A few days ago, I did a quick calculation and found I’ve bought a new bike every four to five years since the late 1960s. Somewhere around my 35th birthday, a nostalgia thing took over: “I need a Honda Super Hawk like I had when I was 18!” So, this old Hawk was not to be a rider — it was to remind me of where my old riding buddies and I started out. And the Super Hawk is a keeper, as I’ve owned it for about 40 years. Easy to perfect at the time, it just needed me to find stock mufflers to replace the original owner’s Bates trumpet megaphones. Easy.
I bugged the owner of a 1986 Honda VF500F Interceptor, a very low-mileage, cherry (or so I thought) machine, to sell it to me. About five years of nagging him paid off. Last weekend, after this bike was around almost ten years, it went to a new owner. But not before I spent about $3,500 perfecting it. What was I thinking, and how bad were my estimates and observations of what it would take to make it saleable? Then again, will I repeat this mistake? Probably.
As a fan of production racers, I marvel at how manufacturers make short production runs of special versions of a given machine in their serial production lineup. These somewhat trick bikes find their way to pro-licensed racers and make the standard production bike look good and sell well. A Harley-Davidson XLR-TT racer looks like a mid-1960s Sportster with no lights, but about 90% of the race bike is actually completely different — few parts are interchangeable with those of the street bike. Between 1958 and 1968 or so, Harley made about 10 to 25 XLRs each year for TT racing (dirt track with a jump and a couple of extra turns). I decided I had to have one and learned only one or two come available each year. Did I wait for an intact, as-raced complete bike? Heck no. After three years of searching, I gave up and bought a “bitsa,” an assemblage of correct parts, never a motorcycle. It wasn’t even a basket case. A guy had been gathering XLR components from friends and at swap meets for about 20 years and passed away before getting the bike together! Now it’s my project, and with a little help from my friends, it is nearly completed. I also “had to have” a Bultaco road racer. At least this time, my impatience led me to a conversation in a Daytona Beach hotel elevator and a 125cc TSS basket case, which was about 100% complete.
I know many of you have faced this same need to collect, and we get so driven that we make less-than-wise decisions about what we acquire. Ideally, always acquire a very good original, complete, never-restored or repainted motorcycle, even if it takes years to find the right one. Wait. Avoid basket cases, and certainly avoid bitsa baskets unless what you are hunting is so rare you may never see another.
I guess the bottom line is that going out and buying a new, regular-rider motorcycle every five years is fine, instant gratification, a turnkey experience. But have a serious talk with yourself before you follow in the footsteps of those who bring home near-impossible, frustrating challenges that linger in boxes and milk crates — like the XLR-TT bitsa basket I got from a guy’s widow, a rare and complicated project. Then again, maybe the former owner is smiling down and encouraging me to accomplish what he ran out of time for.
