Mule Yamaha XS750 “Café-Tracker”

Mule Yamaha XS750 “Café-Tracker”

By David Edwards — Richard Pollock knows a thing or two about street-trackers. Doing business as Mule Motorcycles out of a converted two-car garage in suburban San Diego he’s built about 100 trackers to date and shows no signs of slowing down. In fact now that his full-time job as an aerospace fabricator has morphed into part-time consultancy he has more time than ever to devote to two-wheelers including doing R&D and prototyping for Streetmaster a small Southern California speed house for new Triumph Bonnevilles.

Pollock’s bread and butter though are specials based on two powerplants: Harley-Davidson’s Evo Sportster V-twin and Yamaha’s venerable XS650 the so-called “Japanese Bonneville” and about as good an air-cooled parallel-twin as anybody has ever made. Mule’s latest build is an XS650 with a difference. Strictly speaking it’s not a street-tracker; there are touches of café-racer mixed in. Let’s call it then a “café-tracker.”

Another difference is that it was built to a price. The owner an Australian had a bottom line that was a good 10K below the usual 25000 to 30000 that Mule gets for a spokes-up one-off creation. In retrospect he should have said no to the budget build but Pollock likes a challenge so the Down Under XS was on.

A big chunk of change was saved by using a stock XS650 main frame rather than the heavily massaged stressed-member unit Pollock usually employs for his Yamahas. Up front conventional forks from a Buell M2 Cyclone were sourced inexpensively on eBay. Swingarm is from Yamaha’s mid-’80s Radian roadster. It conveniently bolts right up to the XS’s pivot area and is a nice upgrade from the spaghetti-thin stock arm.

Helping to give the bike its unique hybrid style is an aluminum Storz café-style “bread loaf” fuel tank. Intended to fit a Sportster the tank needed its tunnel heavily reworked to work with the XS frame’s differently angled backbone. Because the owner wasn’t enamored with the usual kicked-up flat-track tailsection Pollock grafted on the rear frame loop from a Wood-Rotax with its minimalistic tightly drawn bodywork. Both tank and tail looking like they were destined to be together are finished in a simple paint scheme a pearl-white and maroon take on the old Yamaha racing colors. Artwork on the gas tank is the company’s classic tuning-fork logo as envisaged by Salvador Dali.

Punched out to 750cc the mix-n-match XS is now on its way to Australia. This may have been Pollock’s first café-tracker but given the bike’s undeniable good looks it probably won’t be his last.

Source: Bike Exif