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Hey folks.

I was just browsing through some old photos there and came across some of the MT-03 seat incident that I had a while back. I wrote briefly about it here, but unfortunately it seemed to skip past without any dedicated post about it. I think that was during my riding only period, where I never bothered to update YY. Shame on me.

So just as a wee updater, my first bike was a Yamaha MT-03, brand new. I rode it for 5,000 miles and then out of the blue, the rear of the bike melted.

It looked something along the lines of this (these photos were taken the same day of the incident) :

It was a good looking bike you know.

So the seat looked like this from the outside. I thought “why’s my stitching burst?”

The carnage that lay underneath. There was a toolkit melted in to this as well!

To the right centre of this image, at the bottom, you can see where the texture of the toolkit has made an imprint on to the plastic. It shows just how hot it is, if fabric can leave a textured imprint on hard plastic.

The frame was in direct view of the hole that I discovered in the exhaust, so was also heated up to whatever temp comes out of an exhaust. Very hot, enough to melt the shrink wrap over the cables.

The hole. It’s amazing how something as small as a weld can create such a big mess. This was about an inch in length. Amazing.

This picture shows how the plastic shield melted as well.

This is the bottom of the pillion grab handle, and you can see the charred carbon residue left on the bottom of it.

A wee arrow showing the location of the failed weld. It’s actually on the other side but I don’t have a photo of it.

So there you go. It still amazes me that we got away with it. I can only imagine the mess that could have resulted had Emma been on the back. And I’m still a bit disappointed with the way Yamaha dealt with it, by saying “Tough.”

Well this problem and the attitude from Yamaha made me decide to leave…and buy a Buell. And what a fantastic decision it was.

I wonder if anyone else has had this issue with regards to failing welds.

Anyway, a tale for the YamYam book anyway.