December and January might, at first glance, seem a very strange time to buy a motorcycle. It is precisely because few other people want to purchase a bike over the winter that it's such a good time to go on the Great Bargain Hunt. Much better than waiting to join the masses in the great rush in March or April.
I have over the years perfected the art of bike purchase in the winter. I always pick up at least one bargain, more usually three or four. Rather than risk life and limb riding these bikes on wet, icy and cold roads, I prefer to spend the winter locked away in my centrally heated workshop (yes, what in any other residence would be the dining room), renovating whatever machines I have managed to find.
The perfect purchase is one that is generally sound but suffering either cosmetic decay or electrical demise. If the price is very low I will accept a non-runner, but usually I at least like to hear an engine running, although the machines are usually in such a state that they can't be test ridden. I live in Bristol, a city large enough to have a good choice of well knackered machines but not so large that I can't get away with pushing the decayed heap a couple of miles to my house.
Finding used bikes is a matter of trudging around all the newsagents, checking out the adverts (supermarket display boards are also good as they are usually free), grabbing the free local papers hot off the press and studying their bargain columns and, finally, knocking on the doors of houses where some decayed heap has been left in the garden.
I don't bother with MCN, bike shops or the evening newspaper; the adverts in the papers are too expensive to justify the sale price of the kinds of hacks I'm interested and most of the bike shop adverts are by people who know too much about motorcycling to let the machines go cheaply (ditto breakers and backstreet dealers).
If, after the first week of December, I have not secured at least one machine, I go to the trouble of placing my own adverts in likely shop windows and the free papers. Something along the lines of, Old Motorcycle Wanted, must be cheap or free, anything considered. I have yet to spend more than a tenner in what gains a fairly exhaustive coverage of the city.
Usually, by the end of December I have the living room full of three or four machines in various states of decay. I chose the best one for myself and repair the others ready for the selling season. I don't just get free motorcycling, I make a profit out of it!
Sometimes, the faults are so numerous that a machine can't be economically repaired, then it is stripped down and the usable bits retained for future use. I once pushed a rotting hulk of a 250 Superdream four miles across Bristol, a trail of bits falling off in its wake, just because it had a decent set of Roadrunners and the owner had given it to me for free. Just about everything else was wrecked, the frame was rusted through in places, the tank leaked petrol, the Comstars were bent, etc., etc. I did retrieve a working regulator/rectifier and a few yards of wire out of it. The engine was seized solid and completely worn out (it had just over 63000 miles on the clock).
Last year I was really lucky, I picked up five bikes, all in reasonable nick. The first was a late sixties CB250K1 which did not run and cost a tenner. It was a bit tatty but I have seen bikes in a worse state that were only five years old. I found the engine problem very quickly, a cracked rubber inlet manifold which I repaired with a combination of old inner tube, Adralite (marvellous stuff, an essential bodger's tool) and a jubilee clip.
It's very important to check all the simple things before rushing into an engine strip. Old engines don't react well to being torn apart when there's nothing wrong with them and a full gasket set often costs more than you paid for the bike in the first place. The CB also needed its points cleaned, a new set of plugs and about twenty kicks to get it into life. A quick run up the back lane revealed that all was well with the engine but that it wobbled a bit and the brakes didn't work well.
Pitted headrace bearings meant some clown had tightened up the steering stem with gorilla force, making the steering more than a little notchy. I replaced them with some from a large tin full of various ball bearings from past strip downs. It's surprising all the stuff that accumulates after you've stripped down a few machines to their bare frames. I have never had to buy a nut and bolt! The front brake shoes I had to buy (pattern, mail order) as they were down to the metal, the rear drum just required a clean up.
The cycle parts were stripped off, cleaned up, filled where necessary and placed in the path of my electric spray gun. A lot of T-cutting later and they were a passable deep blue, one of the easier colours to spray well. The front mudguard was the most difficult as it was full of rust and I even had to resort to GRP in a couple of places. By the time I'd finished polishing up the alloy and chrome, I had a nice little 250 in a condition that belied its age. I was later to sell if for £275, a profit of just over two hundred notes for a few days work.
The second bike I worked on was even easier to repair. And so it should be, as I'd had to pay £250 for a nice looking, 35000 mile GS550. The owner had continuous electrical problems, alternators, rectifiers and batteries all burning out despite replacement of all things electrical. I'm quite good at electrics, even if I say so myself, and with the aid of a multimeter can find out all kinds of interesting things about a bike's electrical system.
At some time the high voltages and currents that a knackered rectier/regulator unit had allowed to pass uncontrolled into the electrical circuit had burned out some wiring insulation, so that the bare wires cut off the circuit. Because this wiring was in front of the fuse box, the newly installed alternator and rectifier/regulator were quietly smouldering away without any protection from the fuses.
As mentioned in the UMG some time back, it's possible to pick up car type regulators and rectifiers for less than a tenner the pair (the better automotive parts shops). In fact, it's cheaper to buy them like this than hit the local electrical store for the component parts. The only problem is that they come without weather protection, meant as they are for installation inside a car's alternator. I mounted mine on a bit of aluminium I had hanging around, connected up all the relevant wiring, then made up a cardboard mould and poured in some plastic resin. Once this was set, the cardboard was torn off and I was left with a neat unit that I then mounted on to the battery box (which is already rubber mounted and thus insulated from vibration).
I changed the wiring on the Suzuki, connecting the unit directly to the rewound alternator (£35 mail order), so that now all the power from the alternator poured out all the time (before, switching on the lights made extra coils come in), assured that the heavy duty nature of the new unit would withstand this extra input.
There was little else wrong with the Suzuki, and I decided that this was the machine I would use over the coming year. It did 12,400 miles without a hint of a problem and I was even a little sad to see it go in the Autumn, although the 950 notes I received did make me feel a little better about the sale, especially when it was due for a new set of tyres, pads, chain and sprockets.
The third bike was to prove the most expensive to repair. A Suzuki GN400 that ran but had a clattery top end. Adjusting the camchain had little effect, much to my disappointment. When I took the head off I found a dreadful mess, scored camshaft, bent rockers, burnt out valves and cracked cylinder head. The only consolation was that it was a single cylinder engine with only two valves. It took a lot of phoning around breakers to even find a broken GN and in the end I bought a used engine for two hundred notes.
That went in okay, but it took me three days to get the knackered swinging arm out and another two days to strip the front disc caliper. These bikes might be fine little commuters when new but after they've been neglected a little they are real buggers to work on. At one point, every screw I seemed to be undoing was stripping its thread or breaking off. I was glad to see the back of it before anything else went wrong, my profit amounted to a massive sixty pounds!
I didn't make all that much more on the C90 someone had given me for free. It's ten year old motor had seized solid and I had to pay fifty notes to a breaker for a replacement. The rear frame cum guard was also rusty, but I fixed that with GRP. Some of the front suspension bearings were also shot, but I bodged on some other bearings I had hanging around, I don't know what they were off, but they went in with some aid from a 7lb sledgehammer.
The little Honda rumbled into life, quickly revealing a shot crankshaft. The breaker didn't want to know, of course, and muggins spent an interesting day freeing off the crankshaft in the original engine to use in the new one. I was tempted to chuck it in a corner and forget it, but I make it a rule that once I've started on a renovation job to finish it off come what may. The finished Honda rattled a bit but ran well enough and proved surprisingly easy to sell.
The final machine that year was another freebie. A five year old MZ 250. I don't normally bother with strokers, when their engines go they tend to go terminally, but I've always thought of MZs as honorary four strokes. All I knew about this one was that the engine still turned over and the machine was covered in two years rust and decay from standing in the owner's garden. I was just going to strip it down and use whatever bits were serviceable.
However, I'm a curious soul, so I renewed the oil and spark plug (not actually new oil and plug, of course, just a lot better than what was there before) and much to my surprise the bike clattered into life on the third kick. It wouldn't rev because the throttle cable was partially seized but I soon sorted that. I had to take the chassis down to the frame, clean everything up and do a respray, but it was a simple bike to work on and everything that wasn't resprayed polished up nicely with a bit of elbow grease and a few tubes of Solvol.
I was tempted to make this resurrected bike my main machine for the year and sell the GS for an early profit, but found I did not really like the engine or handling characteristics, so it went as soon as the weather improved, making a useful £250 profit.
That's just one year in the life of a bargain hunter, but it goes to show that with a little knowledge, effort and perseverance someone with little money can get on the road for next to nothing. Just picking up a couple of non runners for a few quid is worthwhile because of all the bits that you can rescue to use on your own mount. I've been doing this for the past 20 years, having had a particularly lucrative time buying old British wrecks when I started, and hope to keep on doing it for another two decades. Apart from anything else, I don't like riding in the winter and it keeps me busy on those long winter evenings.
Chris Jones