Yamaha Maxster 125

Great bike reliable sounds nice quick acceleration mine a bit of a pig to start in winter sometimes take a few goes but it will start so not a bad bike and it's a yammy so it built to last.

This is my first scooter/bike and I'm very pleased with it. It's quite fast - acceleration could be a bit faster though (I'm a big guy though). It's very attractive and easy to control. Overall I love my bike and it's so good I'm not part-exchanging it when I get my next bike. Nice and reliable :-)

I love my bike but the spares are just to expensive.

I've been looking for rear shocks and what a rip off. The best price I have found is around £145 exculding vat.

What a rip off. If you think of it I only paid £600 for the bike and just the shocks are a quater of the price. MAD.

Also someone mentioned the choke. Yup, mines gone as well but to get it fixed is close to £100, again mad.

The thing is, if you look around you can find a complete card with a choke for around £50. So where do they come up with these prices. I'm seriosly thinking of selling it and buying a different bike.

I ' ve recently bought a maxter 125; I found that it has good acceleration and a good top speed of 65mph which I am more than happy with as it is my first bike. My bike was recently owned by my older brother who had no problems with it at all so it leads me to believe that the bike is very reliable.

Overall the bike is very reliable.

I bought this Yamaha Maxster 125 from a dealer two months ago and use it to get to work/20miles away. Great on fuel and free parking when you find the moto spaces. I got this as I was paying over £100 per month for parking! Now I spend around £8 per week. My car stays in the drive and I'm much happier not to have to pay someone all my money for parking. This is a great idea for anyone with the same problem!! The bike had belonged to an elderly man who had bought it in 2003 to use instead of his car. He became ill and then could not use it and I bought it for £1700 with just 18 miles on it, really a new bike!! I'm still having a great time!!

I bought this scooter for only £585. Its much larger than ordinary 50cc 2 strokes and higher aswell. I have done 65 on this scooter with no problems. Costs me £6 to fill up the tank which usually lasts me a week. I do about 25 miles per day 5 days a week and so far doing 65mph each day. It copes fine with this. The only problem I have had so far was with the keys. The seat release works off the ignition system and this has jammed. A new part cost me £50 but now works fine. Not as quick as 2 strokes on acceleration but has a much higher top end speed. I have completed a 130 mile trip on it without any problems what so ever.

I purchased my Maxster in Jan.04 for only £750 even though it was only 14 months old. It was an unwanted gift that a man had bought for his wife and she refused to ride it - so he wanted shut of it asap.

Power was poor when I first rode it but when I gave the machine a good examination, I found the spark plug was only half way in and was incorrectly gapped. Was it like this from new I ask myself? If it was, then it doesn't say much for the dealers pre delivery inspection.A new plug, correctly gapped and installed made a huge difference in performance. This is only a 125 after all and it weighs a lot for such a small engine, so any fault at all will have a very adverse effect on overall performance.

I used it for local transport only due to car parking difficulties where I live until I lost my job( and company car) when it became my sole transport.Even so, it still has only done 2700 miles despite being now (July 2005) 21 months old. Most journeys are only of a few miles at the most so I change the oil every 500 miles. I always work on the basis that oil is cheap and easy to change whereas engines are not! I have done a few longer journeys but nothing more than 100 miles.

It is capable of motorway travel as long as you keep to 60mph, as it feels stained over that speed although I have seen 75mph on the clock on a downhill stretch.Fuel consumption never seems to drop below 90mpg no matter what speed I do.

Obviously it is not made or sold as a motorway basher and on non-motorway journeys it is, quite frankly, all that anyone needs for travel in Britain today.It will pull away from most cars at the traffic lights getaway and cruises smoothly and effortlessly at any speed likely to be safely and legally reached on any single carriageway road. The overall finish is excellent, especially on the plastic bodywork. If you think this review is written by someone who works for Yamaha -- read on!!!

The seat is very uncomfortable. I know it is a commuter and not a Gold-Wing, but you shouldn't get bum ache after only 5 miles. After 20 miles you need to get off and stretch your legs to relieve the ache.

Components are not as high quality as the glossy finish would have you believe.They are also expensive considering the machine is a commuter scooter. I need to replace the fork seals on my machine - total cost of all parts is around £65 which is ridiculous for two seals, two dust seals, two washers and two O-rings. I couldn't afford to take the machine to a Yamaha dealer - they charge about £50 per hour labour.

To make things worse, the pinch bolts on the yoke have seized neccessitating removal of the entire fork assembly to get at the bolts and quite possibly cut the heads off and drill out the seized in bolt stems prior to tapping new threads for the replacement bolts.Also, there is corrosion and pitting on the fork tubes which means they will have to be replaced or rechromed to pass its first MOT in October.These failures are simply unacceptable on a machine that has only done 2700 miles and has been garaged all its life when not in use.

To me this set of problems is indicative of poor quality materials and bad assembly practices at the factory and/or poor PDI. A small amount of grease or the use of stainless fasteners would have prevented the pinch bolt seizures. Gaiters would have prevented the corrosion on the fork tubes. The cost at the factory would have been negligible but instead I am faced with a lot of work to rectify these avoidable problems.

Fortunately, I know what to do and have the tools, facilities and experience to do the work.

But what about someone who can't undertake such work? The cost would probably be in the region of £500 if a dealer did it all. Not the sort of money that is easy to come by for the sort of people who can only afford a scooter on which to commute.

I also need to replace the air filter which will cost £12. This is a ridiculous price for such a tiny item. The filter on my wife's car is about 6 times the size and costs the same!!

The worst aspect of the Maxster is a characteristic shared by many, if not all, of the new generation of plastic scoots - aerodynamics.

The design of the Maxster is basically faulty. It may look swoopy and curvy and it is admittedly a good looking machine.But the design is a triumph of form over function. That swoopy, fighter-jet styled front directs a blast of air right into your face and body. It is uncomfortable and very very noisy. Ear plugs are a must on any lengthy trip - ie over 10 miles. The wind blast also causes the visor on my helmet to vibrate extremely uncomfortably resulting in an aftershock chattering of my teeth that can last for 24 hrs after a journey of as little as 25 miles. I fitted a genuine Yamaha screen and this has helped at lower speeds but has made things worse at over 50mph.

All in all it is a shame that a simple design fault can spoil an otherwise good machine. I have a 1983 Vespa V100 which is inferior - as you would expect - in all aspects of performance to the Maxster. But the little Vespa wins hands down in terms of protection from the wind and rain, quietness due to lack of windblast and aerodynamic superiority. At any speed, the Vespa is smoother, quieter, less affected by turbulence and protects the rider better from the wind and rain. As the Vespa design goes back to 1946, you would have thought that someone as big as Yamaha could have improved on it by now!

Mind you, it's not just the Maxster that's aerodynamically unsound. I used to have a Honda CN250 Helix which was just as bad and so was a Yamaha Majesty 250 I once borrowed.The Gilera Runner has such a badly designed front end that you would probably be no worse protection-wise on a naked motorbike. The Vespa ET4 is horribly uncomfortable and I bet many more of the new breed of plastic automatics are just as bad.I think it is just the fact that many scooters never get outside the city and never exceed 30-40mph that stops their shortcomings being revealed.

That's OK for city dwellers but I believe that if a machine will cruise at 60mph like my Maxster does, then it should offer adequate protection from the elements at that speed. If Vespa got it right over 50 yrs ago, then everyone else should be able to do so now.

Or is appearance more important than useability?

Lastly, anyone buying one of these should be aware it isn't really a Yamaha. These machines are built in France by a Yamaha subsidiary called MBK. This is the modern name for Motobecane who have been building mopeds since God was a lad. If you look at the manufacturers plate in the luggage compartment under the Maxster's seat you will see that it says "MBK Industrie" --NOT Yamaha. And you can buy one of these that is labelled MBK on the outside too. This is the MBK Thunder.

I have owned this Yamaha Maxster 125 scooter for nearly 4 years, covering 18,000 miles, I felt the power was a little down, so being a full m/c licence holder bought a Malossi kit & uprated it to 170cc. It still returns 70 mpg, has a much better mid-range & appart from the electrical gremlins at 13,500m has been reliable, only major expense to date is fitting new head races, otherwise a practical sports Scooter.

I had this Yamaha Maxster 125 Scooter for 3.5 years, recently traded in for a Jetforce 125. It was a good looking scooter and served me well travelling about 30 miles a day to work and back.

There were teething problems when I first got the bike, like a leaking radiator and speedo set up for km instead of miles (dealers fault). After around 12K miles the electric went and a distributor was replaced.

The engine was still OK after 17K miles with very little problems. My only problem with this bike is the loose trim which I am not able to find/fix.