Origin of the species

The Kawasaki 500LC

Allen Millyard wanted to make another Kawasaki special, but different from those he’d already produced. “I was going to make a four-cylinder Yamaha engine and fit it into a rolling chassis that a friend owned, but I didn’t think it would look right, being just a Yamaha Kawasaki bitsa,” he says. “Plenty of those had been made and I didn’t want to make that sort of thing. So I thought, let’s take the barrels off the Yamaha and put them on the Kawasaki bottom-end.”

He chose 250LC cylinders rather than 350LC because they were easier to locate, and cheaper. But he found that when he dropped the barrels on, nothing lined up. “You could see light through the transfer ports,” he says. “It was really bad. But that made me want to do it even more. So that’s why I did it and how the project started.”

Allen took a pair of 500cc