Amen.

 

Nice brace of bikes you have there! I'm on my first Harley and loving it so I get where you are coming from!!

 

You got a real deal on that Sportster. Enjoy.

 

i cleaned her up today, man i LOVE this bike!

 

Damn, you stole that ride! You'll never regret that purchase.

 

Great deal, nice bikes!

 

Bike looks great. I have heard of some really good bike deals over the years but I think you may have won the gold medal. Most people seeing that ad would likely skip past it figuring that it must be a basket case for $2800. Turns out guy selling it was given the bike for free and just wanted to get rid of it for some fast cash. A $50 part is all that it needed.

What year is your bike and what did it have for mileage when you got it?

 

Here is the detailed version haha, this kinda stuff NEVER happens to me - first time I've ever scored a deal like this:

I was casually checking out craigslist on a Tuesday night, I wasn't in the market at all but I always look at CL out of habit. I see this posting - it says $3100, 11k miles, and it had an OK picture. You really couldn't see any detail, but it looked like it was in decent shape.

I shoot an email and first ask if its still available, luckily he replies and says he's still got it.

Again all of this was all totally on a whim, at this point I was waiting for him to say the bike was wrecked and the other side was destroyed or there was no title. I casually told him I was interested & I could bring cash the following day, but I needed to talk to him on the phone first. If he was interested to give me a call.

He calls me and he is a super nice guy, he says the bike belonged to his father who is the only owner. His dad rode it for a while, but as he got older he quit riding (his dad is 75 years old). His dad gave him the bike, but since he's already got a bagger he really had no use for it.

I ask for details - if it's running (that was the biggie, especially for that price), status of the title, any known issues, basically what's the story?? He says it runs fine but it hasn't been cranked in a few months. Clean title, never been down. He said he put a new battery in it and new tires on it 1 year ago.

I told him for $2800 I'll give it a shot, honestly I'm figuring I'll have to drop a couple hundred in sorting out the carbs, changing all the fluids and possibly a new battery if the one in it was totally dead.

I go to pick it it up and it was a little bit of a mess: looks wise she needed a good bath, a lot of polish on the shiny parts, and some rubbing compound to get the scratches out of the clear coat. There was a decent bit of surface rust, but thankfully no pitting in the chrome. One thing I wish i'd done was get some close up "before" pics haha.

It ran GREAT at higher RPM, but it kept coughing and popping right off of idle; I actually searched this forum and saw the post that said those symptoms could be the crank position sensor...i figure it can't hurt so I swap it out - suddenly it purrs like a kitten haha.

I spent about 10 hours polishing every surface; every single spoke, everything. Luckily I'm VERY OCD when it comes to keeping my bikes clean so I actually enjoy this kind of work.

All in all I TOTALLY scored for $2800 - and the seller was totally happy because it was all profit to him! A win win for everyone!

 

these are my past bikes - you can see i try to keep 'em clean