Authors: Sonny Barger
In addition to a mechanic (or at least a friend who’s knowledgeable about motorcycles), you’ll want to bring the following items when you go to look at a used bike:
The following procedures apply to all bikes, as does the following advice: if something doesn’t check out, move on and find another bike. Unless you have a mechanic estimate the costs of repairing any problems you might find, you can assume the costs will be high. Even routine maintenance like valve adjustments or tire replacement can cost hundreds of dollars. Serious repairs, like fixing a failing transmission, will cost thousands. If you pay $4,500 for a nine-year-old Yamaha Road Star with 59,000 miles, then have to drop another $3,000 fixing the transmission, you’re getting dangerously close to the cost of a two-year-old carry-over version of the same bike with zero miles. (A “carry-over” is a brand-new bike from a previous season that has gone unsold.)
To keep this manageable, we’ll group the parts of the bike together as follows:
You can break the inspection process down into two sections—the macroscopic inspection and the microscopic inspection.
THE COSMETIC EVALUATION
T
HE MACROSCOPIC IS THE
broad cosmetic overview of the bike, which is really a fancy way of saying your first impression of the machine.
Does It Shine?
Is the bike clean? Is it obviously well maintained? Does it have rusted metal or oxidized aluminum showing? Does is show evidence of a major crash?
Does it look like the owner took decent care of the motorcycle you’re inspecting? If he rode it as carefully as he’d shave his own mother’s legs with a straight razor, you’ll be able to tell just from the bike’s appearance. The bike will have a fresh coat of wax and the paint will glow. Even if the bike has a few miles under its belt, if it’s been stored properly, ideally inside a garage, but if not, at least under a quality cover that breathes and doesn’t trap moisture, the paint should be almost like new. Sure, there may be some minor scratches or some swirls in the finish—these sorts of things are inevitable on a motorcycle that gets ridden regularly—but overall the bike should shine.
Likewise the chrome should be polished to the point where the sun’s reflection practically burns out the corneas of your eyes. It should not be rusted or pitted, and the chrome should be deep; you should be able to look down into it. If you find pitting in the chrome finish or rusty exhaust pipes, you could be looking at some expensive repairs.
Any exposed aluminum should be smooth and clean. If it has a whitish appearance, it is oxidizing. This usually occurs only when a bike has sat out in the elements for long periods of time (although it can occur more quickly in areas near oceans, where saltwater spray can get on a bike and degrade its metal parts). Replacing oxidized aluminum parts like engine cases and fork legs is prohibitively expensive and often exceeds the value of a motorcycle, even a Harley-Davidson. It can also be a sign that there are deeper problems with a bike, since the same elements that degraded the aluminum parts will have compromised other parts, like electrical components and rubber seals.
You may find corrosion on the metal parts around the battery box. This might look like hell, but usually it is just cosmetic, caused by an overheated battery puking out a bit of battery acid because it was overcharged. Or it had a blocked vent hose, or the battery cracked at some point. It’s difficult (if not impossible) to remove this scarring, but as long as it appears to have been an isolated occurrence, it shouldn’t cause any long-term harm. If it appears to be a repeated event, however, it might indicate a more serious problem with an electrical system that overcharges the battery.
On many Japanese bikes, you might find that the exposed aluminum parts have taken on a yellowish appearance, especially on older bikes. This is because they’re coated with a protective film that takes on a tint as it ages. The brownish-yellow tint isn’t pretty, but it’s common and doesn’t indicate deeper problems beyond age.
What Do Dents Mean?
Be sure to look for dents and other signs of crashing. A small ding on an exhaust pipe, footpeg tip, or clutch lever likely means a bike has fallen over, but that isn’t necessarily a deal breaker. Motorcycles are inherently unstable machines, and as such they are prone to falling over. Sooner or later, every bike will fall over. A kickstand will sink into the asphalt on a hot day, or you might hit a slick patch of diesel while rolling up to a gas pump just as you happen to be crossing a rough seam in the pavement. Shit happens. The vast majority of these parking-lot tip overs result in such minor cosmetic damage that it’s not worth fixing, but they do leave telltale marks on the machine.
Also, don’t worry about stone chips on the fenders or the frame behind the front wheel. This is natural wear and tear and is unavoidable if the bike is to be ridden in the real world. The only bikes without stone chips are brand-new ones sitting on showroom floors or useless trailer queens hauled from bike show to bike show. All of my bikes have fallen over more than once, and each of them have pitted chrome and paint from rocks and road debris. If you ride forty thousand miles or more each year, your bikes will be pitted too.
Bigger dents are usually signs of more serious crashes that can have more dire consequences to the motorcycle’s structural integrity. If a bike took a hit that was hard enough to put a grapefruit-sized divot in the gas tank, chances are the parts that you can’t see took a hard hit, too. At the very least it indicates that the owner didn’t treat his or her bike with the respect it deserved.
If a bike has plastic bodywork like a fairing, saddlebags, or a trunk, even a minor tip over can have much more expensive consequences. Check to make sure that all the gaps in the body panels have a uniform fit and all the tabs holding the parts together are intact and not broken off. Examine all the plastic for cracks. Even if the plastic isn’t cracked, spiderweb cracks in the paint around mounting bolts are a sign that the bike has been through some sort of traumatic event. This will also show up in the metal mounting brackets that hold the bodywork in place. Visually inspect all the plastic pieces to ensure they line up straight; if they sit crooked, something underneath them is probably bent, which could be a very bad thing.
Even if the plastic pieces appear straight, examine the brackets holding them in place (at least the ones you can see) to make sure they aren’t bent or tweaked. Even if the brackets are straight, examine them for evidence that they have been straightened. This is a sign that the bike has been in a serious crash.
Check the seat cover for rips and tears. The stitching should line up, and everything should be straight. If the seat cover doesn’t line up with the rest of the bike, chances are it’s an aftermarket seat cover. Again, if the seat looks okay and is comfortable, this shouldn’t be a deal breaker—a previous owner may have simply hooked the original seat cover with his boot and ripped it—but it could also be a sign that a motorcycle has been in a serious crash and has been rebuilt.
Most important, does the bike match the owner’s description? If the seller claimed the bike was in mint condition, does it really look like it just rolled off the showroom floor, or is there oil weeping out of the head gasket? Does the bike look like it has a lot more miles than the odometer suggests? This may mean that the owner tampered with the odometer, or else that the bike spent a good part of its life sitting out in the elements even when it wasn’t running. Either way, this is not good. A little exaggeration on the owner’s part is to be expected, but if there is a gross discrepancy, you have no choice but to question the owner’s honesty in general. If the owner has grossly misrepresented the bike, you can either negotiate the price downward or, better yet, go find a better motorcycle.
Sometimes a bike might look like it has a lot more miles on it than it really does, but in reality, it just has a lot of years under its belt. As I mentioned earlier, many riders rarely take their motorcycles out of the garage. If you just ride to town once or twice a month, you’ll be lucky to put on more than four hundred miles per year. That means you can have a ten-year-old motorcycle with three or four thousand miles or less on the clock. Harleys seem especially prone to spending more time in garages than out on highways.
The end result can be a bike that might not have many miles on its odometer but is still a ten-year-old motorcycle, with ten-year-old seals and ten-year-old bearings. Harleys seem more susceptible to this sort of rot than other brands. Harleys with low miles but lots of years usually have very dry gaskets that leak motor oil everywhere. Not only should you avoid buying one of these, but you should avoid parking them in your driveway.
A PART-BY-PART GUIDE TO INSPECTING A USED MOTORCYCLE
O
NCE A BIKE HAS
passed the macroscopic examination, it’s time to put it under the microscope. You would think a bike that looks good on the outside would be good on the inside; after all, an owner who treated a bike’s cosmetics with respect should treat its mechanicals with respect, too. In most cases, you’d be correct. An owner who puts the effort into maintaining a bike’s appearance usually puts as much effort into maintaining its mechanical parts. But there are always exceptions to every rule, and when you are paying your hard-earned money for a motorcycle, you don’t want to pay even more because you ended up with one of those exceptions.
When buying a bike, you’ll be able to put all the things you learned about the parts of a motorcycle in chapter 1 to good use. If you need to, go back and skim over that chapter to refresh your memory regarding the different systems and subsystems of a motorcycle, because you’ll be examining each of them when checking out the parts of a used bike you’re thinking about buying.
The Electrics
Electrical systems have historically been the weakest parts of motorcycles and the most prone to failure. This is partly because there’s just not enough space to package a heavy-duty electrical system like you’d find on a car. For most of the 110 or so years that motorcycles have been manufactured, the manufacturers’ solution to the problem was to keep electrical systems as simple as possible. On the earliest bikes the electrical system consisted of a crude magneto that provided spark; if the bike had any lights at all, they’d be powered by kerosene. The earliest electrical lights were powered by batteries, just like your flashlight, and as with your flashlight, those batteries had to be replaced when they ran down. This is called a “total loss” system.
The earliest regenerating electrical systems used six-volt DC generators to charge batteries and power lights. These systems could remain crude because they didn’t need to be more sophisticated; the single most difficult task of riding—starting a motorcycle—was done with legs of the flesh-and-blood kind rather than of the electrical variety. When the riding public began to demand electric starters on their motorcycles, these systems were no longer adequate and were replaced with twelve-volt systems that used automotive-style alternators to provide electrical power. By the time electronic ignition became common on bikes in the late 1970s and early 1980s, relatively reliable alternators provided all electrical power.
The slow evolution of motorcycle electrical systems is one good reason to avoid buying older bikes. Even newer bikes with early electronic ignition systems can be riddled with expensive electrical problems. For example, Yamahas from the early 1980s tended to have electrical systems that would overcharge, cooking batteries and voltage regulators. Worse yet, the Maxim 750 and 1100, a couple of Yamaha’s bigger four-cylinder bikes, had crude computerized ignition systems that, when they failed, would make a bike completely inoperable. And they did fail, all the time. The system was virtually unusable and Yamaha abandoned it after just a couple of years. Yamaha is notorious for not carrying replacement parts for a motorcycle after it is out of production, meaning that within a few years, replacement computers for these bikes were virtually unobtainable. As a result, you still might run across a Yamaha Maxim 750 or 1100 or a 750 Seca that appears to be in almost new condition. Beware and avoid these bikes at all costs.
Throughout the history of motorcycles, really lousy bikes like this do crop up, sometimes from the least likely sources. For example, the four-cylinder Honda 1200-cc Gold Wings from the 1980s had a tendency to burn out their stators, which are roughly the equivalent of automotive alternators. This would have been bad enough by itself, but Honda made the matter worse by placing the stator inside the engine cases. This means to replace a stator, you’ll have to split the engine cases. This is the most extensive operation you can perform on a modern Japanese motorcycle engine. It’s also the most expensive one; replacing the stator on a 1200-cc Gold Wing can easily cost you $2,000–$3,000, which is close to the value of the entire bike.
As motorcycle technology advanced, bad designs like these became increasingly rare, which further underscores my point that modern motorcycles are your best bets when considering used machines. The worst electrical problem you’re likely to encounter when buying a modern motorcycle is a weak battery. Modern batteries can last for years, but some climates can make them wear out more quickly. Both cold and heat can shorten the life of a battery. If a battery’s not properly cared for in northern climates, they can wear out during the winter months, and in hot climates, the sun and heat can shorten a battery’s life. I live in Arizona, where I replace my battery every two years just to be safe.