I Lost 117 Pounds in One Week!

The 1982 Yamaha IT-175J.
When I was 16 I was dying for one of these, and I read through a sales brochure I'd gotten from the local Yamaha dealer about a trillion times.

It's sometimes tough finding a good pic on the Internet of the bikes I've had in the past.
The above pic is the best one I could find in the 10 minutes I allowed myself to search for one.
It's an action shot from the 1982 test article from Dirt Bike magazine (and I read that one a trillion times, too), but at least it shows the bike in brand-new condition, where the ones I saw from doing a Google search were well-used and looked like shit, or were not-exactly-as-they-were-when-new restorations.

I bought this bike used around 1990.
Around this time, I'm not able to remember exactly what bikes I had during what years because I was making a habit of buying, repairing, riding, and selling them fairly regularly.
I didn't do this to make money (and didn't), but was instead a hobby.
I liked doing it.

The IT-175J was a fantastic bike.
Basically, it was the 1982 version of the bike I ride in the Pachaug rock pile these days, a bike made for trail riding, racing off-road on trails or in the deserts of the south west, and just general fun riding.
Back then, like I wrote in an earlier post, all of the real off-road bikes were 2-strokes, or at least that was the consensus with most riders.
This bike was light, had a great engine with low end, a punchy midrange, and a good top end, a good suspension at both ends, handled very well, and gave the rider (me) a great feel.
It felt like a real dirt bike, as it should have because that's what it was sold as.
If I had one of these bikes today, and I could somehow get a license plate on the back of it, I wouldn't hesitate to ride it out in Pachaug.
In fact, I believe it would be a great bike for that, even though it would be 28 years old, now.

Off to jerk,
-John