An excellent bike for beginners and shorter riders looking for a sportbike look with standard seating. $2,500
Sold: 2004 Suzuki GS500F
Sold: 1989 Honda Hawk GT NT650
A customized Hawk GT with wider tires and an exceptionally nice Corbin seat. $2,800
Sold: 1975 Honda CB750
Decent looking example of one of the less trouble-prone vintage Hondas.
Sold: 2001 Kawasaki W650
30,890 miles on this modern classic that came out before its time. $3,500
Sold – 2019 Gear Up OD Green
Standard color, black powertrain.
Get Upside Down on a Vintage Motorcycle
There’s an event called the Vintage 1000 whose stated goal is to get a dozen people to ride 1000 miles of the Trans America Trail on 1981-and-older motorcycles, with an extra (optional) challenge of putting that bike together for under $1000 total. I did it. The bike was a 1972 Honda XL250, the first year … Read More
Why we stopped repairing Chinese scooters
In the fall of 2014, Nashville Motorcycle Repair stopped working on Chinese-brand scooters. Here’s why. Imagine Sisyphus, sweating away in Hades, pushing his rock up the hill every day, only to watch it roll back to the bottom, where he’s forced to start over. Now imagine the rock is actually a poorly-made machine that’s always … Read More
On replacing complex parts
Lots of motorcycle problems require us to replace the affected parts. Worn out tires, chains and sprockets, crash-damaged levers, leaking fork seals, etc. But there are two items people seem inclined to replace that rarely actually need it: the carburetors and the wiring harness. Both of these assemblies are pretty complicated, at least in comparison to a tire, a … Read More
Buying a used bike: Honda 599
In June 2012, I bought a new-to-me Honda 599, roughly one week after finding out they’d been sold in the U.S. for two years. In The Rest of the World, it’s called a Honda Hornet 600. Here, it’s the 599, because, supposedly, somehow the old AMC Hornet has a permanent claim on the name. For … Read More
2003 Honda VFR800 running problem
I’ve been making a lot of “cobbler’s son” jokes this week. Of the three motorcycles I own with unexpired tags on them right now, exactly zero are running properly. One of them is a 2003 Honda Interceptor VFR800 with 7,000 miles on it. I bought it from a friend who bought it from a coworked … Read More