"Rebuildable in a parking lot"? Surely, you jest. You want an old bike with new reliability and efficiency. Ain't a gonna happen.
Look at the 650 thumpers by Suzuki and Honda, IIRC the same bike they’ve been selling for 30 years. Yamaha apparently stopped selling their big air-cooled thumpers here.
Far and away THE coolest bike I’ve ever seen was one morning during the dry season in 1982 in Konongo, Ghana, West Africa. One day the brother of the Dutch doctor I would work for when school was out (driving a classic old LandRover for a mobile vaccination team) comes rolling down the dusty, crowded main drag, thumping along on a white Yamaha XT500. He had just come the 160 miles from Accra on the coast and was about to hang a right to go another 25 miles up to the Mission Hospital at Agogo. Truly a Superbike in that time and place.
Among my biggest missed opportunities was this: some of us Peace Corps Volunteers were issued 125cc Kawasaki dual-sports, again in those settings not the tiddlywinks bikes they would be here today.
One guy I knew, when his term of service was up, headed north and rode that little thumper across the Sahara to Morocco. Damn, I coulda used my $5,000 severance pay to buy one and go with him.
"...if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we would take great care in their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them." Canasatego 1744
