Sports Cycle

Buying Your First Motorcycle : Where to Buy Your Bike ?

Motorcycles are expressions of passion, and the people buying and selling them tend to be passionate people. (Should you doubt this, ask yourself when you last saw someone covered with Chevrolet tattoos, wearing a T-shirt stating he’d rather see his sister in a brothel than his brother in a Toyota). Just finding a motorcycle differs from finding a car. You can find motorcycles in several places, some obvious, others less so.

Dealerships

The most obvious - and perhaps the easiest - place to find a bike is at a dealership. If you’re buying a new bike, you’ll have no choice but to buy from a dealer, but even if you’re buying used, buying from a reputable shop can be the best way to get your first bike.

Physically locating a motorcycle dealership can present a challenge if you’re not familiar with an area. People selling motorcycles don’t have the kind of cash flow car dealers have, so usually you won’t find motorcycle shops amid the endless car lots, strip malls, and office buildings in the sprawl suburban America has become. Motorcycle dealerships tend to be hidden in out-of-the way locations, like inner cities and industrial parks, where leases are lower. Check the Yellow Pages under “Motorcycles” to find dealers and repair shops in your area.

Choosing a Dealer

Not all dealerships are created equal. The quality of the staff makes or breaks a shop. When you’re buying your first motorcycle, it’s tough to know if you are being taken advantage of. My first experience with a dealer turned out badly. I wanted to buy a 100cc Kawasaki dirtbike, but my father distrusted Japanese products (this was the early 1970s in rural Minnesota), so he took me to a shop selling American-made minibikes. He liked the minibikes because they were powered by snowmobile engines, which he believed to have been built right there in Minnesota. Actually, these engines were manufactured in Japan and were wholly unsuited for summertime operation. The second day I owned the bike, I seized a piston.

The dealer fully expected us to be back the next day; he knew these bikes were unfit, but he had a plan. He traded me the trashed minibike for a new 80cc Yamaha motorcycle. It ended up costing about 20 percent more than the 100cc Kawasaki would have cost, but it was either that or keep the blown-up minibike.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the dealer lied to me about the model year of the bike. I was too naive to know where to check the date of manufacture and ended up buying a two-year-old carryover motorcycle for more than the price of a new one. So, Here are some tips to keep this from happening to you:

- Learn as much about the motorcycle as possible. Check my article about "How To Choosing the Right Motorcycle ?" and also "New or Used Bikes ?" to see if it’s listed there. Go to the google, and read back issues of motorcycle owners that have tested the bike.

- Make sure your sales person knows motorcycles. Ask good questions, and by the answers, you can tell if the person is uninformed, unscrupulous, or both.

- Check the mileage on the odometer against the mileage on the title, and check the model year on the title against the date of manufacture on the frame, usually located on a plate riveted either to the steering head or the lower frame tube or beam. If something’s not kosher, chances are neither is the shop selling the bike.

Buying a motorcycle from a salesperson who knows bikes and whom you can trust can be fun, the beginning of a productive relationship, but getting ripped off can poison you for life. Generally, you’re more likely to have a bad experience at a shop where motorcycles are just a sideline, like a car dealership that also carries a line of bikes, or a dealership devoted primarily to snowmobiles, watercraft, or some other type of recreational vehicle, and just carries motorcycles because its franchise requires it. Your best bet is to find a shop specializing in motorcycles.

But like any generalization, there are exceptions. The best salesperson I’ve ever dealt with worked at a Chrysler shop that carried Honda motorcycles. If you can find just one person at a shop who knows and cares about motorcycles, that’s a good shop.

How’s Their Service Department ?

Finding the right dealership with a salesperson you trust means little if the mechanic working in the service department is a ham-fisted fool.

This is more of an issue when buying a new bike under warranty than it is when buying a used bike. With a used motorcycle, if you get a good deal, you can always take it to a mechanic you trust somewhere else. When you buy new, you may be forced to go back to the same dealership for warranty work; many shops balk at covering warranty work on motorcycles bought at other dealerships.

An unskilled mechanic actually wrecked the top end on one of my bikes once. This was at a shop where I’d developed a relationship with one of the salespeople, a decent fellow and a dedicated motorcyclist. I made the mistake of assuming that the personnel in the service department were as competent as my friend in sales. I was leaving on a solo motorcycle trip to the Ozark Mountains in a couple of days, so I brought my motorcycle in for a complete tune-up. I wanted to make certain my bike was running well.

When I picked my bike up, it wouldn’t idle. In fact, it never idled again. The mechanic, who I later learned had been hired because his father owned the shop, had over-tightened the valves, and before I left the parking lot, I’d bent a valve stem. I was still somewhat of a novice and didn’t know what had happened. I took the bike back to the service department, and even though they knew exactly what they had done, they blamed the problem on dirt in the carburetors. They kept the bike overnight to clean the carbs, but there was nothing they could do short of a valve job. Shops like this usually develop reputations in the motorcycling community. Within two years of trashing my bike, this shop went out of business.

So how can you find out which shops offer reliable service? Wherever motorcyclists hang out, they talk about mechanical things. And they love to gossip. If you can find a coffee shop or bar where motorcyclists congregate, ask them about the reputation of a shop’s service department. If several people agree on a shop to avoid, avoid it. If you have no local hangout, check with independent repair shops. These are often staffed by mechanics who cut their teeth in local dealerships and who usually know the scoop on other shops.

The Classified Ads

The other obvious place to hunt for a used bike is in the Classifieds section of a newspaper or website. I enjoy this form of shopping, because it puts me in direct contact with the local motorcycling community. When I go to look at bikes I found in classified ads, I meet all kinds of motorcyclists, from people who bought a bike on a whim years ago but never rode it much, to hardcore riders who are moving on to a different bike.

Shopping the classifieds requires you to bring even more knowledge to the transaction than buying from a dealership. The range of conditions you will find classified bikes in varies as widely as the personalities of the owners selling them. Even the most unscrupulous dealer fears lawsuits enough to make certain the wheels are correctly bolted on. (At least they usually do; I once tested a bike that handled so squirrelly, I stopped and discovered the dealer had mounted the wheel backward!)

You never know what to expect on a machine you found through the want ads. Pinch bolts may be missing from axles. Chains may be held together with baling wire. Seats may be attached with duct tape. Remember, your life depends on the condition of your machine, and any one of these conditions, as well as a host of other possible problems, could convert you into a grease spot on the pavement.

Many people will let you test ride a bike, but check it out carefully to make certain it’s safe before taking it on the road. Later in this chapter, I’ll show you what to look for when you examine a bike.

When buying a bike from a private party, obtaining a clear title is absolutely critical. As with buying from a dealer, make certain the information on the title matches the information on the bike. This is especially important on motorcycles with high theft rates, like Harley-Davidsons, but it’s important with all bikes. A friend of mine once replaced the frame on his Suzuki after a crash without changing the title to reflect that change. One morning, he went out to the street to find his motorcycle had been carted off by the police. They wouldn’t release the bike to him because of the irregular title. He ended up forfeiting the bike, because it would have cost him more to get it back than it was worth.

If you buy a motorcycle that turns out to be stolen, you will not only lose the bike, you may well end up in legal trouble for receiving stolen merchandise. Generally, this is only a problem when buying from private parties, but dealerships have sold stolen motorcycles, too. One clue that something may be less than above board is if the bike has a replacement title from another state.

Buying a motorcycle through the classifieds requires you to bring more to the table yourself, but it’s often worth the effort. Private sellers don’t have to build the overhead costs of running a dealership into the price, so the prices tend to be lower. Plus, you get to see a lot of cool bikes and meet a lot of cool people.

I read the classified motorcycle ads every day, even though I’m usually not in the market to buy a bike. I find it’s a good way to keep up on the motorcycle market, as well as the motorcycling community. I like to see who’s selling what, and how much they’re asking. Sometimes, I find even more information than I expected. My all-time favorite ad, written by a guy selling his Harley Electra Glide, ended with the following phrase : “She caught me cheating, and now it’s the big D for me: make offer.”

Motorcycle Clubs

Motorcycle clubs are another rich source of used motorcycles. Members of clubs tend to buy and sell a lot of motorcycles. They trade bikes the way some kids trade baseball cards and comic books.

Again, check with other motorcyclists at local hangouts and shops to find out what kind of clubs operate in your community.  Members of motorcycle clubs tend to be long-time motorcyclists, people who love to talk about bikes. You can learn a great deal about every subject in this book from these people (I have), but they are an especially valuable resource when it comes to buying motorcycles.

The bikes these folks sell tend to gravitate toward the higher end of the price scale, usually with good cause. The following is a list of reasons a motorcycle bought from a club member will likely be worth the money:

- Club members’ bikes are usually in excellent condition. They take pride in their equipment, partly because they know their fellow members will judge them by the quality of their bikes, and partly because they bond with their machines even more closely than a "normal" motorcyclist (if there is such a thing) does. They treat their bikes like members of the family.

- People in clubs have enough motorcycle savvy to buy bikes that are worth something, motorcycles with decent resale value.

- They know the value of their machines and usually won’t ask more than they’re worth, if for no other reason than that other club members will doubt their intelligence, should they get greedy.

- Motorcycle clubs are an especially tight subcommunity within the general motorcycling community. If one club member ripped off another club member, he or she would be ostracized from the group.

Read More : 

- Buying Your First Motorcycle : What’s It Worth ?

- Buying Your First Motorcycle : What to Look For ?

- Buying Your First Motorcycle : Minimizing Maintenance Costs