1976 Yamaha XT500 Service and Repair Manual

The first year of the XT500 is the one people rebuild, and the factory manual for it is LIT-11616-01-50. The 1976 machine wears the model code XT500C, which is the code to check against the frame label before you order anything.

Yamaha did something useful with this book. Rather than a separate volume per year, it wrote one service manual spanning 1976 through 1981, and extended it across the related SR500 and TT500 as well. So a single set of procedures covers three closely built machines and six model years, with the differences called out where they exist.

For work on a fifty-year-old thumper that means you get the original tolerances instead of a modern approximation: valve clearances as Yamaha set them, torque values for the head and cases, ignition timing, carburettor settings and the wiring as drawn at the factory. Anyone chasing a starting problem or reassembling a top end will spend most of their time in the specification tables, and those tables are reproduced as written.