I wanted to see the actual process of breaking a motorcycle down into parts so over two days I watched Tyler, at Steele’s Cycles, disassemble a 2023 Kawasaki Ninja EX650R that had clearly hit something very hard. The story behind the bike? Totally unknown.

The bike was up on a lift when I arrived and Tyler, with the assistance of Kade, had it running and were testing the motor and all the electrics to determine the running condition of these items. Kade shot photos of the instruments to document their functionality.

Meanwhile, the front end was clearly headed for the trash or the scrap metal bin. While the right fork tube was bent, the left one was busted wide open, with the spring inside now completely exposed.

Naturally enough, Tyler started on the outside, stripping off the plastic body panels. The bigger ones were trash but many of the smaller pieces further back were in good shape and clearly worth resale. These were stacked on an adjacent bench, which got fuller and fuller as Tyler worked.

The gas tank was in excellent condition so that came off and had to drained. Tyler removed the gas cap mechanism from the tank and set that aside with the keys. Later when the ignition switch came off the frame it was bagged with the tank cap and the keys. On other bikes, with keyed elements such as helmet locks, those, too, are included.

The muffler came off and would have presumably worked fine but it was dented so it became scrap metal. Is this axle good or is it bent? It looked straight and it rolled smoothly on the floor. Salvage, not scrap.

Piece by piece the bike came apart with everything salvageable set aside with all nuts, bolts, and washers carefully collected. Tyler might start on removing one item but then find that to get it off he first had to remove something else. The construction of the bike dictated the sequence of its deconstruction.

The oil pan came off and the oil had to be drained. The cooling system came off and the coolant had to be drained. Sometimes it was not a clean job; shops rags are close at hand when needed.

Finally it was time to remove the swing arm. Tyler put a jack and a block under the engine and raised it to take the weight off the rear wheel. First the wheel came off and then the swing arm.

Out at the back end, the taillight assembly was in excellent condition—salvage.

One of the very last things to come off was the wiring harness. Pretty nearly everything else had to be removed because that octopus of copper and rubber winds its way through everything.

Now it was time to release the motor, leaving only the frame attached to the front fork and wheel. The triple clamps seemed not to be bent but they would be examined more closely before the decision was made as to scrap or salvage.

Nothing else was good. The wheel itself was shattered on one side and the brake disks were bent.

Amazingly, the front lights and mirrors were undamaged. This bike hit something really hard but that object must have been no more than two feet high and the upper portion was unscathed.

The very last thing to come off the frame was the ignition. And this, Tyler said, was “The most painful frame ever.” Up to this point Tyler knew the words and had been singing along to practically every country/western song that came on his Pandora feed. For the next 20 minutes Tyler did not sing.

The box with the ignition switch was bolted to the frame with bolts designed not to be removed. The only way to get them out was to drill into them and then tap them with reverse bits and back them out that way. But Tyler drilled and tried the bits, drilled more and tried again—over and over and over. They just would not come. Until they finally did.

What had been a motorcycle was now a collection of larger parts—engine, rear wheel, frame—and two benches of smaller parts. The job was half done.

Biker Quote for Today

You might be a Yuppie biker if you think a wrench is a bitchy woman.