TW200 Mods, Skidplate

My little TW is said to be nearly unkillable. That said, me and Murphy’s Law have a long and storied acquaintance.

One of the very few weaknesses to a Yamaha TW200 is the low crankcase. You could conceivably smash the crankcase into a sharp rock and damage it. Realistically, this kind of event has a low likelihood of happening, especially since I am trying (somewhat unsuccessfully) to be mellow. Also, the good folks at Yamaha equipped the TW with a skidplate. Here’s the brand new OEM skidplate with a bespoke applied patina of organics:

Not a scratch on it. But it just looked too wimpy for my tastes. I wanted something better.

My reasoning is that I’m stupid. If there’s a sharp rock I’ll be drawn to it like a moth to flame. The second bit of reasoning is I travel solo. Normally off road people travel in packs. When one damages his or her ride, everyone else has a good laugh and then bails their fellow traveler out. No huge penalty for the mistake.

Not so for me. Just about any off road machine can get you far enough into nowhere that hiking out on your own is a solid gold pain in the ass. If you’ve ever had an unplanned 15 mile hike… you know it’s something best avoided. If you’ve ever hiked half of 15 miles before it got dark, hunkered down overnight by the trail, and continued on… you know it sucks. If it happened while raining… well you know.

So, to prepare for the worst and stack the deck in my favor using mechanical overkill, I ordered a upgraded skidplate from Ricochet. I can’t recommend this upgrade enough. It cost about $100 and you can find them on Amazon. (Note: Ricochet sells a zillion skidplates so make sure you’re getting the right one.) I can’t remember if I ordered via Amazon or directly from Ricochet but I think the price was the same either way.

If you’re the sort that cares about such things, you can get the skidplate with an array of powder-coated colors. It’s only about $20 more. Honestly, it would dress up a plain little TW quite nicely. However, I expect mine to be covered in mud 99% of the time so I didn’t bother with a color.

The replacement vastly exceeded my expectations. You could bludgeon a moose to death with this beast!

This is what the two look like side by side. I have no complaints about Yamaha’s design, it’s a $4,500 motorcycle and decisions have to be made. But the replacement is a bad ass improvement.

Installation was pretty easy. I wanted to use anti-seize on the bolts (which are included) but during the COVID flake-out I couldn’t get any. I plan to add anti-seize in due time… and I’ll probably forget all about it.

I can’t remember if the replacement bolts are metric or SAE. I am carrying emergency tools in metric sizes. I may, in due time, swap to metric just to be safe. Also two of the included bolts are monster Torx bolts. Nobody normal will have a monster Torx socket on the trail. (I had to order Torx sockets on Amazon and wait a week for delivery.) I’m not sure why you’d ever need to pull the skidplate (if you hit something hard enough to trash the skidplate… you’re already dead) but that’s something to think about.

In case you’re wondering, the skidplate doesn’t interfere with oil changes. Once it’s installed, just leave it on.

So, this is almost certainly overkill but I have no regrets. It even looks good.

BTW: This skidplate, like the rack, was funded by Paypal and Patreon donations. No shit guys, I really appreciate every penny.

Also, you might think I’m bolting a gazillion dollars of farkle onto this basement priced little motorcycle but it actually came in under budget and I’m almost done. Upgrading from basic OEM to Curmudgeon-approved death mule has been pretty inexpensive. For example, put a skidplate on your Toyota and then come back and look at what I did for under a C-note. Of course, there’s always more cool shit to add, but I’m not far from declaring it “good to go” and seeing how far I can get.