Bikes - Sellers Market?

Hi all,

Well, tonight I am bored and so have been surfing around Fleabay looking to see what sorts of old rat bikes like wot I used to ride 'back in the day' are still around and what sort of money they are commanding. Not having been around bikes for some years I must admit I am shocked how much some are going for. So thought I would ask the experten on dis ere forum how the market has been over much of the last twenty years.

For example - There is a ratty looking 1982 Honda CB250RS in auction and it's currently over £500!

I owned one of those back in the early 90's and I think I paid £250 for it in better condition than the one for sale and, while I actually really rather liked it, they never got a great write-up, weren't exactly what you would call 'Rockets' and had some problems like cams running directly in the alloy of the head that would wear out the head and that was the end of that unless you found a good'un from a crashed bike and a rocker cover that wasn't gasketed and leaked no matter what you tried, oh and all the rocker cover bolts stripped when you looked cockeyed at them. I wouldn't have thought it would be a bike to command even £500 in good nick now unless there is a real shortage of machines on the market.

If I recall correctly the prices of used bikes in the early nineties was because biking had really hit the doldrums in the 80's leading to very few 'ordinary' runabout and commuter type machines being on the market throughout the nineties but I would have thought that the higher sales throughout the nineties and into the early 2000's would have meant more decent used machinery at lower prices now but it doesn't seem that way.

Have bike sales been poor over recent years?

 

I loved my old 250rs... round the Cumbrian back lanes it was hilarious

 

Ah the GT550 - legendary favourite of the suicidal motorsickle couriers. That was a bike that always held it's money but it was hard to find one that hadn't gone round the world ten times even in the 90's.

I was actually looking for an old 250cc or so, traillie/scrambler to explore the forestry roads in the mountains around my village and maybe farther afield but they seem to be few and far between and cost ridiculous amounts of cash.

 

I feel for you man, I never trusted anyone to work on my bikes even though they tended to be old bangers in the first place. My Sprint fills me full of terror looking at all the electronics they have stuck on 'em these days but the seventies, eighties, and even the early nineties machines were a doddle to do it all on as long as you had the genuine workshop manuals. Never found Hayne's number to be half as good.

It is rather nifty that you can get the Triumph worshop manual for the Sprint online for free! My last workshop manuals (Suzuki) cost something like sixty quid each if I recall correctly.

@johne Those are a couple of grand or more on fleabay. I was thinking more of a couple of hundred quid. Basically I was looking more in the line of a Honda XL, Yamaha XT, Kawasaki KL - a four stroke, low maintenance crashable banger. The only essentials was that it had a running engine, two wheels and a chain. Not planning to use on the roads but just up and down the forestry roads that start a couple of hundred yards from my front door.

 

@Big Sandy is this the manual you are looking for?
https://www.manualslib.com/download/1001824/Triumph-Trophy.html

It seems to cover most of the earlier 900 models.

@Tiglet what is this 'SAFE' motorcycle of which you speak? I am looking for the kind of old banger that you climb up muddy hillsides on at quite low speeds and, if it's about to go 'pear shaped' you throw it away and then pick it up again, bash out the bent bits and carry on as before and if it dies altogether you bury it in the peat to really confuse archaeologists in a millennia or so. Not the high speed round a nice even field pretending you are Travis Pastrana type of business. That's why I was thinking more four stroke rather than crazy stroker. You wouldn't believe the condition of some of the bikes I used to ride 'safely' in the wilds of Scotland. I had a KL250 at one point the had forks bent in to point the wheel in one direction while the bars were bent to point in the other direction but, once mastered the thing went across the moors etc. without missing a beat until the rusted spokes of the rear wheel collapsed anyway and, even then I left her there in the middle of nowhere 'til I got a new wheel, complete with tyre, from a breakers and went back to collect her and she started first kick. Sadly she met her demise after I sold her to a fellow who decided to try and go into orbit off a sand dune and collapsed her forks.

 

Ah well, I wouldn't hammer down any of the forestry roads around here as the local boys who drive the lumber lorries are complete nutters ( 50mph on a gravel road around the shoulder of a mountain over a 1000 foot drop kind of mad!) and, taking it easy is the key to avoiding a quick death.

 

It is somewhat insane. I have been looking out for an old four stroke scrambler style bike and the prices are plum crazy. A ratty 35 year old trail bike for two and a half grand! Considering I was looking for a bike to be chucked around on rough ground and battered silly there is no way I would spend that kind of money on what has gone from being a cross-country workhorse to being claimed to be a 'classic'.