Talk about Rare!

Only 10,300 XS1B's were built world wide in 1971 - Do you have one?

The following is an excerpt from the August 1971 "Cycle" Magazine:

YAMAHA 650 XS-1B

Forty Cubic Inches of Japanese balance, reason, and pizzazz.

In the realm of motorcycling, there are machines that grip your solar plexus and squeeze it;  these motorcycles give the rider an immediate, spontaneous, visceral experience.  Such machines may have drawbacks - they may have truculent starters, service headaches, chronic leakers, or whatever - but the machines remain exciting because they give the owner cloud-level highs as well as basement-level blues.  Your marriage to one of these motorcycles might not be long, but the days will never be dull and the hours will always be eventful. They Yamaha XS-1B falls into a different class, a category in which balance and reason prevail.

The big 650 doesn't wring your solar plexus - but pats it.  The forty-inch Yamaha is a reasonable sort of machine; it starts pretty easily, doesn't leak oil, carries a good set of brakes, is reasonably comfortable, has ample power, displays a modish style, and handles well within reasonable limits.  Yamaha's 650 is a machine that hits no highs and snags no lows.  It strikes you that a committee of twenty good men and true, applying modern ideas to the very traditional 650 vertical twin concept, designed the XS-1B as a balanced, compromised package.

Yamaha didn't introduce their forty-incher in late '69 and then go napping..........