including the steel gas tank. |
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| Replacing the miniscule stock footpegs was the biggest part of the whole transformation. The XT’s weird footpeg mounts are to blame. There are some other, cheaper ways to install bigger pegs but we wanted to do it right with the best MX pegs available, these billet aluminum fully adjustable units from Fastway. |
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| The left peg mount only required some minor grinding to install the Fastway unit. Simple is good! |
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| The new homemade footpeg mount is very strong, and thanks the adjustable angle and even tooth height of the Fastway pegs we easily had them bolted on and lined up perfectly |
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| The right peg was a lot more work. We cut off the goofy looking ‘noodle’ part of the stock peg mount and set about creating a new one from scratch to weld to the stump. |
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| Our Foo Fighter is barely recognizable as an XT225, looking more like a solid, if funky, little 7/8 scale off-road racer. |
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| The fun starts here. We couldn’t wait to get off the road to see what the transformed XT felt like in the dirt! |
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| Foo Fighter feels like a modern little dirt bike after our modifications. The FMF pipe, airbox mods and rejetting made a big improvement across the entire powerband. It’s no rocket ship, but has more than enough to pull the bike up anything we’ve pointed it at. |
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| The Moose Racing bars and controls, Clarke tank and Fastway pegs, along with putting the bike the crash diet, made a huge difference in control and confidence. Ridden aggressively in the woods it’s now quite easy to maintain a brisk trail pace on the XT. |
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| The Michelin tires work well, and teamed with the bike's short wheelbase and light weight this thing can carve turns quickly enough to give bigger bikes fits … as long as the trail is relatively smooth, that is. |
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| Pin to win. On a twisty course, and by always holding the throttle wide open and rowing the gearbox just right, you can turn some surprisingly quick laps on this little bike. But the suspension needs help, desperately! It was just good enough to hold the bike off the ground in stock form, and now as a Foo Fighter it’s barely adequate. We’re worried about the wimpy spokes in the rear wheel too, although by paying close attention to spoke tension it has been ok so far. We’ll address those issues in part-four of the Foo Fighter saga! |
4 Comments
The Foo Fighter just completed an intensive tour of duty in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta and BC, carrying me around while I chased the Canadian Enduro Series with my camera gear. Between races it survived a ton of very hard-core trail rides up to and above the snow line, tagging along with fast Pro riders like U.S Shane Watts and Canadian Pat O'Neill. How the little XT didn't blow it's guts out keeping up with the race bikes is a testament to Yamaha's engineering...I literally hit the rev limiter thousands of times! During this torture the bike made it around the Alberta and BC National Enduro courses, plus I rode it up some hills big enough to earn me a few 'hero' beers afterwards. The MX-Tech revalved suspension worked quite well, considering the short amount of wheel travel and ground clearance. Unfortunately I did eventually break the modified rear shock while playing on the MX track, but that's getting fixed now. The full writeup for Foo Fighter part 4 will be here on Off-Road.com soon, thanks for reading!