It is November, the Evo-class CR250R is on the bench, and the list is the usual one. Piston and rings. Base and head gaskets. Fork seals, because the left leg has been weeping since Farleigh. Rear pads. A chain that stopped being a chain somewhere around the fourth round. None of it is exotic. All of it, for a 1986 Honda, involves the same ritual: three websites, two forums, a phone call to a man who might have a piston in a drawer, and a Sunday at Newark with a shopping list.
Iron Offroad, which went live in May from an industrial estate in west Leeds, is an attempt to shorten that ritual. It is a parts website built around one idea: pick the bike first. Choose Honda, choose CR 250 R, choose 1986, and everything on the CR250R page from then on is listed as fitting that bike. Nearly 25,000 hard parts sit behind the lookup, from 55 brands, across 40 makes and more than 4,500 make-and-model pages, and the fitment data reaches further back than most modern retailers bother with: 1974 for the Yamaha YZ and Kawasaki KX lines, 1973 for the Honda CRs, 1975 for the Suzuki RMs, 1971 for Husqvarna and 1960 for the Maico MC250.
Before the catalogue, the name.
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A hundred and fifteen years in the trade
Iron Offroad is the third online shop from the team behind Iron City Motorcycles, the Harley-Davidson, KTM, Royal Enfield, Aprilia, Moto Guzzi and Mutt stocked dealer on Wellington Road, Leeds. The dealer’s history runs back further than most. Septimus Jennings began mending bicycles in a shed in Morpeth, Northumberland, in the 1890s, bought his first premises in 1911 to sell bicycles and motor cars, and in 1917 signed with the Ford Motor Company, making S Jennings Ltd one of Ford’s earliest British dealers. The firm stayed in the Jennings family until 1992. A management buyout in 2005 put Nas Khan – later awarded an OBE for services to charity and the economy – at the helm, and when the car dealerships were sold to Lookers in 2018 the family kept the motorcycle side. His son Sohail Khan now runs Iron City Motorcycles from a 15,000 sq ft showroom in Leeds, which MCN named its single-outlet Dealer of the Year in 2023.
The online side is run by Dale Gillespie, the dealer’s chief operating officer. In April 2026 the group launched Iron Stable, a Harley-Davidson parts site carrying more than 100,000 parts and accessories from around 400 brands – by product count, it says, the largest independent Harley parts retailer in the UK – with a part finder built on exploded factory diagrams. Iron Tyres followed, with 3,400-odd motorcycle tyres from 28 brands. Iron Offroad is the dirt-bike arm, and it is deliberately narrow: motocross, enduro, trail and supermoto. No road bikes, no quads, no bicycles. “Hard riders. Hard parts.” is the strapline, and hard parts is what it stocks – engine, chassis, brakes, controls, plastics – rather than jerseys and goggles.
What is actually on the shelf for an old bike
Here is the honest answer, because readers of this article will check. The depth is in the Japanese two-strokes and the big four-stroke singles. Run the lookup on a Honda CR250R and just over a thousand of its 1,359 listed parts are for pre-2000 models. The Yamaha YZ250 page carries 937 pre-2000 items, the Suzuki RM250 812, the Kawasaki KX250 793 and the CR125R 932. The Honda CR500R – for which 760 of its 776 parts predate the millennium, because so does the bike – has a page of its own, as do the Kawasaki KX500, the Honda XR600R, the Kawasaki KDX200, the Suzuki RMX250 and the Husqvarna CR250 from 1971 onward. The Maico hub runs to eighty or ninety parts each for the 250, 400, 440 and 490, and the eighties KTM MX250 and MX125 both have pages.
What that depth consists of is mostly the stuff that wears out. Wiseco and Wössner forged piston kits, ProX and Vertex top-end kits, Athena gasket sets, Hot Rods cranks and bearings, fork seals, wheel bearings, EBC, Galfer and SBS brake pads, Moto-Master discs, Renthal bars, sprockets and chain, Twin Air foam, Boyesen reeds, Motion Pro cables, and UFO and Polisport plastics – including UFO’s vintage-pattern universal rear fender for 1978–80 Maicos, listed at £40.88 against a £54.50 RRP at the time of writing. A Wiseco piston kit for a 1997–2001 CR250 was £140.50 (RRP £175.63). UFO radiator shrouds for a CR500, £38.76.
What it will not do is find you a Pursang crankcase or a Cota 348 clutch basket. Bultaco, Montesa, Ossa, Kramer and Armstrong are all in the lookup, which is a nice touch, but with single-figure part counts they are there because the fitment data mentions them, not because the shelf is full. Iron Offroad is fed by Parts Europe’s application lists and it is candid about that: if your bike is on the list, the part fits; if the part no longer exists in the aftermarket, it is not there. The autojumble is safe.
How it works, and what it costs
Every product page shows the maker’s RRP alongside the shop price, the OEM cross-reference number where one exists, and the full list of models and years the part is listed for – so a piston that appears under YZ 250 F also shows the WR 250 F and YZ 250 FX it shares a bore with. Pricing is flat and published; there is no membership scheme to join. In-stock parts leave Leeds within two or three working days and the site quotes six to ten working days door to door, with UK delivery at £4.99 on orders over £30 and free over £100. Returns are 14 days, no quibble, on unfitted parts.
If you would rather see the part before it goes on, the counter is at Unit 1a, Wellington Road Industrial Estate, Leeds LS12 2UA, open Tuesday to Friday 9–5 and Saturday 9–4, on 0113 340 3591, with collection by arrangement. Orders are picked by Iron City’s own workshop staff – people who fit parts for a living, rather than a warehouse working from a photograph.
Beyond the shelves there is a growing set of workshop guides – on reading a weeping fork seal, judging chain and sprocket wear, setting race sag and catching a wheel bearing before it takes the hub with it – written in plain English by people who turn spanners. And, in a nod to the club scene that keeps old bikes racing, there is a UK motocross clubs directory organised by region, with track pages for circuits including Hawkstone Park.
“We’re not going to pretend we can supply a crankcase for a Pursang,” says Gillespie. “But if you’re racing an Evo-class CR, YZ or RM, most of what wears out between rounds is on the shelf, and the lookup tells you in seconds whether it fits your year. That’s the bit that’s been missing for older bikes. Not the parts – the certainty.”
Winter is rebuild season. Iron Offroad is at ironoffroad.co.uk, and the full make list – Maico and all – is at ironoffroad.co.uk/makes.
