I picked up a 1975 RD350B on June 11, 2011 from a private seller in San Jose, CA. It is all stock except for Mikuni air filters and the airbox has been removed. It also has Koni rear shocks...the rest is bone stock. It has 4900 miles on it as of this posting. I plan on riding it around for a year or so before I get into a restoration project.
As you can see it is in pretty good condition for a bike 36 years old. I have always wanted an RD ever since I was a youth of 16 tender years. I choose a 1975 because if I had a choice of bikes to purchase on my 16th birthday, it would have been this one.
Some info on the RD: From the first '73 RD350 to the last 1975 RD350B, Yamaha's overachieving pocket rocket humiliated triples and fours packing over twice its 347ccs on racetracks and backroads all over the planet. Back when bell-bottoms were cool and Harley's weren't, most anybody's big-bore multi roasted the RD in a straight line. Horsepower was cheap, and any fool could twist a throttle.
The RD350's street roots stretch back to February 1967, and the YR1--Yamaha's first street-legal 350. But the 1970 R5 350 drew a straight line from brand Y's TR production racers to the street.
Fast forward from the YR1 to the mercifully cleaner lines of the 1970 R5 350. Adding new seven-port, reed-valve cylinders and a few other refinements turned the '72 R5C into the 1973 RD350. Now we're on to something. Even in '73, RD styling was still parked somewhere between tawdry and garish. But 0.010-inch thick spring steel reed valves between 28mm carburetors and the new, seven-port cylinders made all the difference. The 347cc RD twin used classical 64x54 bore and stroke numbers to spin out about 35 horses at 7500 rpm. Pushing 352 pounds fully fueled, the 1973 test bike covered the quarter-mile in 14.12-second/93.2-mph blast.
The RD looks tiny by current standards because it is. Even so, nice flat bars and a seat to match keep six-footers comfy for 100 miles or so between fuel stops. The little 350 corners on rails, even if it does wallow and grind its low-slung undercarriage at relatively mild lean angles. But keep rowing the cliche-smooth transmission's six tightly bunched ratios to keep the hydrocarbons burning between 6000 and 8000 rpm and the RD flat out roosts--60 mph arrives in less than four seconds. Even through the tastefully muted stock mufflers, the weed-whacker-on-benzedrine exhaust note is pure heaven.
Careful, though--some things never change. Since most of its 352 pounds rest on the rear wheel, the 350's front hoop enjoys pointing out interesting cloud formations under full throttle. The Habitually Dim still risk wearing it as a hat in the first two gears.
The RD was the official bike of working-class curvy road cognoscenti in the mid-'70s. As Yamaha product planner Ed Burke says, "The RD was a cult bike if there ever was one." All it took to initiate membership was that velvet shriek rising into your Bell Star. Once you knew what it could do to a perfect road on a perfect morning, nothing else was even close. But all good things must come to an end. Neither the cleaner, more "civilized" 1980 RD400F or the liquid-cooled RZ350 (a story for another day) of 1984 could win the war against progressively faster, more sophisticated heathen four-strokes. Riders demanded bigger, faster bikes. The EPA wanted cleaner ones. The handwriting was on the wall. The RD350 begat the RD400 in 1976, and by the end of 1980 the 400 disappeared from Yamaha showrooms as well.
Read more: http://www.motorcyclistonline.com/flashback/122_9609_yamaha_rd350/index.html#ixzz1PJVmpJY4
Catcha later...
