Yamaha rz500 owners manual

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You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to be able to view it and print it. These manuals will be updated as soon as the new products become available on the market. Please be aware that for some models only the English version is available. I agree, take me there Cancel. Why the RD-like timing? Remember, this is a street engine, not a racing engine. It has do to things like be easily ridable, get reasonable fuel mileage, and even pass certain emissions standards one day.

It can't necessarily do all these things with yawning exhaust apertures. The performance advantage over the old RD comes from the size more than from the timing of these holes. The RD's exhausts were only 32mm wide, but these new ones are a huge 39mm—only one millimeter less than those of the current TZ road racer's. That's 70 percent of bore diameter, something we were told even just a few years ago was impossible without ring snagging.

Well, Yamaha has built a lot of wide-port MX and road racer engines since those days and has learned a thing or two. Proper port shape is gentler in pressing the rings back into their grooves after the bulging trip across the port, and, ductile ring materials accept this service without snapping.

Transfer ports open a whopping 38 degrees after exhaust opening, so there is plenty of blowdown for 10,plus rpm performance here. The transfers, opening at degrees ATDC, are rather late in comparison with racerly numbers of degrees, but higher transfers would in turn require higher exhausts, and soon the RZ would just be a pure race engine.

Watch the piston move toward BDC; it uncovers only part of the transfer port windows. This means there is plenty more to come from this engine in the future. Power from all this huffing and puffing reaches the six-speed gearset through a big wet clutch whose plates have the same dimensions as those of the TZ racer. Any engine whose shafts don't all lie in a single horizontal case split has a gear lubrication problem.

How to lube the shafts and gears at the top of the engine? Submerge those at the bottom and while oil churning losses are bad enough, potentially running to many horsepower, the oil would foam right out the breather from all that gear action. Yamaha's answer is to put a small Eaton-type gearbox lube pump at the bottom, drawing oil from the sump area around the shift-drum and delivering it in correct quantity to the several meshes. The pump saves far more power than it consumes, for now the transmission is well lubricated without heavy churning loss.

On modern GP road-racing engines a tuner can pull the dry clutch in about five minutes while his helper pulls the lower pipes and drains the gear oil.

The tuner pulls the primary cover while the assistant tackles the drive sprocket in another five or Unbolt the "door" holding the gear cluster into the gearcase and slide the whole thing out shafts, gears, shift-drum, and selector forks.

Lay it out on the bench and exchange ratios to tailor the gearbox to the circuit. In under 40 minutes, the rider is rolling back out with the right ratios. Obviously at the Grands Prix, this capability is essential. The RZ is built in similar fashion, but for a different reason. A compact V-four cannot be built as a single-case-split engine, so this racing "sideloader" construction is the most sensible way to carry the gears.

Remember, too, that Harley-Davidson motorcycles had this construction for many years before it became popular at the GPs. The RZ gearbox, rendered in street-bike fashion, has four dogs at each engagement to cut down on backlash, something that street riders have been known to worry about.

In racing, three dogs or even two make more sense because the primary goal is strength and quick, certain engagement. Few dogs and big spaces between them give you this, but they also give the backlash that some folk don't want. Neither are the RZ's dogs undercut as those in a real race engine would certainly be. In racing this draws the gears into engagement and keeps them there during hard, clutchless shifting. On the street, this design is not yet accepted.

Truly remarkable, however, are the extremely close ratio separations, almost identical to a pure-racing TZ's:. What does this mean? If you upshift the RZ from first to second, your revs will fall by 33 percent—change up at 10, and the engine will fall back to From fifth to sixth the upshift will drop you back to , close indeed, and keeping the engine right in the good meat of the powerband when it needs it the most. What are the drawbacks? Well, you won't win any uphill stoplight drag races with a passenger on this motorcycle—first gear is just too tall, too close to top gear, to permit that.

On switchbacks and compound sweepers, though, you'll be glad those ratios are as tight as they are. Yamaha has sized this transmission for horsepower growth and vigorous use. The gears aren't the skinny bacon-slicers used in certain other engines you've seen. Up between the two cranks, and driven by the front one, lies the engine-speed balancer.

With its bearings and drive gear this addition weighs less than three pounds. Before you purists sniff at this, think a moment. Isn't it possible these three pounds in the engine are saving far more weight in the chassis? Engines that don't vibrate like a 10,rpm washing machine with a load of bowling balls can actually be used as part of the chassis without shattering every weld in 10 hours' running.

And if the engine is stiffening the frame, maybe that frame doesn't have to be as heavy. Some people may think it was romantic, back when men were men, to finish the day seeing double from engine vibration, but today such experiences are both stupid and unnecessary. The RZ balancer corrects primary imbalance arising from the vee angle being less than 90 degrees and from the wide separation of the two cranks.

Intake location was the major problem Yamaha faced on the RZ With conventional exhaust location, the natural place for the intakes is in the vee. On a four-stroke the intakes attach to the heads, relatively far apart. On a two-stroke V-four the intakes attach far down in the vee, either to cylinders or directly to the case. On the Yamaha OW70 and OW80, the absence of air filters reduces the problem to having special carburetors made that just fit the space.

Street bikes must have filter and airbox, and they will fit easily if you can do without the radiator and front wheel, for that's where the parts would end up. And what about the problem of keeping all intake system parts tilted slightly toward the engine so that in slow running fuel won't condense in pools and blorp into the engine to foul its plugs? Yamaha's solution was to put the carburetors at the sides of the vee, pointed outward and mounted on rubber right-angle-manifolds that will give airflow specialists nightmares.

To get all the parts to line up, two different kinds of cylinders, pistons and intake schemes are used on the RZ The rear cylinders carry cast-in conventional reed boxes, while the fronts get their mixture through case reeds bolted to the crank cover. All four reed cages are the very same moderate-sized parts seen on the RD series. The rear pistons have reed windows, while the front have only slight intake-skirt arches.

All this twisting and turning results in less power than Yamaha might have liked this machine to have had, but it does provide the motorcycle with places for all its parts. Between the cylinders run the Power Valve links, connecting each pair of cylinders with the bellcrank down in the vee, rotated by cables from the control motor frame-mounted behind the engine.

The carburetors, bolted together in staggered pairs, have their throttles linked for operation by double, push-pull cables—no sticking throttles on this machine. Chokes also link to a single control; otherwise the aluminum 26mm VM-type carburetors are much like those of the venerable RD. The airbox is stuffed under the fuel tank, just behind the steering head. Air enters through two flared horns, descends through a thin sheet of foam filter, and turns outward to meet the "elephant ears" conducting the flow to the carb pairs on either side—all very civilized and fit together marvelously considering the dense packing of the parts.

The first sight of all those hoses, cables, and wires almost obscuring the engine was like looking upward under a luxury car's dashboard. The only reason working on the RZ isn't quite as bad is because you aren't lying on your back with your heels higher than your head. The cooling system is also civilized because, unlike the TZ racers', there is no need for air-bleeding during fill.

Every high point that could trap air or steam has a line running back to the header tank, making the system self-bleeding.

A large plastic-impeller waterpump moves the coolant around, just as in the recent MX machines. The radiator has a large area, but a thin section. By contrast, racing radiators always have two, three, or even four rows of cooling tubes.

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