Faults:

Within the first month of ownership, a misfire and then failure to start was traced to the electrical connector block under the fuel tank, which had corroded so much that the wires had broken off. Quite pathetic as the bike was only a few months old.

The bike's finish was in a continual battle with the Scottish Winter. I eventually discovered lanolin-based protectant, quite common nowadays, but it was only because I lived in a small agricultural village with lots of tractor supply shops that I was able to buy it. Works a treat!

At the bottom of the road from my home was the best agricultural and engineering equipment stockist ever. I used to go in and spend say £3 and come away with another £10 in free gifts. They also welded the Diversion's steering lock stop for... 50p!

When they welded the living room gas fire; it was quite expensive: £2 but they fired up the black smith's hearth to weld it under even heat to ensure the fire didn't crack again :-)

I obviously paid them a lot more, I eventually avoided going there: too embarrassing with all those free gifts! A good way to run motorcycles is, if you come across someone who's capable of doing quality work at a fair price, always pay them more.

As a qualified Citroen mechanic, I can do nearly every job myself, but welding is a skill I never got really good at, even though I got an electric arc welder for Christmas when I was 13. I can do decent arc welding, but MIG or TIG is more suited to the vast majority of automotive work.

Learn to TIG weld and you can do a sideline on fabricating expansion chambers or custom frames and finance the superbike of your dreams with ease. Seriously.

Oh, and the local DIY shop in Scotland often made you wait for TV soap Neighbours to finish before they'd serve you and they cared for all of the area's stray cats too. You need a few weeks to decipher the local accent, as the first conversations are utterly unintelligible.

If you decide to ride through Winter you will be the sole rider on the roads. There were zero potholes when I rode there through the nineties and you'd often see piles of tarmac dumped at the end of the land's frequent roads to nowhere. Council workers would do this rather than lose their budget next year. Perfect biking country as long as you invest in decent warm gear. The Frank Thomas full suit I rode in was so efficient, I could ride in shirt and suit trousers underneath and arrive at work completely warm and dry.

If you ever break down, you can absolutely guarantee that a motorist will stop to give you a lift. Usually the very first one too. Even lone female car drivers happily will run you to the next service station. Heaven.

Try breaking down in Salford in biker gear and see what assistance you receive. Lovely place & people. I must've been quite mad ever leaving.

The Diversion's handling was truly terrible when I first bought it. Any side wind and the bike felt very unstable and I'd wake up from a nightmare that I was still riding the bike and about to crash!

Luckily the rear tyre was worn out by 3,000 miles and a new Bridgestone was the complete cure. Hell to get the axle off as it had already seized solid. Fork seals & chromium plated stanchions lasted my entire ownership. Brake calipers all stayed corrosion-free too as the pistons are made from quality stainless-steel. The uncommon single front disc brake was good enough; the rear, also disc, is correctly sized and sensitive in feel.

On hard acceleration, the oil light would come on, but it's only an oil level indicator and a common problem with Yamahas of the era. The 4-cylinder air-cooled engine with 6-speed transmission was a paragon of oil-tight reliability as well. Engine vibration is non-existent. Only an electric starter is fitted, and with the expensive sealed battery which will definitely fail if voltage drops below 9 volts, practicing a few bump starts is a sound idea...

Although only a few weeks old when I took ownership over, the battery would not revive even when I rode the bike 650 miles. It would charge to a certain level - just enough to make the starter 'click' but no further. Even high tech chargers and experiments with a variable laboratory power supply (I was working in education at this time) made no difference. There's no conventional lead-acid of similar size too, so £58 it was...

Servicing is easily done by a competent DIY with nothing difficult. The valves are reliably maintenance-free with excellent hydraulic adjusters. Oil filter is a metal car-style canister, but definitely stick with genuine for this component. Fit Iridium long-life spark plugs which will do 30k miles with ease. Cheap too if you do a little research and buy from eBay.

This bike eats final drive chains, even with daily lubrication, about 5k miles is the best you will see. Sprockets are durable and cheap in comparison to nineties' prices. I'd have a go at making a carbon-fibre chain case if I had another one. Or even try adapting the excellent rubber one from the MZ Supa 5?

I always used fully-synthetic engine oil intended for car engines without the wet clutch slipping from the friction modifiers these oils contain. Doom Mongers warn of this happening, but as a car mechanic, I can spot clutch slippage from a mile off. There was none and adjustment stayed the same from day one to selling the Diversion.

General Comments:

I'd read about the Diversion in the UK bike mags. I hated the styling, the pathetic 60bhp engine and most of all, the horrible Ford Cortina type blue 'Diversion' badge on the half-fairing that the first ones had. The bike was supposed to be a new concept, a cheap bike for the everyman. The rear monoshock suspension was devoid of the usual rising-rate linkage on Japanese bikes (which 25 years later they decided was superfluous anyway as the rising rate is easily incorporated into the shock unit itself) is no loss, and saves on a lot of maintenance. So I bought a bike I didn't like?

But it was too cheap to miss. I was partly wrong too. It is an okay motorcycle.

And £1500 for a six-months old bike. The catch was it was an insurance write-off. They wrote it off because they said the frame was bent. It was only the rear subframe and I straightened that with an easy ten minutes of hand bending it straight again! Another £200 in new parts and it was on the road. A nearly new 600cc bike for well under two grand.

It soon was put to hard use. 500 miles per week riding to and from Aberdeen where I worked and touring at the weekends. I'd do the thirty-two miles in 22 minutes on the empty country roads with fuel economy an okay 58mpg.

I rode the bike so much, in the worst weather I'd ever ridden in, such as the minus-18 Centigrade evening, snowing so hard I thought I was going to die one February evening. Riding in such conditions made me a far better rider. In Aberdeen, the police motorcyclists would be in heavy traffic and play keeping their feet up as long as possibly. I'd pull up along side and could do the trick indefinitely I was riding so much. My record was over ten minutes.

The engine stayed in one piece and only the normal bike consumables were generally needed. It is just the bike's finish that lets it down, but they were remarkably cheap when introduced and sold for £3,600 brand new in 1991. The stainless-steel exhaust system is decent quality and I could outride most other motorcyclists such as those on their brand new Ducati 900s, but to be fair I could outride them on a clapped out Suzuki GP125. I used to think they were scared of damaging them, but eventually discovered most simply cannot ride. Why are Ducati owners always crap riders?

Eventually I had a 'sell everything' spree. Living in an area of such decent people, I would simply advertise my stuff and just leave them in the back porch to be collected. They'd simply post the money through the door. Every time. I cannot wait to move back there. It was an eternally discontented now ex-partner why we moved back to England...

Nowadays the Yamaha is an unloved bike. They are dirt cheap, low insurance with an unbreakable engine. With a 120mph top speed, they will still see off most cars.

A really comfy riding position, but I'd go for the 900cc version with its shaft rather than quick-wear chain drive. Yamaha did make a shaft-drive bike in the mid-range engine size. Although the Diversion engine looks similar to those 550 & 650 bikes they made in the early 80s, it is a brand new design of its own and shares no parts with those bikes.

In retrospect I would have bought another TZR250 as there were still a few in dealers' showrooms unsold. A totally different bike to the Diversion, but one should never buy something expensive that you dislike. I did sell the Diversion for what it cost me, but as I love 2-strokes, it was a daft bored Saturday afternoon purchase. I will review the TZR in a few days. It's more of a story rather than review of how I left my job to start a new business selling brand new parts at less than 1/3rd of Yamaha prices. That's right, I spent literally my last penny on a brand new bike and pulled it in bits.

*Great idea for a website 'Motorcycle Survey' is. I'd love to see it evolve into an online version of the 'Used Motorcycle Guide' magazine of the 1980/90s whereby owners wrote tales of owning a particular motorcycle that went much further than listing specs, etc.*

Postscript: A few months after selling, I got a phone call asking if the mileage was genuine. An Inverness dealer bought it from me. The bike was so tatty, he couldn't believe the mileage even though it was quite high, was indeed genuine. It was, just some very hard miles :-)

And Finally: One other reason for selling was I'd done so many miles without a single incident I thought I would give bikes a miss for a while before my luck ran out.