One of these rules is that I will buy any motorcycle that:
- I can ride it as it is without much if any work.
- Has a clean title
- It is a buck a cc or less
At this point in my life, I felt safe, as I am not in buying mode.
Far from it.
Then a Buell Blast comes up and it met the criteria.
It's basically half a Sportster engine, the rear cylinder removed.
It's slower than any 500cc motorcycle I have ever ridden.
The brakes are stellar.
That windscreen, that may have been created by Satan himself.
Specifically, Satan wanted it to wind buffet a 6'4" rider into a fierce rage.
After a mile I was ready to push the bike in a ditch and burn it.
After another half a mile I was riding it like a dog hanging it's head out the window - leaning way to the side, into a stream of fresh, stabile, pleasing wind.
The handlebars also sucked, being too narrow, making everything harder than it needed to be.
Halfway through the ride, I stopped for the 1st time at a friends house, and begged him for tools to remove the fairing.
Buell, would it take simple tools to do anything an engineer has touched? Who was I kidding. Plus, my buddy had trouble finding his allen keys. Asking for more tools might have been bad.
That fairing pulled right off, no tools needed, and the motorcycle was 1000000 times better.
Rode home and got to work.
Found a stock windscreen on eBay. Fine, now I am over a buck a cc.......
Those bars and knuckle busters are now gone, replaced by no less than 5 different slightly bent handlebars that I thought were good.
I picked up a ton of parts from a dealer, now I am realizing, I hauled off a lot of scrap metal.
The 6th or 7th handlebar was not bent, but it was wide, and not a bad height, in fact, it is darn near perfect.
Windscreen auction was won, it arrived.
Slapped on a set of bar end mirrors replacing the stock Mickey Mouse Ear mirrors.
It's much better, as soon as the temperature hits 50 again I'll take it out again.
Someone is going to buy this from me this spring, for probably $1500, and it will be a great motorcycle for them.
My goal is to try and not put more than that amount of money into before I sell it.