The Concours Lives!
My old bike posted on the Steele’s website.
I made the very unpleasant decision to sell my 1999 Kawasaki Concours to Steele’s Cycle for a pittance because it made more sense than paying a pile of money to get some problems fixed and then turning around and selling for less than I just spent on it. When I took it over there I made the pitch to Rick, the honcho, that this was a bike that was worth fixing and selling rather than just parking it in the lot to be picked over by people needing parts.
He may have thought we were having a negotiation but we weren’t. I knew he would not offer me much and I was prepared to take whatever he offered. All I wanted was for the bike to continue to roll and to bring joy to someone. But “negotiating” as he was, he told me no, with 79,000 miles on it there was no market.
Well, he lied–sort of. A couple weeks afterward I went to the Steele’s website and looked at what they had for sale. What do you know? There’s my bike, listed as being “SALE PENDING” for about 10 times what I sold it to him for.
Now, I’m sure it’s not exactly the bike I took in there. The benefit you have from being a salvage lot is that you probably have a lot of parts off similar bikes that you can use to make a really cherry bike. The listing says the condition is “Excellent” and the descriptive text refers to it as “super clean.”
What has changed about it, as far as I can see just from the photo, is that they removed the top bag and reinstalled the passenger backrest, but left the rack itself. The top bag and the back rest are incompatible–if you have one installed the other cannot be mounted. It also appears they removed the Murph highway pegs. Maybe the idea is to then offer these accessories at an additional price to the buyer.
They also put on a tank bra and swapped out the right side bag from some other Concours to replace the damaged one I had. And of course they did the repair work I did not wish to spend the money for–another advantage because the cost for them was just the repair guy’s time.
The one other thing they did is the questionable one. The bike I took in had 79,000 on the odometer. Here it says mileage 37,986. Certainly it’s not hard to swap out one instrument cluster for another, putting on one that shows fewer miles. But that motor and everything else still has 79,000 miles on it. I would think to just do this would be fudging the law a bit, but maybe they got a salvage title for the bike. I’m sure that would be easy enough for them to do. You just say hey, it’s a frankenbike, put together with parts from various other bikes, and gosh, this odometer just says 38,000. We don’t claim that that goes for the whole bike.
Anyway, it’s really not a big deal. I knew when Rick was telling me it had too many miles on it that he was BSing me because these Connies are known to go many, many miles further. These motors are pretty bullet-proof. It’s not going to break down on this new owner anytime soon. I took really good care of that bike.
So it did not get consigned to the lot. That makes me very happy. I wish the best to whoever the new owner is, and particularly with those decals on that side bag I will recognize it if I ever see it somewhere. If I do I’m going to want to chat with the guy. He got a good bike.
Update
I was throwing out paperwork on maintenance and repair on the Kawi and on my car that got wrecked and ran across an “Odometer Disclosure Statement” that I got when I bought the bike. It says it is both a federal and state crime to misrepresent the mileage on a vehicle. But. This does not apply to vehicles more than 10 years old. So there you go, swapping out that odometer and representing the bike as having only 38,000 is perfectly legal.
Biker Quote for Today
You either love going for motorcycle rides, or you’re wrong.
