Thanks for the opportunity! I'm hoping to buy an historic oil in frame Triumph Bonneville from late 70's to early 80's with gear selector on the 'modern' side! Thought I'd join the forum to see if there is any advice or warnings! Looking for the right bike at the moment.
Gidday mate, welcome to the forum. I have no useful advice for you in your search, but have a look at the attached link, there most probably will be some gold in there. https://www.thetriumphforum.com/forums/bonneville.44/#google_vignette
@wolfram Welcome to the family. Looking at the Bonneville's do check for service history and how any owners. To many cowboys out there that think they can work on them. Not true. Start the bike from cold. First few seconds you may get white smoke but if it turns blackish then you may need valve stem seals on complete valve regrind. If you find a decent bike talk to @Iron or @darkman and for a please and thankyou they will steer you in the right direction or offer advice. There are some more very helpful peeps here just got to find them. If you look in the classics section their names will be there. But the T140 is a nice machine with a smile a mile. And if you find a TSX let me know and i will try and beat you there. And the TSS but they need more inspection. Great bike but the head studs did leak a little oil easy job with compression washers on there. Now i am dribbling so i will get my jacket.
Hi, @wolfram, and welcome to the forum. Good luck with your search! As others have said, there are folks here who can be quite helpful with knowledge and advice.
keep looking. the kind of machine you want is out there. personally i wouldnt worry too much about which side the machine shifts on. unless you ride lots of different machines you will get used to whatever is on yours. i ride left shift, right shift, one-up, one-down, and so on, and i just adapt as necessary. the reason im suggesting that is because there are many right shift machines out there available to you, and you might like it just fine. not a lot of red flags. just remember that the machine will be old, so it will likely need some attention. and once its sorted, you will need to keep up with routine maintenance, just like everybody did back then and lots of us do now. but theyre nice machines. they handle well, they start and stop reasonably well, and you can make them go very fast if you want to get creative. parts are common, and theres lots of free advice available.
