Written from primary sources
History
How these machines got the way they are, written from manufacturer documents rather than from other websites. Every paragraph names the issues it rests on, and every article states what it could not read.
-
The 30hp problem that shaped the first hull
Yamaha wanted fifty horsepower for its first sit-down craft and could only get thirty. The double-chine hull almost every runabout still uses is what the engineers did about it. This is Yamaha's own account of the years before the first machine shipped, and it is the part of the story that the model lists leave out.
-
Jetpilot: one logo, two companies
A stand-up racing apparel brand founded in California in 1986, sold to Japan in 1999, run from the Gold Coast for two decades before it legally owned itself, and today split into two separate companies sharing one logo. Three things its own about pages say do not survive checking, and one thing they have never printed turns out to have a name, a place and a year.
-
Marine Jet, Yamaha's name for the same ski
In Japan these are not WaveRunners. They are Marine Jets, sold under codes rather than names, and the gap between the two vocabularies means owners of the same hull cannot find each other's parts.
-
Yamaha on its own machines, 2003 to 2009
Yamaha published a dealer magazine for decades, and the personal watercraft sections of it are a primary record of how the four-stroke changeover actually happened. This is what those issues say, and what they cannot tell us.
What shipped, and when. These articles say how the changes happened. For the year-by-year list of what each company actually launched, the Yamaha model timeline runs off a different source on a different calendar, and does not decide fitment either.
Where this comes from
The source index for the Yamaha material is the Yamaha News PWC index, which lists every issue whose index names a personal watercraft and links to Yamaha's own archive. Model-year tables live at Model History.
4 articles · 13 sources cited