In my opinion, a cafe racer is not complete without a classic kick starter. So I removed the electric starter gear and embarked on installing a kick start on a bike that has no readily available OEM parts. In fact Yamaha advised me not to do it and insisted that it was not possible to install a kick start on this SR250.
The main challenge was to source the right parts from other Yamaha models. After doing some painstaking research I learnt that like their XT dirt bikes and older DT road bikes etc did have kick starters and it would be a matter of trial and error in finding the right parts. Apparently the XT shares the same engine as an SR. You can see the similarities in photos and on technical diagrams of the two models. So, the SR250 engine had allowed room for this modification, which meant as long as the parts fitted and worked, I was good to go.
The bungs on the side case were tapped out and removed. Certain mounts and bushes inside the engire were removed to make room for the new found parts. As it turned out even spare parts dealers on the 2nd hand market (wreckers etc) didn't know their parts well enough, meaning I was often sold the wrong parts. I ended up with kick start levers from XS's, DT's and XT's and idle gears and axles from DT's. Shit just didn't fit together because not only didn't the bike models match but the year models didn't match either at times.
here I modified an XS650 kick start lever to work on the SR250. The lever has rubber on it and the clamp fits fine, the only problem was that it would rub along the side case when it sprung back up. I grinded it to shape and had it powder coated.
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