Now, I needed to break the news to Yamaha: Their machine was dead. It perished in my hands. Yamaha, bless their souls, took the bike back and swapped it for a new one for the sake of this story. Subsequent questioning about the status of the Mr. Hyde XT revealed that the bike had suffered an oil pump failure. An oil light would be nice. That was the bad news. Yamaha has made this bike for more than a decade and they tell me they had never heard of this kind of failure. In fact, when I first told them the motor had let go, they were rather shocked. The XT350 motor has a reputation for being bulletproof.