camthepyro wrote:I thought you already had a bike... the red one.... like a GS500E or a bandit or something...
Oh well, anyway, post some pics.
I could and still can get a Bandit 400. In the end though I decided I wanted 2 cylinders instead of 4 to learn on. I also thought the price was a lil' high and he refused to budge. I actually told him I would buy it "next week" (told him that about a month ago). I should let him know I changed my mind...
So, if anyone's looking for a Bandit 400 in great condition near Birmingham, AL, I've got his info!
dieziege wrote:I flat don't understand the mileage people put on their motorcycles.
There can be all sorts of reasons, although the chief one is that the novelty of the bike wears off and it ends up sitting motionless in the garage for years.
I bought my '93 Nighthawk new (out of the crate) in '96. In the last 10 yrs. I've only racked up 15K miles on it. It's not because I haven't been riding, though. It's because I had two other bikes in the garage that also needed riding time.
Now that the Nighthawk is my only ride, I suspect the miles are going to start piling up.
So, the bike has been at my friends place since the night I bought it being tuned. I headed over there after work today and checked it out. He had cleaned it up cosmetically ALOT (I'll hopefully have before/after pictures soon), changed the brake fluid, changed the spark plugs, fixed the fairing, oiled the chain (still havn't put the new one on, I think we'll wait), cleaned/oiled the speedo/clutch/throttle cables (they really needed it) and several other things. So I get there and he says we need to warm up the bike a lil' bit to check the carbs.
So...we wheel it out of the garage and I hop on. Now a quick note, I've not been on a bike much since November, so I was a little bit nervous (his driveway is quite steep) so I had him ride it down, but once there I hopped on and took off.
Oh...my...GOSH! The thing ran great! I couldn't wipe the grin off of my face! He lives in a really small subdivision which is pretty much 3 roads, the one he lives on being about 1/2 a mile long. So I go back and forth a few tiems getting used to the feel of the bike. I sure am glad I didn't go with anything bigger than the EX500 as it's got PLENTY of get up and go for anything I'll be doing in the near future. The stuff I learned in my MSF course came back to me pretty quickly and I didn't have much trouble navigating the bike around. Oh, it was absolutely great! We went back in and changed the coolant, tried to pull the carbs (whoever last cleaned them put the screws in rediculously tight, so he'll have to go to the shop to get 'em out probably), and changed the spark plugs. By then it was 10:00 or so and I wanted to go out again. So I got on the Ninja and he jumped on his dad's Shadow (1100 or so) and we went around for probably 30 or 40 minutes. Once again, the grin returns. It was fantastic! He's certainly alot better at riding than I am (of course, he's been at it for about 4 years now). It was great!
i dont get why people put no miles on their bikes either. since november 9 when i got my baby i have put on 4537 miles. (yes, i do know it off the top of my head.) i bought it nearly six years old and it only had 1874 mileson it. in the summer my miles will really shoot up and i plan to have roughly 15000 miles on my bike in just the first year. yes, thats about ten times more miles than ill put on my truck.
KarateChick wrote:Sounds like you had fun. Nice friend btw...to do all that...!
No kidding!
There's definately something gratifying about riding my own bike as opposed to bumming them off of other people. I've been riding a bit while the search process went on, but now that I have "my" bike, it just seems all that much greater!
there are only 2 kinds of bikes: It's a Ninja... look that one's a Harley... oh there's a Ninja... Harley...Ninja...